Will Mainstream Acceptance be the Downfall of Hive? Only Time will Tell

in LeoFinance3 years ago

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Every now and then a good social platform comes along, with like-minded users of good nature flocking towards it for one reason. Because we are all social beings. And when such a platform survives long enough the masses flock to it, possibly making it a toxic environment in the process. This happened to almost every platform we know of. Facebook with it's degenerates and fake news, Instagram with its superficiality and even Discord with al those phishing attempts. I still remember going on fb in 2007. It was a peaceful but useful place back then.

The worry in this story is that the same thing might happen to Hive as well. Right now all the people who have the right intent to use this platform are here. But as we move closer to mainstream acceptance, the degenerates and wackos will all follow and misuse of the platform may increase. It's quite an interesting dilemma. Sure, we could argue that Hive has mechanism in place to prevent exactly this, but that's all theory and speculation. It will only be truly proven when the real-life practical situation of mainstream usage comes around. I for one believe the chance that this platform will turn out like some toxic facebook environment is not very likely though, because of the communities pushing back. But the chance is still there, so be prepared and enjoy the platform as it is while you can. It might soon change forever, for better or worse. :)

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One of the structural failures of Facebook was that when the volume of traffic reached a certain point, the owners of the site decided to focus on maximizing ad revenue. In and of itself, there's nothing wrong with that. But in doing so, they boosted certain topics and buried others.

Again, I don't have a problem with how they went about it. In fact, if we knew the whole story, I bet it would be pretty innocent. But "who decides" came into the picture. Who decides what to boost and what to bury?

Their solution was "who = algorithm" so they could be hands-off.

If we have that problem on Hive, i.e., one front-end decides to boost visibility of certain topics and bury others, we will be able to see the ground truth, on the blockchain and other front-ends. Unlike Facebook, if a certain front-end tries to break away like that, we would be able to determine this quickly.

And maybe there would be no problem if they did this. Maybe this "rogue" front-end will do better. But we'll have that information nonetheless.

I'm not worried about that problem at all. As you stated whenever we are not satisfied with one front end, literally anyone can build a new one. So it probably won't be a problem.

Human behavior however might be a problem, which can be regulated by the community as a whole with mechanisms like down-voting, but we can only be sure when the situation actually presents itself.

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