Hive's "Short Form" Options, Community Building and the Problem of “Dilution”
No matter how you look at it, building a thriving and dynamic community takes a lot of work!
In most cases, it ends up taking a lot more work than the people who started the community had originally envisioned. It's one of the reasons why so many communities end up fizzling out and dying because community founders discover that it's just ”not as easy as it looks!”
Personal experience over the past 30 or so years has repeatedly illustrated to me how the notion that ”if you build it, they will come” doesn't actually hold water in the real world.
OK, let me back up here. This rather wonderful idea can work — perhaps in one of every 100 cases or maybe one in every 500 cases — but it's unwise to build your expectations around it!
In going back to a more tangible approach to community building, you ultimately have to start with the questions of what your basic proposition is — and why anybody should actually care — followed by how do we make that proposition attractive enough that it becomes ”sticky.”
By sticky, I mean what do we do to not only create a community that attracts people but also one that keeps them?
One of the fundamentals from the world of marketing is that it is much cheaper to keep and make an existing customer happy than it is to go out and get a new customer. That means it is important to put a large part of your focus on not just attracting people but how to keep them happy.
Alas, one of the problems community builders often run into is that everybody has a differing opinion about how to best build and run a community. As a result, splinter groups often form in which somebody goes off on the belief that they "have a better idea," so they're going to start their own community.
In time, you end up with multiple versions of the same thing — or virtually the same thing — but none of these actually have a chance to grow big enough to get any traction and to reach that all important "critical mass" where a community more or less sustains itself, thanks to being dynamic and thriving.
Here in the world of Hive, so many people worship at the Altar of Decentralization. We have the freedom to simply create our own version of whatever it is we're visualizing.
Whereas it is quite natural to believe that you have the best answer to something, striking out on your own to create your own interpretation of something isn't always what's going to be the most successful or beneficial. Sure, you get to establish your "right" to create your own version of some concept, but what use is that if "your own version" never has a chance to become anything bigger than a ghost town?
So where am I going with these thoughts, today?
Well, as part of trying to stay relevant in this world of everything being served up as information in smaller and smaller bits, I've been exploring the different "short format" options here on Hive.
Whereas each one undeniably has its own flavor, pretty much none of them alone seem to have enough of a following or supporters to be truly dynamic and active. Take "Snaps" by @peakd and I see participants there talking about how there seems to be about 150 Snaps a day. Compare that to more than 5,000 tweets per second on twitter/X.
Ecency’s ”Waves” is not a whole lot better, and while in InLeo’s ”Threads” has more activity, much of it seems to be AI generated, and LikeTu’s ”Moments” also sees little activity, relatively speaking.
Even if you aggregate all four — which the PeakD interface thankfully makes possible — it’s still not exactly a hive abuzz with activity.
Point being?
Promoting any one of these seems like a somewhat meaningless exercise because who’s going to be excited about being part of something where practically nothing happens?
Whereas it could be argued that it is nice to have options, this is where the whole decentralization thing has often fallen on its face: The freedom to ”create your own version” invariably also creates the problem of dilution or fragmentation; an environment in which the multitude of options prevents any option from actually reaching ”critical mass” where it is able to stand alone and be dynamic and self-supporting.
Reminds me a bit of the 1990s when everyone tried opening a Video Store to ”do it better.” After a while, there were so many video stores that none of them were able to turn a profit, after which massive numbers of them went bankrupt, aided to some degree by YouTube and the advent of streaming technology.
An important reminder that ”more options” isn’t always better.
Personally, I hate the menu at The Cheesecake Factory chain restaurants because there are so many options that nothing ends up actually being good.
I don't pretend to have any answers to this dilemma, other than to point to the obvious: In order for any of these short form dApps to truly get on the map, it will take virtually relentless pushing forward, by the people who created the base idea. Because they surely are not going to fgo anywhere, by themselves.
Personally, my favorite is "Snaps" from PeakD because it works so seamlessly with the original PeakD blogging interface...
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2025.06.24 00:08 PDT
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Community building is hard work, true! Let's keep our stables strong & active. 💪🐴
And persistence is certainly a very valuable attribute. Sometimes those who fare the best are those with merely a "solid" (as opposed to "brilliant") idea but who stick around and keep going while everyone else gives up and goes home.
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STOPLess is more!
Building communities is bloody hard and the build it they will come is so much nonsense in reality. Open a food takeaway they will come. Like fluff they will if you don't go out and market it!
Blockchainiacs and Decentralists have a certain arrongance in the way the assume that of course the fact that we're decentralized and on the blockchain will automatically make the world flock in, like we just invented cold fusion in our basements.
I guess to get in "fights" with people back on the legacy chain because they seemed to think that "being on the blockchain" somehow exempted us from dealing with the vagaries on human nature.
Good luck with that!