Hive has been an exceptional place for people new to crypto to get started. You don't need to KYC with shady centralized exchanges. You don't need to ape in chasing green dildos with your life savings. You just need to write interesting things on a blog, and stakeholders of the chain can reward you. For many, this is one of the lowest barriers to entry to own your own piece of the digital revolution. Blogging rewards have been instrumental in making Hive the place we all know today, and any change, including one as drastic as this, should be debated thoroughly before a consensus could develop.
Before we can discuss this, we'll need to back up. To get the big picture of this situation, we need to understand the history, the current problems, the future problems, and also what's at stake (no pun intended). There are also other problems that will not be covered in this post that will need to be figured out, such as incentivizing staking without curation rewards, HBD emission, and inflation reallocation or removal.
But first things first, let's start at the beginning...
An Abridged History
When Dan Larimer designed MUXER, he envisioned a crypto community with a social aspect which could be used to reward users who brought value to the stakeholders. Eventually this idea was fleshed out to become STEEM, with even more ambitious goals and complex design.
While it is complex under the hood, the idea was brilliant in its simplicity. A cryptocurrency with built in social media that could host dApps. Blogging with rewards turned out to be the first dApp, used to showcase the power of the chain with its fast and fee-less structure. However, to this day, it is the only dApp that takes base inflation and distributes it to users.
Evil Inflation Can Be Good
There are some purists out there that say all inflation is bad. However, if inflation is providing value to the ecosystem as a whole, then one could argue it's not only good, it is necessary. We have inflation to pay our witnesses to secure the transactions every user submits. We have inflation that goes to the DAO to fund things to better the chain. We also have staking inflation, but that's almost negligible in the grand scheme of things. And then we have inflation that pays out bloggers in the form of a reward pool.
Are Blogging Rewards Worth it?
Honestly speaking, there has never been a consensus on what is "good" or "valuable" in terms of blogging. Our community has identified some things that are definitely off limits which almost everyone agrees with, but in terms of creating a standard, our "one-size-fits-all" reward structure for microblogging, long form content, video content of all types, memes, etc have had contention from day one, with no real direction to allow reasonable expectations for users. This has led to bad user experience for many who were used to traditional social media, but then were downvoted and felt punished when they tried out Hive for the first time and didn't meet the stakeholder's opaque conditions.
All is not lost however. While there are glaring problems and difficulties with this structure, this has been something of a loss leader, getting people to try our wonderful chain and experience how painless transfers and transactions can be with crypto. They have easily memorable wallet addresses and instantly feel a connection to them. For the people who decide to stick it out through all the uncertainty, we create die hard fans and ambassadors of the chain in the greater conversations on the net.
As a person who saw the chilling effects downvotes had on the platform in addition to the problems stated above, this has always led me to the conclusion that the reward pool must be decentralized even further to the second layer, to allow each community or style of content their own reward pool. For example, something like a meme community could decide on their own policies for what is posted, and if it's valuable, the users could reap the rewards, without sharing a pie with people who make video content. This allows for much more flexibility in policy, while also concentrating value in the communities that bring it.
This conclusion has always seemed inevitable to me, but I have stopped myself from formally proposing it because it would uproot what people have built here. It would fundamentally change the nature of this chain, destroy business plans, and possibly see an exodus of users. While there are problems with the reward pool allocation and experience, I never felt it was bad enough to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is, until now...
The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back
At the beginning of this experiment, our community content moderation had to deal with people translating and spinning articles or blogs that weren't theirs in order to try and get rewards. This was difficult to detect, but not impossible. If our vigilant community members weren't able to stop it, the problem would have grown so pernicious we may have been forced to take drastic and counterproductive measures to combat it.
This is what I see lying in wait with AI. In its current state, it can help with help a writer with blank page syndrome, or it can come up with topics or lists, but it's still very limited in regards to creating engaging content that passes as human. Even in the more extreme cases, we have other AI bots that can detect it to combat abuse on the chain. This will not last forever. AI is taking massive leaps and bounds in a short time, and before long we'll have difficult choices to make. There will be a future time with witch hunts on new users, accusations against old users, and an Ouroboros of our own community unless we make a plan now. We cannot wait until the problem is at our threshold, as these kinds of decisions need to be thoroughly thought through, pros and cons weighed, and implementation put in gradually so the pain is not felt all at once to give community members time to acclimate.
If the above is true, we cannot be sure that blogging rewards can survive on the second layer either. When computers can mimic humans with extreme accuracy, there will arise a culture of extreme distrust among the community, and this will be catastrophic for us. New members would be welcomed with accusations instead of open arms. Top earners will be vilified even more than we've seen in the past. However, allowing each niche/topic/type/etc. to have its own reward pool, their own content policies, and its own culture, will be the best bulwark against the worst case scenario from playing out.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Anyone seeing the evolution of AI and AGI on the horizon can see how disruptive it is to our ecosystem. It seems inevitable that the tools to fight it will always be one step behind the means to exploit. While it may seem like a distant future now, some estimates have it coming much sooner than we can imagine. Open source AI appears to be jumping leaps and bounds above the corporate models, and this could come to a head here in roughly 3-5 years.
That doesn't give us much time to discuss, debate, decide, and then execute a plan. There are many problems and knock-on effects this will have. How do we empower those who have built a business model around the reward pool? Will HBD inflation only come from converting HIVE and DAO emissions? Why would people power up HIVE if they can't earn curation rewards? Wouldn't this jeopardize governance?
These questions and more need to be answered before anything can even be fully considered. We, as a community, need to begin this discussion ASAP before it's too late. I have removed a large chunk of this post going over different options for staking, but may include that in a followup post after hearing feedback.
I ask everyone to consider this carefully. Don't think about the short term earnings, but rather the big picture. Leave your questions and comments below, I will reply to each and every one I can. Or join me on the Town Hall tomorrow on X where I will answering any questions I can.