I love doing crypto experiments. I love comparing crypto projects to their mainstream competitors. I do this for several reasons, the main one being, ease of use. How easy is it for Joe Normie to hop on board and get involved. I also like to see how ease of use compares to the traditional mainstream product. 

2013 is over! Blockchain prouducts have been around for a bit now. If they're not easy to use, they're just not going to get used. At least that's my take on it, and it really affects how much I'm willing to invest into a platform. 

HIVE is a good example of that. Sign up and onboarding is way better than the Steemit days. I have to admit, when new users can't get signed up, it makes me a little more than concerned about the amount of money and time I'm willing to invest into it. 

Hive is easy to use, has community, and we're seeing a lot of development happening. It's also super easy for the averager person to get singed up and started.  I'm way more confident in HIVE than I ever was with Steemit! 

Today eTorroUS sent over a swag box and I thought I'd do a video unboxing. My first instinct was to upload it to 3speak, I have no idea what's up but I couldn't even get signed up or logged in. 

Next d.tube. It used to be my go to platform but they've had some issues in the not so far off past. I decided to give them another try. I used to be able to sign in with my Steemit credentials, figured my Hive credentials would work just fine.. No such luck. NEXT

In all fairness, I will give both 3speak and d.tube another chance. I was just expecting to login, upload a video and be done with it. On to lbry

LBRY.tv - No problem logging in. Video uploaded fine, I did get a message about my bitrate being over 5Mbps. I continued on, uploaded the video, selected a thumbnail, wrote the description and done! 

![Screenshot 216.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/the-bitcoin-dood/S4BoiT5k-Screenshot20216.png)

For the most part, no problems at all with the exception of the lbry.tv wanting me to fix this bitrate issue. I'll have to research this for my next video upload. The video did upload to the server, no problems really. Got buffering on the playback but that's probably due to the bitrate warning I got. Again, I'll research a fix for that on my next upload. I really do love the lbry platform though, and plan on posting more there in the future. Here's a link to the lbry TV post if you want to check it out for yourself. 

https://lbry.tv/@BitcoinDood:a/eToroUnboxing:c

Youtube! The devil himself. Guess what. No issues at all. Video uploaded no problem. No issue with bitrates. No buffering on playback. Logged in with Google account. Easy peasy and upsetting as hell. I don't like anything about this platform other than it's ease of use. 

https://youtu.be/EI1JN8BgofI

Copy paste link and it's available in my Hive blog. 

Hands down YouTube wins! Boo... Hiss... 

https://media4.giphy.com/media/W0SLa0YuzWBZ6/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47jeywut2uqoem5waq2z975z8crtvy81fpakbz1om4&rid=giphy.gif

Anyway, my point to all this is that we have a ways to go to catch up to where YouTube is at. I was really disappointed that I couldn't use the HIVE based dApps as well. Not sure what was happening there but I'm going to have to figure this out. Still HIVE is my go to for blogging now! 

This was kind of an important experiment for me. I hate these corporate platforms that deplatform users, censor or select what type of political content is acceptable (censorship), and use sneaky algorithms to select content for users. Not to mention the abuse of user data. 

Our blockchain based platforms have to be just as easy to use as the mainstream competitors. This is the only way we compete. The end user is extremely fickle. They don't care about the stuff I mentioned above. All they want is a seamless easy to use experience with no hassles. Until we're able to give that to the general public we remain a second best alternative used only by people in the industry with no chance of advancing or competing with the mainstream!

**UPDATE and EDIT:**  I finally got signed in with 3Speak. I have no idea what the problem was earlier but I'd click the signup button and nothing would happen. Tried again after dinner and got signed right up. I posted the video to 3speak. Encoding took some time but no problems at all. I'm really looking forward to posting video content to 3speak now. With the exception of the wait time, it was pretty darn close to YouTubes ease of use. Also, no buffering issues on playback. Here's the 3Speak video. I'm really happy I got this working now! 

https://3speak.co/watch?v=the-bitcoin-dood/vjpaqcye