Hive's Horrible Habit

We go on all the time about how Hive is a fabulous ecosystem where all kinds of apps, dapps, games and utilities can be made.

We're right - it is. I kind of track all those I can find on an on-again, off-again basis. I'm up to 293 so far, in all states from live and thriving, to beta test, to dead and defunct. My suspicion is that I have only just scratched the surface. For all I know, we may have thousands of assorted different things out there using our wonderful blockchain.

But we have a terrible, terrible blindspot.

Discord.

Image by WeDevlops_com from Pixabay

There, I said it.

Just about every community, every game, every social function ends up saying "talk to us on Discord". All the front ends use Discord for their support. Games use Discord for their in-game chat.

But let's think about it for a minute. Hive is all about decentralisation and anonymity, freedom from censorship and freedom from governments peering over our shoulders. So why on Earth do we all have this obsession with using an external site with such a terrible record when it comes to privacy and censorship ?

You might have seen the hullabaloo on social media about their latest move; their roll out of ID verification for "some" users. As if they won't rapidly roll it out to everyone and feed the information to governments around the world. Their PR machine is in overdrive.

It's ony a few users accessing adult servers if our AI thinks they might not be adults. Right, so we're trusting AI to crawl over our posting history and make a decision without human input.

It's to protect the children. That old dog-whistle. Any time someone says that, I know it's a power-grab to exert control. Purely a personal opinion, but I think parents should be responsible for helping their children to learn the internet safely, not the state.

Your ID images and data stay on your device and we don't keep a copy once your ID is verified. That's been proven (if I'm being charitable) to be weasel words at best. It turns out that they are being accurate in a literal sense, because they outsource ID verification to a third party (5CA), which kept the photos but leaked 70,000 of them in a data breach. They also say their "vendors" have access to them, but give no information on who they are or what they do with the images and associated data.

So What Do We Do About It ?

We're Hive. Surely we can do better ! Surely we have coders who could create something in-house that is not the confusing and time-consuming mess of servers, boards and sub-boards that is Discord.

We've already got bits and pieces that have been made. I don't know if it would be easier to link them all up, or to make something new. All Discord really is, is a way of organising short-form content, with a bunch of bolt-ons (many of which I feel are frills rather than essential) enabling direct messages, voice chat, music etc. Perhaps a front-end that sorts existing short-form content in a visually more structured manner would be a good starting point, or some of the chat apps created by front-ends but currently under-used.

Whatever we create, I think the biggest issue to overcome is the one we see so often on Hive; gaining broad adoption. For this, I believe the solution is to create a product which is genuinely appealing, promote it hard and (most especially) persuade as many front-ends as possible to have a link at the top of every page.

To do this, I think the solution would be to enable tipping, just like any other post.... so it's kind of baked-in anyway. There might even be a premium version charging a few HBD a month. But in the same way communities can set a percentage of rewards that go to themselves, this new "Hive-cord" could take the premium fees and a percentage of rewards and split them 4 ways;

• to the front-ends to incentivise them to add a link
• to pay the server costs that are needed to run the service
• to the coders who made it happen to pay for their efforts.
• finally, to market the service to non-Hivers out in the wider world who might appreciate something better than a centralised, censorious, ID-verified, snooping Discord.

Now tell me I'm crazy......

Posted using The BBH Project