Sometimes I find myself wondering whether the world of crypto is ever going to be able to get beyond its scammy, risky, get rich quick, greed and other dodgy associations it seems to have taken upon itself as its public image.

There's little doubt that many of the people I talked to in daily life are well aware of what crypto is, and they certainly know what Bitcoin is, but the majority opinion is also ”this is not something for me!”

In some ways, it is exactly the sort of hurdles that Multi-level Marketing of old (aka “Pyramid Schemes”) was eternally battling against. As is true of the crypto world today, it was also true of old-fashioned MLM that it was beleaguered by scams and dodgy practices, which made it very difficult for the minority of legitimate projects and businesses out there to make significant headway.

As always, the proof has to be in the pudding, but you also have to be aware that it's a pudding that takes a very long time to cook if you're going to move past the skeptics.

At times we might run the risk of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy by comparing ourselves to the get-rich-quick schemes, because by doing so we're actually placing ourselves in the same category as them trying to keep up with something that isn't operating according to a metric that represents what we're doing is supposed to keep up with.

There's little doubt that the Cryptosphere has a pretty sketchy self-image. Maybe we shouldn't call it self-image, we should call it public image.

I consider these thoughts in the broader context of my occasional moments of feeling inspired to introduce people to Hive.

The more I think about it — and the more I've gotten to know Hive and how it works — the more I realize that what we have here is not something you can just carpet bomb everybody in your contact list with screaming ”Hive is amazing!!!” from the nearest rooftop!

It probably serves us far better to be choosy and targeted in terms of who we choose to share Hive with. Consider some of the interests we have that keep us blogging here on Hive — or whatever it is we do here — and then consider who we know the genuinely and actively shares an interest in the same thing.

If we think back a bit, one of the most successful peer marketing plans in relatively recent memory was mobile provider Sprint’s ”friends and family” program from the early 2010’s. It wasn't about mass marketing, it was about being able to offer family members and close friends a good deal and everybody ended up with a win-win.

And so perhaps that is the approach we need to take with Hive: how do we turn each contact point we make into a win win for the person we're talking to for ourselves and for Hive?

Mass marketing is nice, but sometimes it misses the point completely. It would perhaps behoove us to remember that much as we might like to think otherwise — and may have had dreams that we could become the “Facebook of the blockchain” — Hive is really not a mass market proposition, it is a niche specialty venue!

So, let's treat it as such, when we share with our friends.

This post was in part inspired by @meno's recent post "Hive, Hope and Hopium", thanks for the ideas!

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