This blog is a bit different from my usual ones. It is still related to science, will be (slightly) personal, but it won’t address particle physics or cosmology. Don’t worry, I will go back to these topics later this week with a post in French, and early next week with a new topic covered in English.
The present blog concerns an announcement of a study conducted by the Toronto Metropolitan University, which caught my attention a few weeks ago. This study is about social media and how privacy-preserving technologies can be leveraged to benefit social media users. I must highlight that I got aware of it through a message from @guiltyparties on the Hive discord server.
[Credits: Original image from geralt (Pixabay)]
On the website related to the study (or the associated Twitter account), we can read that the involved researchers are currently looking for participants that are willing to share their experience with blockchain-based social media like Hive. The goals (among others) are to learn how users interact with blockchain-based social media platforms, why they choose them over traditional web2 platforms, and the related gains/limitations in having a blockchain-based medium.
Whereas I am very interested in the results of such a study to satisfy my curiosity, this is not possible for now as the study is only starting. I therefore decided that it could be cool to participate to the study myself, and get interviewed. This interview then happened yesterday.
I obviously shared my experience with our chain as a science blogger (which is the reason that brought me to Hive in the first place), and also as someone who aims to build a new way for both researchers and STEM enthusiasts to share their passion with the general audience (aka the STEMsocial project and community).
This being said, I also emphasised that Hive is not only about blogging, and that there are actually tons of apps gravitating around it. HIVE is indeed a thriving and diverse ecosystem.
Some more details about my interview
During the interview, we started by assessing my general background with social media platforms. For those who are interested, I started with mIRC in the 1990s, in the early days of the Web, and then moved from platform to platform throughout the course of the years (before ending here in 2016).
We then discussed my current activities on Hive, and which frontend I use (almost 100% condenser, aka hive.blog, as I like its simplicity and clarity). I took the opportunity to share a bit my vision for STEMsocial (I will discuss this deeply at Hivefest 7 for those who will be there), my citizen science project on Hive (which you can still join if you have a few hours per week to deal with state-of-the-art particle physics simulations on your computer), and how I use my blog on Hive for scientific outreach.
As a side note, I mentioned the two STEMsocial meetups we organised in 2018, inside the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (yes, we really went inside, 100 metres underground), and at Virgo Labs in Italy (to chat about gravitational waves a few years after their discovery).
During the rest of the interview, we discussed how I was seeing Hive in the future (in other words, why I was still there and how I expected the growth of the chain), the ecosystem at large and some comparisons with other social media (within the context of my own experience with them).
User retention and audience were also a non-avoidable part of the talk, which is something that is worked out by many communities and project teams on Hive as not fully resolved. As a side note, it is in my opinion much better now than what it was years ago.
Some final words
I won’t enter more into details and I hope that the summary above is sufficient to trigger the interest of many Hive community members in the study.
If you have 30 minutes of free time, please consider joining the study and share your experience with Hive Blog, Peakd, Ecency, 3Speak, LeoFinance or any of your preferred social media applications built on Hive. It would be nice to have the Hive community in its full diversity well represented within this study. Moreover, participation is rewarded with 10 USD in HIVE.
To participate, it is enough to visit the website dedicated to the study, and register. Also, don’t hesitate to put @guiltyparties in the loop who tries to monitor this (if I am not wrong). I am of course also happy to answer any question in the comment section of this blog, if you have any.
It is now time for me to stop writing, and go back to precision calculations relevant for the Large Hadron Collider. See you!