So I have been on Hive for a little over a week now. As a newbie I thought I would share what I like and what I do not like about the Hive platform.
First, I want to thank @RealSociology for the tip to check it out. I am using PeakD as my main entry into the Hive world, but as I'm discovering there are several other portals that are available.
What I Like
I can see that given time and assuming you create worthwhile content, the earnings on the Hive platform can be substantial. Authors earn Hive tokens when their posts get upvoted. It looks like some of the top earners are making up to $30 for each post or more. That is insanely good money for just writing about what you had for breakfast!
You can earn Hive tokens just for giving others Upvotes. This is called "curating." The amount of value of your upvote is tied to how much Hive token you have staked (as Hive Power). Some Hive whales are able to give out upvotes that are worth several dollars.
Hive is more than just a forum, but a full blockchain environment. I am just wrapping my head around what all can be done on the Hive blockchain but what I've seen so far it is very impressive.
As a hack web developer, I'm very interested in learning how I can use Hive's API to possible make my own portal with a built in way to provide incentives for community involvement. The hardest part of any new social platform is at the beginning where there is no existing content. Hive solves that by allowing developers to tap into the blockchain and extract the full existing feed. I have had a few web ideas that I can see Hive could provide plug and play implementation of.
Transactions are free. With Eth gas fees over $2 per transaction, free seems like a much better deal.
Hive gives you a way to create your very own cryptocurrency. Unless I read it wrong, you can create your very own Token on the Hive block chain for a mere $10. Their is even a market for tokens with a few of them having some real value and decent volume.
Splinterlands. I decided to give it a try and find it to be a pretty good game. Kind of a dumb downed version of Magic the Gathering, but with real crypto earnings. Early on in this crypto journey I had decided I wasn't going to be playing crypto games for money. But that was based on the ad bloated "earn crypto" to play games I had checked out. Splinterlands doesn't have ads, you just play the game. Every time you win you get a little crypto. It took a $10 investment to get a starter deck but looking at the prices of the cards I got, I could probably sell them all and just be down a few bucks.
What I Don't Like
The onboarding of new users really... and I mean really ,,,, needs to be reworked. For someone who just stumbles on to the site, just getting signed up and logged in a challenge. Sign up, download your keys, now log in and create a new password, use your private key to save that password... oh wait there is no key called a "private key" in the list of keys you just downloaded you were just supposed to know that means use your posting key or master key.
Because there are multiple portals into Hive it is entirely possible that you already have a Hive account and don't even know it. That happened to me. As it turns out, I had already signed up at Esteem, so when I went to signup I was surprised to see my rather unique username was already taken. It wasn't until a day ago I realized my username was taken because I had already signed up. So now I have two accounts.
After you get in you are greeted with a note that you had just been awarded 0.001 Hive. Great! At $0.18 per Hive they generously gave me approximately 0.02 cents. Now I know, beggars shouldn't be choosers, but because many actions you take on Hive use Resource Credits, and the amount of resource credits you have is dependent on how much hive you have, 0.001 Hive is just about enough to like one post. I'm not sure it would even be enough to make one post. To give new users a reasonable chance to get started the powers that be should really consider giving all new users 20 or more delegated HP for a period of 1 month. That will give new users a chance to get their feet under them.
Documentation is very lacking. The welcome email should contain links to some of the best FAQ posts on Hive to give new users a chance to learn how this very unique platform works.
Conclusion
All in all I think Hive is an amazing platform and I'm looking forward to growing with it. It is by far the least newbie friendly site I have ever run across but I'm not completely convinced that is by accident.
