RE: Steem vs. Hive - A Quest for New Governance Approaches? (Research Project - Call for Participation)
I'm just a user without a huge stake, so my influence on governance issues is minimal. Right now most of my posts are done via DTube and Actifit which allow cross-posting to both chains so I do that. My impression during the whole controversy has been that the old witnesses/Hive leadership have been aggressively pushing a political narrative that frames things in the way they want. This tends to trigger my contrarian instincts: if you have the truth and sound arguments on your side do you really need to sell so hard, or is the fact that you're selling so hard an indication that your story isn't as solid as you pretend? Actions by the Hive leadership like coordinated spam campaigns and cutting large parts of the Korean community out of the Hive airdrop have made me even more doubtful about Hive, so personally I'm hoping that Steem emerges from the crisis stronger, and I'm thinking about trying to get a Steem-focused project going since there is a potential vacuum that can be filled here since a lot of previously-dominant voices aren't here anymore.
I would suggest that an interesting frame of analysis for the conflict would be that Steem is a social media blockchain, so it has both business/finance aspects and social aspects. It seems to me that the Hive side of the conflict has heavily leveraged social tools such as gossip, shunning and shaming, who is or isn't invited to secret meetings, etc., to their advantage, while the Justin Sun side has leaned more on the tools of business and finance. If you listen to some of the meetings you can see that they're metaphorically not even speaking the same language, e.g. the Tron representatives are trying to treat it like a normal negotiation or business meeting while the witnesses are acting like they're in an online argument.
Hi @danmaruschak thank you so much for your interesting reflections and apologies for my late reply, things have been a bit busy lately.
Very interesting idea to frame this along the economic and social aspects of a social media blockchain. Would you say that Steem governance focuses more on pursuing economic interests whereas Hive governance focuses more on connecting people?
If you had time for a follow-up chat, I would very much appreciate the opportunity to engage in a discussion about this topic with you.
I don't think I'd necessarily attribute it to a difference in focus, more a difference in style or approach to handling problems. I get a very different feel from the two sides: I get a much more "corporate" vibe from the Steemit side while Hive feels a lot more "high school" to me. I guess I have time for a follow-up chat (I'll post my contact info into your form link above).