Is a decentralized community a utopia?
This post is due to the current situation in the SportsTalkSocial community and not in relation to Hive (Layer 1).
I know that this is not the best example in terms of tokenomics or even engagement, but it is a community with a huge theme with huge fans around the world, simply abandoned by its creator, which means at least it keeps the front end active.
A "DAO" was implemented over a year ago, which is more of a voting mechanism than a real DAO, since the person who created the account used by this mechanism still has the private keys of the same and can simply change them by doing this mechanism “becomes” useless.
In addition to this, there is the fact that this mechanism is hosted and running on a private server owned by a single person, who just wants to stop running the code that supports the mechanism.
Can we call this decentralization?
Of course.
To add to this pseudo-decentralization, we have the fact that the token was manufactured by many users who are neither active nor interested in the community or its governance. In other words, it is now impossible to have a governance proposal approved, as 51% of supply needs to vote yes for it to be approved.
I've been advised by several hivers to forget about SportsTalkSocial and just keep posting about sports without looking at community governance and trying to improve something, or stop wasting time-sharing ideas to change things.
Have I thought about creating a new community related to sports?
Yes, I have, but due to the following points, I never decided to go ahead with it:
- Lack of knowledge to think/design a sustainable tokenomics;
- Lack of HP to be able to have a decent curation and encourage users to create quality content;
- Lack of liquidity to define the initial value of the token;
The only thing I've ever achieved, as it only depended on time investment, was to launch a frontend outpost and successfully place ads on it.
With these points open, it is not possible to start a sustainable community for the future.
I'm really sorry that a huge topic like sport doesn't have a community that could have huge potential even to expose Hive to people outside of Hive.