Shortform content, Hanging in there, riding the Wave or are things about to SNAP?

Good morning buzzers! I just wanted to make a short post about short-form content on Hive. There's been a real buzz- from the early Dbuzz days to InLeo's threads- a new era was born on Hive! Sloth and steady, we saw waves of different short-form providers and containers, but has the buzz begun to snap? Or are people still hanging around enjoying short-form Threads?

Looking back, I can still remember the huffing and puffing of users when people were making short Dbuzz 'blogs'. As usual, some users were giving mega upvotes for a tiny number of characters, so the natural thing to do was wrap these short posts into one thread and make them comments instead of blogs.

Then Threads turned into Threadcasts, curators got involved and were handing out massive upvotes to comments, commentrewarder got involved, spreading more votes between more commenters and every other platform, thought, huh, we should be doing that too! Next came the Waves of short-form; shut your eyes and Snap! Another one! We were all living in the moment, then before long the sloths started to hang! Now we also have BBH and Hivesuite with their own shortform, and I'm probably missing some others!

All in all, there's been a nice little buzz around it. Roll this into games, and we have daily threads from games, some sharing updates, some just an area for players to hang out and chat. Now we have games posting snaps/waves/short-form content, and this is where my real talking point comes in.

I've noticed recently that Inleo Threads has seen waves of 'abuse' hitting their threads. Users are spamming fake airdrops/giveawasy etc. Ruining the feeds and making threads an undesirable place to be. Of course, the Inleo team, or Hive as a whole, will eventually blacklist the users and clean up the feed; that's the beauty of a decentralised network. Although we are all able to post what we want, we can control what is shown, within reason.

This brings me to my main point. The nature of Shortform... short, quick posts. Some are gaining pretty good upvotes because CommentRewarder is used through the thread. Users are getting paid to say 'good morning ', 'good evening ', and 'good day'. We've moved from posts having to be 1000 words and interesting to readers to simply rewarding greetings. Between that and the 'game spam' from multiple games. The feeds are becoming congested with 'spam'.

Now, I'm not holding it against game devs; they are leveraging the social network that is Hive to their advantage, and I applaud that. I mean, why build on Hive if you're not going to use Hive for Hiving! My issue is with how many game posts hit the feed; are they necessary? Are they simply 'farming' the algorithm? And don't get me wrong: I want #SlothsMiningWar to be able to share posts to Shortform; I mean, look at the success Hivegrove has had with it! Each day I see a Hivegrove post, I'm reminded to go check in on my trees! That is what should happen. Unfortunately, more games are getting involved, copying the system and ultimately filling the feeds with useless posts.

So, what can we do about it? Probably nothing. We'll always be battling spam across Hive, especially on short-form platforms. It would be nice to see 'one' short-form for all, the same thread we can all use, but as everything else decentralised, every dev has their own ideas and their own vision to incorporate. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is still TBD. For now, it's enough for me to write a blog about!

What do you think about short-form, and, I guess, the number of options we have for 'front ends' now? It seems we've really taken a buzz in that area too! And they're all looking a lot better than the options we had even a year ago, which were mainly the 'big 3' plus outposts! Now we have Ecency/Peakd, with Inleo seeming to fall off a little, but we have Slothbuzz, scrobble, hivesuite, flexus, bbhproject and many more coming on leaps and bounds!

Where do we go next?

Until next time,
Sloth out!