The Future of Hive: Promoting Our Community, Alternatives to Facebook and Ease of Use

With LeoFinance's new interface initiative and the "Threads" project underway, I thought I'd revisit and finish this post which I started many months back, concerning the general efforts to promote the "Greater Hive" ecosystem, and along with that, one of my own pet "hobby horses:" the importance of usability.

You Should Really Give Hive a Try!

The problem with basing anything at all on the premise of "what people SHOULD WANT to do" in a given situation is that "people" rarely do anything even remotely like what we want them to do.

Periodically, @cosmictriage (aka "Mrs. Denmarkguy") — returns to blogging on Hive. Because she likes what we're doing here, she typically shares a bit about Hive in some of her Facebook groups. After fiddling around with the language and linkage a bit, she usually finds a format that sneaks around Facebook's shadowbanning filters and so... there it will be, for all to see.

Last few times she did this, she was subsequently notified by @peakd that people had, indeed, joined Hive with her referral link.

Great news, right?

Now What?

Which brings me to the topic at hand: Much of the time, people don't really know what they are actually asking for when they claim to want "an alternative to Facebook," nor what a true alternative entails.

First, let us consider the very common "this Hive thing is FAR too complicated!" complaint. Yes, those of us who have been here a long time have heard it often. We also don't think Hive is that complicated. Because we know it.

But before we get all puffed up about it, let's consider this: people are inconsistent.

Somebody might claim that the genuinely want an alternative to Facebook, but when push comes to shove, they also want "Log in with Facebook" ease of use and access! Now, my background is actually in usability, so I'm ALL ABOUT ease of access, but there's a very big BUT here:

Say... WHAT?

If you truly are trying to "divorce yourself" from Facebook, why on God's green Earth would you want to "log in with Facebook," thereby giving the Meta Giant open access to knowing what your movements and interest are?

To me, that just doesn't compute!

But let's move on. Let's say you actually want to "log in with Google."

Yes, our sign-up and sign-in process is way more complicated than most places'... and part of the challenge we run into with that is that most of the "newbie help" was created by long-time Hive users how have long forgotten what it was like to start up and be totally clueless with zero help. What's more, some of that FAQ stuff hasn't been updated since before God invented dirt.

But Hive is DECENTRALIZED! That's Different...

Indeed, we are. But let's toss a bit of reality into the mix: 95% of the "general public" could give a rat's ass about decentralization. They just want something quick and easy to use, with a minimal learning curve.

We also tend to become a little too smug about the importance of decentralization... to the point that we sometimes refuse to incorporate some of the positive aspects of centralized organizational structure.

But let's return to Mrs. Denmarkguy for a moment: She's a graphic designer, has built countless web sites, has forgotten more things about using and coding WordPress than most people will ever know and was even a programmer in the early days of PCs. COBOL, Fortran, anyone?

Even with that on her resumé, she periodically just hands me a text file and says "do you mind turning this into a post on my Hive?"

Why should I do that, honey?

Because Hive is "complicated, time consuming and hard to use."

There are a number of good newbie FAQs out there, but most of them miss the mark, sadly.

It's not that we don't know what to do, it's that we have forgotten that things we think of as "pretty easy" are actually utter gibberish to someone who has just clicked over from Facebook!

The beginners' guides have to truly start at the beginning:

• Why do we have four passwords, and what do they each DO? Why does it matter?
• Why can't your password be recovered?
• How, exactly, do these "rewards" work? Why is the same number not always the same number?
• Why aren't the photos I put in my posts in a photo album somewhere?
• Just what is this "resource credit" thing?
• Why can't I send private messages to my friends when they join Hive?
• Why doesn't the internal exchange on Hive work in dollars, so I can withdraw to my bank account or just buy Hive tokens directly with my debit card?
• Why do I have to use six different apps to do fundamental things?
• Why do I have to go to Discord/Telegram to find answers, rather than HERE where I actually need them?

And so on, and so forth.

One of the things I learned while in usability is that you have to "meet your target user where THEY are," not where YOU are, nor where you WANT them to be.

That's why we stuck people in labs and just watched them open boxes with new computer systems, and let them put everything together and get set up and running... and whenever there was a "knot point," we would spend hours asking what was going through their minds at that moment, so we could understand what they were thinking, not just what we expected them to think.

Retro Moment: The Early Internet

Back in the Stone Age of the Internet, AOL ended up kicking competitors Compuserve and Prodigy's butts not because they had a better Internet but because they had better usability.

They understood that people's objections that the Internet was "too technical and difficult to understand" was a valid point, and they addressed it.

Much of the help system on AOL was created by regular people, not by developers.

When I worked in IT, the coders would often present us with something terribly elegant and sophisticated (no, really, not being snarky!) and we'd send it back to them because it was the equivalent of Albert Einstein teaching advanced Quantum Physics to 2nd graders.

PeakD, Usability and "Decentralized Centralization"

After some 6+ years of being part of this gig, @peakd has by far the best and most intuitive (and full-featured) interface, from an ease-of-use standpoint.

Given what they have already built, they also have a great foundation for creating a more comprehensive "wrapper" for Hive's many features and communities.

One of the ideas I floated several years back was creating precisely the ability to toggle a "view as" option where you could literally access multiple Hive features from inside PeakD... Perhaps an additional pull-down menu like "Communities" where you literally could view ecency, or LeoFinance, or Actifit, or dBuzz, or 3Speak from inside your logged-in account on PeakD.

But Hive is DECENTRALIZED!!!

Yeah, that's nice.

But here's the thing. The more features and apps are added to the Hive blockchain environment, the more "decentralization" starts looking like "fragmentation" and becomes a nightmare of "bits and pieces" that automatically puts off 95% of the web-using public.

For example, I belong to lots of Facebook groups and pages... but I don't have to go off Facebook to access them! And all my "stuff" can access all my other stuff.

Letting our "pride" in decentralization get in the way of how most people actually use the Internet makes no sense.

Consider this: The reason most people go to farmer's markets (a form of decentralization) is that generally all the producers are gathered in one location, even though they are representing themselves, individually. It would be a pain in the rear if you had to go to 7 different farmer's markets to get the produce you wanted, right?

Promoting Hive, and Such...

The other day, I was reading Eric's (@anomadsoul) post/rant on promoting Hive — It pays to write on Hive, not to promote Hive, well worth a read! — and one of the things I'd like to add to his thoughts is this:

I have always been very selective and hesitant in terms of promoting Hive for one single reason which can be summed up as a lack of a viable way for me to communicate directly with — and hands-on help — anybody who creates a Hive account as a result of my suggestion.

No, "talk to them on Discord!" is not an answer. That initiates what we're already having issues with: complexity. Now people have to sign up for TWO things, not just one. No good.

I know the @peakd crew is working on something, and maybe that will be the answer we've been looking for, in that respect.

I guess I'd better stop for now, before this turns into something too ridiculously long...

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Greetings bloggers and social content creators! This article was created via PeakD, a blogging application that's part of the Hive Social Content Experience. If you're a blogger, writer, poet, artist, vlogger, musician or other creative content wizard, come join us! Hive is a little "different" because it's not run by a "company;" it operates via the consensus of its users and your content can't be banned, censored, taken down or demonetized. And that COUNTS for something, in these uncertain times! So if you're ready for the next generation of social content where YOU retain ownership and control, come by and learn about Hive and make an account!

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(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — NOT posted anywhere else!)
Created at 2023-07-03 00:23 PDT
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