Today I reached a major milestone on Hive: 45,000 Hive Power. Just two years ago I was at less than two thousand Hive Power, when I read a series of posts by Azircon on Hive Power of Splinterlands players holding at least a hundred thousand SPS tokens. Those posts have convinced me to play the Hive Power accumulating game. I still play Splinterlands and accumulating SPS tokens as well, but Hive became a bigger focus for me in these last two years.
45k HP is a number I am very happy about because it represents my time,
consistency and belief in this blockchain. According to the
stakeholder rankings, this puts me in the top 500 Hive stakeholders at
452nd place. At the same time, if you look at my Curator
Dashboard,
I am currently ranked 278th among Hive curators. I think that is quite
interesting. And I do not plan on stopping at 45K, every Hive I get a hold of is immediately staked, next milestone is 100k Hive Power and eventually I would like to have a million Hive power.
Coming back to the rankings, the obvious question is: why is my curator rank so much better than my
rank by Hive Power alone?
The answer is actually encouraging. A good number of large Hive
stakeholders are not very active in curation, while some accounts with
lower total HP are using their stake more efficiently. In other words,
curation on Hive is not just about how much HP you have, but also
about how well you use it. That is one of the things I still really
like about Hive. Stake matters, but activity and efficiency matter
too.
Updated Curator Voting History Dashboard
I also made some updates to my newest dashboard, the Curator Voting
History Dashboard:
https://seattlea.z5.web.core.windows.net/curator-voting-history-dashboard.html
This dashboard is giving me a much better view of what the top
curators on Hive are actually rewarding with their votes. And when you
start looking at this data over time, some very clear patterns appear.
As I have mentioned before, the top 100 Hive curators account for
about 82% of all curation rewards. My latest concentration data has
that number at 81.72%, so it is not just a rough impression. It is the
actual structure of Hive curation today.
For the most recent week in the dashboard, the top 100 curators
distributed about 186,040.738 HP across 17,961 curation events. Over
the full five-year view, the same dashboard covers about
33,321,379.299 HP across 4,946,909 events. That is a lot of signal.
What the charts are showing
The most striking part is where a large share of these rewards are
going. Looking at the last-week distribution and also the five-year
distribution, a very large portion of curator rewards is tied to
project-style accounts and ecosystem initiatives rather than
traditional individual content creators. In the chart, hbd.funder
alone is taking the largest share by a wide margin, with buildawhale
also very high, and then accounts like poshtoken, peak.snaps, and
others showing up prominently.
So yes, I think it is fair to say that close to half of top-curator
reward flow is going to projects and programs rather than normal
author content. That helps explain something many of us have felt for
a while: author growth on Hive has been harder to sustain than we
would like. My other dashboards support that concern as well. The
latest authors data shows 2,082 rewarded authors in the last 7 days,
while the longer weekly trend dashboard shows active authors falling
from over 4,200 last summer to about 2,109 in the latest weekly
snapshot. That is not a small change and as you can see from the chart
below this trend extends to the start of 2022.
My thoughts on this
I do not see this as a reason to be negative about Hive. I actually
see it as a reason to be more focused. The curation economy is active,
the witnesses are active, the data is there. The tooling is improving
and people are still building.
What the data tells me is not that Hive is failing. It tells me that
Hive is becoming very efficient at rewarding organized ecosystems,
funded initiatives and established networks. That is not entirely bad.
In many ways, those projects are helping keep Hive alive, developing
tools, supporting communities and giving users reasons to stay.
But I also think we need to be honest that if too much of the reward
pool keeps cycling into projects and internal ecosystems, then
independent author growth becomes harder. New users need to feel that
good content can still break through. Mid-sized creators need to feel
that consistency is worth it. If we want Hive to grow, then content
creation has to remain a primary destination for curation rewards, not
just an afterthought.
Why I am still optimistic
Even with that concern, I remain positive.
Reaching 45,000 HP personally is one reason. It reminds me that Hive
still rewards long-term participation. My curator rank being much
stronger than my raw HP rank is another positive sign, because it
shows there is still room for skill and discipline to matter.
And the dashboards themselves are another reason to be optimistic. We
now have better tools to see what is happening. Once we can measure
things clearly, we can improve them.
To me, that is the opportunity in front of Hive right now:
- keep supporting the projects that add value
- keep rewarding strong curation
- but also make sure more reward flow reaches real content creators
and new authors
If we do that, Hive can become stronger, fairer and more attractive to
new authors at the same time.
I happy about reaching 45,000 Hive Power starting from almost zero
four years ago and to be ranked 452nd among stakeholders and 278th
among curators. And realistically I have started to get serious about
Hive about two years ago when I had less than two thousand Hive. In
the last two years my Hive Power growth has been great and it is
accelerating and that tells me I am moving in the right direction.
At the same time, the data from my dashboards shows that Hive is at an
important point. The blockchain is strong, but participation growth
needs attention. The good news is that we are not guessing anymore. We
can see the patterns. And once we can see them, we can act on them.
If you have not checked them out yet, here are the dashboards:
https://seattlea.z5.web.core.windows.net/
I am a Hive Witness and would really appreciate your vote for me as a witness:
https://vote.hive.uno/@seattlea
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