yeps not all types of content are suitable for everywhere. You gotta know the audience.

Which is a bad thing for general content creators and has been a bad thing for general content creators on the Steem blockchain and very much looks like it's going to be a problem on Hive. From your own original tag studies on the platform, you know that the vast bulk of rewards go to a relatively narrow slice of types of content posted, hugely tilted toward crypto topics. Which is great if that's what you want to write about and sucks for everybody else, and it sucks for anyone who wants to make use of the replicated database backend that is the blockchain.

On the positive side, some of JS's comments have been pretty explicitly directed toward his idea of establishing the Steem platform as the "go to place" for crypto discussion. On the one hand, that's great. A focus that it can do, the tools to leverage that narrow niche, and a community that's largely built around doing so – that's a pretty strong core idea. Whether he has the tools and talent to do so is a different issue, but the basic idea is great.

On the negative side, it sucks for everybody else. Anybody that wants to make some other kind of content is going to get screwed out because there won't be an audience even looking for that sort of thing. It's an opportunity for Hive to step into the gap – but they don't really have an interest in stepping away from being crypto-focused and toward being a more generalized content platform. It's an opportunity but they are going to have to pivot to catch it and I remain unconvinced that they are going to exert the effort. I would love to be proven wrong by their actions going forward.

I guess I live in my own little dream worlds with my own ideologies. Plagiarism is on fire on BitTorrent and although you believe that is true decentralization, I believe it is theft. Just like Justin thinks it was a theft that his coins were locked and others do not, we all have personal standards on what we deem acceptable.

You can have whatever ideology you want, but you need the facts. Piracy is rampant on BitTorrent – the protocol. That has nothing to do with Justin Sun. It has to do with the fact that it is truly decentralized. I want to hammer on this idea that he and the fact that piracy happens all the time on BT are unrelated. It happened all the time on BT before he got in as CEO of the tech company and it continues to go on all the time because it literally, mathematically, is not in his control to stop it. He couldn't even if he cared. The math is out there. The algorithm is out there.

Anybody, anywhere, can set up a BT index that hands-off torrent files which point to the physical location of blocks associated with a piece of media and facilitate the distribution of that content. It has nothing to do with BitTorrent-the-company. It hasn't for the better part of a decade, now.

That is literally the power of decentralization. There is no way to centrally control the content which is transferred by the BitTorrent protocol. It doesn't go through a single point. It is implementable by a 16-year-old kid in his garage. It's usable by a 90-year-old grandma with a network connection. It is absolutely unable to be censored by a central authority, and you know that's true because if it were able to be, Hollywood would've shut it down a long time ago.

I'm not saying that piracy isn't theft; that's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that this is absolutely the side effect of decentralized activity and "theft" as a concept which is enforceable doesn't exist in it. Any more than if someone started copying all of your Steem platform posts, word for word, over the history of your engagement, and began posting them under their own account name on Steem or Hive. What could you do about it? Aside from asserting your identity by continuity because you as an account have been interacting with people over time, nothing. Maybe you could get enough high rollers to vote down that content, but we've already established that voting things down doesn't make them disappear it just removes rewards they might accumulate. We have 10,000 scammers and spammers who continue on the platform that prove otherwise. Maybe you could convince the two major platform interfaces to not display that copyright-violating content – and you might could even make a decent argument against centralized censorship of it by arguing that it is a deliberate choice by the interface of what they show or don't show. (It would be a bad argument, but it would be a possible argument.)

But all of that content would be duplicated in the blockchain for anybody to see and for anyone to transmit upvotes or straight out tips to the originator (not you), and there wouldn't be a damn thing you can do about it.

That's decentralization. That is exactly what it leads to. It also comes with a lot of really good things, but it does no good for anyone to walk around with some belief about the magical powers of the word without actually understanding what it means.

Like I said, you can have any ideology you want and you can feel anyway you like about Justin Sun, but you need to have a truthful and accurate understanding of the world in order to make good decisions.

As for steem and hive - I think I will be on both. I spent so long on steem and being honest, I am getting more interaction here than on hive. Interesting indeed.

I currently chalk that up to two reasons:

First, the crappy state of notifications on the Steem/Steemit/SteemPeak system. While the little notification pulldown functions, for a relatively low value of "function," it's not very good for actually keeping up with people interacting with your content. You have to be on the site already, it doesn't make it easy to see what kind of interactions that you have acquired, you don't have an easy means of reading a reply and then putting something in right there – it's kind of a crappy experience.

The absence of GINAbot on Hive is a game killer for me. Since I already have to worry about not being able to see notifications on the site in a convenient way, the fact that all my notifications from the Steem platform end up nice and neat and even color-coded in a place it's easy for me to see, requiring just a single click for me to interact with the results – that puts interaction on the Steem side of things way ahead. That Hive doesn't have a similar support group providing that feature makes actually trying to interact on Hive a real pain in the ass.

Secondly, people hate to move. I've made the argument before that the developers of interfaces for Steem need to realize people build routines around spending time in places they get things that they want. Not just paid but content, emotional gratification, community support. When they build up those routines, they are very reluctant to change them.

At the grossest possible level, they now have two bookmarks to choose from, SteemPeak and PeakD, with the interesting creators largely already deciding to post to both. Why should they read both? They have no differentiation. PeakD has the clearly worse notification possibilities (not to be blamed on the PeakD developers but on the tools which just haven't come into being to support the reader base).

It's no surprise that you would see more interaction on the Steem blockchain, because that is where people have been accustomed to interact. It's going to be interesting to see if Hive can maintain any kind of separated value for its token as long as it is effectively un-differentiatable from its predecessor. If it wants to be seen as the place to go to, it needs to do something far more compelling than just "we are not Justin Sun", even if JS is an authoritarian, censoring asshole. For the day-to-day experience of the vast bulk of the platform, those things don't matter and they will refuse to imagine that they will ever be in a position that they matter.

This goes into the "the Hive split was a terribly ill considered operation from the ground up" side of things, but since the same people are in charge over there as were in charge over here for years, how could we expect differently?

If the folks who are really hyped for Hive want to build the interactive readership, they are going to have to do with a failed to do for the last several years and build tools which actually facilitate interaction, they are going to have to look at the interface and make it better, they are going to have to actually try to build a platform not rooted in early 2000's user experience.

Or at least get all of the tools that people depend on to make the platform useful ported and running. Until then, it's just kind of a mess.

(If anyone cared, step one would be making the Notification system look more like a blog, with things like multiple upvotes and noninteractive bits displayed as a compressed block between notification that you had a reply, the full text of the reply, and a slot to actually compose a reply to that comment so that you don't have to go anywhere else to engage with interaction. But nobody listens to me on this stuff and I don't expect it to happen now.)