THE BEST WAY TO IMPROVE ENGAGEMENT IS BY IMPROVING CONTENT QUALITY AND DISCOVERY
For the most part of the history of social media, its ability to grow exponentially is a result of it being free. Freedom to use and freedom to engage. The major incentive to use social media has been to engage and connect with people who you know or would like to know, or ideas and concepts that interest you. Second to that would be the need to have influence and the attention of people--clout in essence. This is done via socializing and networking and creating value freely.
Now decentralized social media platforms have tried to do the same thing and also offer monetary incentives to the masses which has never been done before on this scale. Unfortunately, it hasn't really done well or proven to be more efficient than traditional centralized platforms that do not offer these monetary benefits. What is predominant in this space is abuse and sub-par content and engagement.
We've played with the idea here on hive/steem and even bastardized it because it has never been truly about improving the social experience. You can toss a few coins here and there but it's really not going to do your platform any good. Maybe no one cares/fears to say it but we've prioritized the interests of stakeholders over improving the social experience on our decentralized social media platforms. Steem/hive is about 4years and we're yet to proffer lasting solutions to mitigate or ease the account creation process or identify the demographics we want to attract. Certainly, hive/steem doesn't attract young people, so I guess we're left with aristocrats and crypto influencers/enthusiast many of which spend their time every day crying about censorship on centralized platforms. There are a lot of things I can complain about but that's not the point of this post.
The only true way to improve engagement is to improve the content
Improve content diversity and quality. I have been in this space for about 2years. When I first got here the comment section was a mess. Uptrend as a social platform reminds me of steem in its early days. People basically just commented on your post to get upvote (hey, I am guilty as well). And honestly, I do not want to see those days return. If anything the last hardfork on steem (before the spilt) destroyed that culture of comment spamming. Once people realized they couldn't earn much from making comments they stopped and commenting became more organic but reduced drastically. That was the price to pay for a saner platform. Now, if you want to improve engagement first of all your platform must be easily accessible to everyone who wants to assess it with little or no stress. It makes sharing content easier and more sensible. I'm not expecting people on hive/steem whose heads are wrapped around their token or blockchain to comment on my post about the impact of corona in Lagos. My friends on twitter/Facebook might, most of them live in the community. How do they engage with me without having to deal with the burden of saving keys and having resource credit? Like I said in a previous post, an average user doesn't want to be saddled with the responsibility of running a platform which is basically what everyone who is involved in this project is doing--building.
So here is the solution:
• Solve your account creation problem.
• Improve and support genre-specific communities
• Spend money in promoting your platform/frontend
If you are going to incentive anyone than it should be the content creators. Cut down the curator rewards. You shouldn't be earning so much for curating content. It's really absurd. I don't know why we think this is a good idea. There are other ways to make holding hive/steem more profitable for whales. Their needs are more financial than social. Develop financial projects around the blockchain i.e lending services, investment opportunities, venture capitalism, etc there are so many ways to make money. Like the DAO is for developers, the reward pool should be for content creators and a fraction of it should go to content consumers.
If we do work on distribution and find better ways to incentivize investors and earners to hodl we will have an amazing platform in 5years.
The content discovery part depends heavily on curators and high stakeholders. Whatever this platform looks like is solely on them--good or bad. It's a lot of work to curate. So it is in their best interest to curate properly. For most centralized platforms algorithms do that work. I do not know if that's possible on decentralized platforms. I do not even think we are receptive to the numerical valuation of the activities on hive/steem. At least on 3speak I get to see how badly my videos are doing in terms of views so I don't get any unrealistic expectation of the value I bring to the platform. I hope some frontends will begin to add view-counts and other stats to help a content creator evaluate his or her process.
It's really a bad idea to start incentivizing comments. Maybe as a content creator, it can services as a good way to reward your audience. However, I think every content creator who is genuinely passionate about what they do want organic feedbacks. You can't begin to imagine how annoyed I get when I see an unrelated comment on my uptrennd post because someone wants to earn a point or two. It's already not a totally good idea to reward every content because those who do not have any business creating blogs are doing so. Hive/steem can be said to be a blogging platform not a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter. People want to pass meaningful information and earn not socialize. Probably this is the part many of us are yet to come to terms with.