I remember trying to onboard an artist from reddit once, showed them the onchainart community and without saying the rewards artists were earning by posting their new work, progression, etc. She straight up just asked me how much I'm willing to pay for her artwork to be "listed" there. As if her artwork being on hive in and of itself would somehow profit me or hive directly. Now the latter of course has somr value but she was coming from an angle where she expected her artwork just being here to generate someone income thus wanting up front payment for it. I tried to tell her that we don't have any adrevenue system and that it's more like a social media platform, you wouldn't ask random reddit moderators for payment to post your artwork in r/art, what you get from it is visibility and some shitty reddit awards compared to here you can also earn some liquid crypto and stake in the ecosystem. She said she is not bothered cause Hive doesn't seem to have that many users and the rewards seem too good to be true considering how inactive it is.
My take from that is that we indeed are quite small yet and to paraphrasr Andreas Antonopulous a social media platform really needs a certain amount of users where everyone knows someone on there who enjoys it and spends time there and gives out a good word to those who ask, before a certain news event or hype causes everyone to want to join and the platform to go hyperbolic.
I've also said it in the past to those who are against the way hive inflation is distributed to content creators right now, we're just too early and too few for it to blossom properly and show its real value and how good it works and scales. Tho it works a lot better now than it has in the past, I long to see days where you have thousands upon thousands of smaller stakeholders all actively curating posts and comments.
It can be a bit confusing, especially for artists more accustomed to the traditional art hustle. Bring any busker with a bit of ambition though and they'd have their account rocking in no time. I made a bit of a quip in my most recent post about how some traditional artists don't like my approach. Some of that stems from speaking to folks on the outside behind the scenes, trying to get this thing rolling. And it's hard for some because deep down they lack confidence so when you say half is going so someone else, they flip out thinking the percentage is too high, not realizing that isn't a greedy middleman, it's the actual fans and followers getting that money. Sometimes they think they wouldn't be able to drum up that kind of support but I disagree. And there's no real need for marketing in the traditional sense. Simply directly connecting with people and chilling is the new 'marketing' in a sense, and of course one can still make traditional sales as a side hustle. Consumers getting paid is a huge game changer but for now causes more confusion than anything. New concepts do that to people.
Truly do need to get this support system on the minds of more people, and more people here. Those thousands of small stakeholders would make up the majority of stake once it's all woven together.
Pardon those edits. Was having a few beer LOL!