Although there are no Wikipedia pages on both Hive and 3speak, I will not write about these services in Wikipedia-style, as the basic information can be easily found in the Internet. Instead, I will focus on details which I think are interesting and thought-provoking in the context of Joystream and its way in Web3 space.
Overall, I found Hive and 3speak inspiring, they have an interesting story to tell and they also have high-quality community members, who are willing to share their thoughts and views in their blogs. For example, consider this guy and his articles **The Best Hive Marketing EVER (By A Guy Who Hates Marketing) and 3 More Hive Marketing Approaches (Ode To The Whiners 😉) .** He is sharing really interesting thoughts about marketing. A little bit of history
Hive is really about community and decentralization. It appeared in 2020 as a fork of Steem blockchain. It should not be mixed up with Hive which is the first publicly traded crypto miner, listing in 2017. No, the Hive we are interested in has a completely different story.
It started on March 20th, 2020 with the mission to revive the word decentralization that Steemit Inc killed with the help of Justin Sun. Vitalik Buterin wrote in his Twitter: “This seems like a potential positive watershed moment in the history of blockchain governance. If Hive (the fork) overtakes Steem it would be a strong demonstration that the community is in charge and cannot be bought.” Well, the Hive is doing good now, and it looks like it has a good potential. As you know, crypto market has crashed a lot, but they are still afloat and the price of their token was affected much less compared to other crypto projects. The story of Hive forking was dramatic and you can read about it here. To put it short, Justin Sun’s Tron Foundation acquired Steemit. The move has led to controversies since then. Tron’s “hostile takeover” over the Steem network came under the limelight. Tron and Steemit unilaterally enforced a hard fork with help from top exchanges, including Binance and Huobi, to remain in control of the Steem network. The “hostile takeover” resulted in a community outcry and the community moved to the Hive blockchain in response to a centralized attack. I found this interesting reading, written by a community member, who recalls these events 2 years after they happen. The lesson they learned after the acquisition is very interesting and revolutionary. The author writes:
It is an important lesson that “we don't own anything under a centralized entity”.
Decentralization means
✅ No Premine
✅ No private sales / No VC funding / No ICO
✅ No company/entity
✅ No CEO/founders reward
Only 100% community-owned
Indeed, Hive is pretty unique because it claims to have no company, CEO, or set of teams to do the marketing, it is only solely owned by the community itself. Unlike ordinary crypto, Hive is a fully community-driven protocol only led by its people. It has no Venture Capitalist, no Initial Coin Offering, No CEO, no company, and no owners, its just owned by the community for the community. It is a really revolutionary approach, I was impressed! Some users even claim that Hive is “the most decentralized community on the internet”. It’s of course an ambitious statement, but they seem to really have a good level of decentralization. You can read their whitepaper here.
3speak - community-owned video platform
Hive is a blockchain with a whole ecosystem inside it with over a hundred apps, here is the list. One of the most important app in the ecosystem is 3speak, which is a video platform, “a place where content creators directly own their onsite assets and their communities. Using blockchain technology, the ownership of these assets and communities are intrinsic to the creator and the user, not 3 Speak. They are therefore transferable to other apps that use blockchain technology. This means that if we do not serve the community and creators in the best possible way, they can take the assets they have generated and move them to another app. The result is that 3Speak is censorship resistant, cannot take your assets away or delete your communities.” (link)
By the way, here is a very good article 7 Simple Features That Makes 3Speak Special, in which the author explains why 3speak is better than Youtube and why is it so cool to join the platform. It will be good if Joystream creates something like this, the arguments are very persuasive. Enjoyed reading it.
Ok, but let’s speak about decentralization.
If you read Terms of Service, you’ll see that 3speak is trading name of Oracle-D Communities Limited, a private limited company registered in the Seychelles, company number 206239.
3speak has a very curious episode in its history. It happened in 2021, and it can be a lesson not only to 3speak, but to other video platforms as well. So here is the story.
How 3speak.co turned into 3speak.tv On March 5, 2021, this announcement appeared on 3speak blog and also on their Twitter. “We are currently experiencing an attack from a developer that has gone AWOL. Apologies for the inconvenience. We have moved out of the domain 3Speak.co to https://3speak.tv/ for the time being. Please use this until further notice. Also our witness has struggled as a result. Please bear with us, we are working to get everything stabilized.”
So, they had a problem with their developer, and .co domain was stolen by a malicious party. Later, they made a more detailed announcement, which is very interesting, as it shows what exactly was affected and what were they trying to do. Finally, on March 11, 2021, this announcement was made. It says that the storm was over and they returned the control of 3speak.co domain.
However, for some reason 3speak.co is unaccessible now, and they are still on 3speak.tv. It can serve a good lesson to Joystream and other similar projects, and is a reminder that security is very important, otherwise it can cost a lot of time and money to fix everything and it can even threaten the mere existence of the service. What marketing ideas can we take from 3speak/Hive to Joystream?
I like this blog (very useful and interesting materials about marketing based on real experience) and I also like marketing activities they have. One of them is a Call to Action Initiative. It was organized by this member of community, who is searching for interesting posts related to Web3 (most often it is a Twitter post, but sometimes on Coinmarketcap or other places) and asks people to like and comment this post to get rewarded. Here is a good example of an announcement he makes every once in a while. The post received 26 comments. This is another example which got far less responses, probably because the header is not catchy. But I liked the post he chose - a Twitter blogger with 73.5K subscribers asked an interesting question: What is the best web3 platform to post long form videos? And the community members are supposed to comment and mention Hive. Another example of Call to Action Initiative is this one. Here he asks to write a review about Hive on SourceForge (by the way, Joystream is not featured here yet).
And what I like most about this initiative is that he provides clear and detailed instructions on what exactly to do. He even collected gifs about Hive on tenor.com and asks community members to use them in their comments. They have already collected an impressive set of gifs here and here. I think that Joystream should also add as many gifs as possible to Tenor, because they are automatically added to Telegram, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord, LinkedIn and other services. So if somebody uploads a gif to tenor.com, it will be shown in gifs search on Telegram, Twitter, Discord etc. and everybody will be able to use them - in their messages and comments. It adds a lot to a visual presentation of the brand and we all know how people like pictures and gifs, especially in crypto space.
I made a research and found out that our competitors, such as Odysee and Theta, have a lot of gifs on Tenor. But Joystream only had 3. I added my 4 gifs and they’ve already appeared on Telegram, Discord, Twitter. So now it’s 7. But we need more, so I think marketing team or other community members can help here.