We went out to the mall today, and while I'm not a fan of reading in car rides as it kind of makes me nauseous, I was browsing hive while eating and having a coffee.
I randomly started thinking back to the old days, you had things like facebook, reddit and potentially other popular forums that were fun to use. You spent your free time consuming content others shared or created and interacting with it on their platforms, the creators of the platforms and then later the shareholders got all of the profit that came from you and everyone else's existence and activity on those platforms. It's still quite similar today but a bit refined in terms of "sharing adrevenue" with the top creators and influencers.
Do you know what it takes to make a living on those platforms today, still? Assuming you try to go the correct way to grow a genuine audience, create genuine content that requires a lot of effort, potentially hardware/equipment, just for the chance to earn at some point in the future? I'm going to ignore the fake ways people milk and abuse these systems cause let's be real, fake activity and investment into that is quite wide-spread and very difficult to counter if the platforms would even bother to because in their books any activity just makes their platform look more popular.
Now let's assume as a consumer you spend 1-8h daily consuming content, most likely a lot less if you work and in general not that much because it's tiring to consume a lot of content depending on what it is. Just watching entertainment may not be that tiring but if you're constantly consuming research/informative content it's pretty much like learning. I'm going to remain neutral about the content for this point and mainly focus on the consumption alone.
Now let's imagine there's 1 billion daily active users on Youtube and as an example say 5% of them are creators as well. How many of them do you think make a "living" where they can create on youtube full time? I'd guess it's closer to 1% of those 5% that are creators, most likely even less. What we do know though is that the top creators make a large amount, a little similar to the real world when it comes to businesses. CEO's are known to make 100-1000x more income than say the workers directly working for them.
I'm sidetracking a bit here but do you think that's all good and well and should continue that way? I'm not trying to downplay how these people got into the position they're in. For instance Elon was at one point about to go broke if his spaceshuttle launches hadn't started showing results, there could be a parallel universe out there where he's homeless now or just a random IT guy working for amazon. There are of course also people who maybe got lucky and find themselves in a position of wealth and power and do everything it takes to remain there. My point is, why is this the way the world works?
A lot of these companies don't really do anything that innovative or unique to take that much of a share to give to their founders/CEO's/shareholders, etc. We also see a lot of aggressiveness when it comes to the top companies basically "killing" any form of competition by buying any up-and-coming potential competitor up early and absorbing or taking their ideas to remain at the top. What if things worked differently?
Okay, bear with me, Imma try circle back to the main point of this post and the way Hive works in a minute.
Let's for instance go back to the beginnings of companies that become big in the future. Let's say you worked for one of them early on, you helped get it to where it is today, you did your part. Why is it that most of the time we're just paid a salary that we get taxed for with close to no potential upside? Sure you can say you can move up the ranks within that company and earn raises over time, etc, but are you really part of it or just working for it and why do we settle for the latter?
Now one could argue that the workers could easily take part of their income and buy into said company, but many of them are private from what I understand how that world works and only later do they offer shares to be purchased publicly and they control the amount they can share with others while maintaining most of it. Check how many Amazon shares its founder owns/has sold to date, check how much Mark Zuckerberg owns after having sold some and buying half of Hawaii. I'm exaggerating but isn't the wealth they receive quite an exaggeration in and of itself? Why do these people deserve/need this kind of wealth?
You could compare the start of the previous section with Hive, just have the creators buy part of the shares of the ecosystem that they "earn" by being active in it, in a way that's how author rewards are split up, half comes in liquid HBD and the other in staked Hive Power. Sure you can't expect everyone to hold part of them as the economy is kind of in shambles and for some the earnings are required in their daily lives.
My point is why are we not shifting over to a fairer way of things similar to Hive with everything else in existence? You may think that crypto and blockchain is here to change that but if you take a deeper look at most of the new projects being launched most of them operate in a similar fashion to companies in the past. They may give investors a chance to get in earlier before IPO's but most of them are just using that as a reason to get their returns and pretty much abandon the idea to move onto the next thing.
It feels like there's a lot of fakeness and purposeful trickery going on in this space where the word blockchain and tokenization is there just as a veil to lure people in as they take most of their value while sharing it with exchanges.
I don't know, I value a lot of projects who understand the true nature of decentralization and attempt to do their best when it comes to distribution of our main token and their own projects. But it seems like the masses out there don't and are most of the time in on the grift themselves to just get some profit out of anything they get involved in as fast as possible without really attempting to change things for the better. Thus the solutions that really attempt to make changes barely get any attention or support.
Feels like a weird start to this innovation that was meant to bring equality and a fair entry to the masses after almost 15 years in. I'm hoping that throughout all of this people will eventually take a step back and think what path they want to choose.
They don't. Some people at various companies deserve to be well paid. Various people that founded and built companies deserve compensation and a share of the profit as well. The way it is now though, many of those people that work hard and built companies are NOT well paid or compensated. There are founders that are poor now while their companies flourish, because they left or were screwed out of shares or whatever. Also, the workers that helped build companies are often not well paid or compensated, such as with stocks. It is fully up to the companies how they compensate who. The majority mainly only compensate executives well.
IMO there needs to be regulation to at least ensure that companies that are successful and/or that compensate executives, also compensate their employees and pay a living wage.
Might be an unpopular opinion in the crypto space, but if you can pay your executives well, you shouldn't be exploiting your workers.
I think you're right that it's less than 1%. But you don't have to necessarily make a living doing it. Even just a bit of extra income helps a lot of people. Especially if it's something you enjoy doing. Unfortunately a number of years back YouTube changed it so you had to have a minimum number of views or something to get payout, which is bullshit.
Likely a way for them to increase their revenue or something.
Rather than making money off of people barely making anything, they should have increased the fees from large creators.
I still say there should be ad sharing on Hive. But people are too opposed to ads. Primarily because so many sites these days have such annoying ads that inundate you everywhere. So they can't even imagine the old style of just maybe a banner ad at the top and bottom and maybe the side.
Even Hive itself is largely centered around the idea of a return on investment for many things. We need to think about more ways to reward people for being here and engaging and growing this place. Not just the whales.
Sorry for the long reply. I do go on sometimes.
I guess instead of ads we could start off with the other big income source to the general web2 folks: sponsorships. For that we need more consumers, though. I doubt any company would pay me to post about their product even if I'm potentially one of few authors on hive that consistently gets a lot of attention.
Well, there is always affiliate income. But people on Hive hated people using affiliate links last time I was here.
There was just an announcement by InLeo of a new subscription option, to subscribe to users, which will be fully enabled with the new hard fork. Problem is that currently it's only for InLeo Pro. But with auto-renew for more than one person being enabled with the new Hard Fork, and the ability to have encrypted posts, it should, hypothetically, be possible for other front ends to also enable the feature. Would suck if you have to use InLeo.
myeah one thing i disliked about leo was the "removal" of things we always were able to do unless u pay premium, it's like taking the worst things of copying what twitter/x is doing and trying to implement them here rather than innovating.
Hope @peakd decides to give everyone the option to get subscriptions and encrypt the text to only allow those subbed to you to see it without forcing people to pay for "premium" or that nonsense.
Same!
I took a good hard look at my account after reading the post by a Hive veteran from a month ago asking who's here to invest or milk the cash cow? It was an informative take which has caused me to make changes to my account, as I'm certainly not one of the "milkers" but don't want to give even the appearance of it.
Based on the discussion, I now set each post to 100% power up, as opposed to letting the HIVE build until I have 100 of them and then powering up or purchasing dividend tokens. I looked at my delegating percentage and see that that's too lopsided (It was done that way in order to bring more HIVE in so that I could grow the account and augment the small earnings of my posts).
However, how does that look to someone with a large stake looking for accounts to support? The 100% powerup is the response to that. It has been a long time since I powered down to assist an ill elderly relative, that's why my stake is so low.
After 7+ years on Steemit/Hive I should be holding tens of thousands of HP, but we can't do anything about the circumstances of the past, just continue moving forward. So if I was a veteran with a large stake I asked myself: Would I be supporting the evernoticethat account? Without knowing what I know now, no, I wouldn't. Looks like he might bail.
I don't even want to give the appearance of that.
I'm doing all that I can with what I have at the moment, and if there's no poisitive response from the stakeholders, then nobody can say I didn't try.
I may not have the biggest house on Hive, it's tiny, but it's mine, and it's time to fix the old place up and expand it for the future.
Well that's not happening, as I too have been railing about the extractors for years who receive consistent high upvotes yet are constantly powering down. And if it wasn't for ionomy taking the money I sent to it months ago to buy HIVE, I'd be much further along to buying the token and powering up on a regular basis.
I am going to figure out some way to get BTC from a crypto ATM and onto Hive since I no longer use Coinbase due to the creepy service that they use now for verification. 7+ years later I'm still here. Even the small upvotes and the rare thoughtful comment left on my posts are greatly appreciated. We need people with a long-term OWNERS mindset on Hive, and I'm proud to be one of them.
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Many times people prefer the method of an immediate response rather than a solution that takes time and dedication. Based on the work at Hive, perhaps many have strayed from the purpose and origin as Hivers, but it is not too late to look back and return to our roots. For me, Hive still has many wonderful things to give and we can all be a fundamental part of this.
It's good to see someone else sharing this opinion. Most cooperate organizations and financial systems do not view their employees as being family but tools for achieving ends that's the reason for the inequitable wealth distribution. Decentralization might help with that but it's going to take a lot. As long as man remains greedy this issue may never be properly redressed.
Sadly there’s so many factors here.. psychology, greed, social engineering. You name it..
I think the one I’ll focus on is social engineering via manipulation in the media space. They focus television shows for so long on maximizing money, doing whatever it takes etc but don’t really spend any time on fiscal responsibility. There’s far too many shows that are about fancy houses, expensive cars and shit. It subtly and repeatedly influences behaviors and opinions over decades. It’s similar to the Yuri Bezmenof way to slowly destroy the United States. They do it by subterfuge and manipulation slowly over time and eventually it’s far different than where it started. Same thing with crypto and money in general. It used to be about the freedom and decentralization but sadly that’s not the case. It’s about control the same as it has been for hundreds of years with the traditional money system.
A very good read. It made me think deeply about the current state of Hive and how I will plan my journey here over the next 5 to 10 years.
I'd like to believe that Hive itself is still in its early stages, though I wasn't as early as others who have already grown substantial stakes compared to mine. There's still a good opportunity for me to grow, as well as for others who are just starting. If at this point I'm able to earn Hive through my content creation, then we are definitely early. I imagine a time when we can only earn 1 Hive (worth 100 HBDs) for a post because it's already priced high, and then people would regret not participating during the time when you could earn 500 Hive (worth 100 HBD). By that time, I would feel proud that I was one of the early users on the platform.
If I were to compare us early Hivers to the early users of Web2 platforms who became influencers, I don't think we are working much differently from them. They were normal people until they became influencers, and people started talking about their journey from being unknown to becoming famous. All of a sudden, they became relevant.
I guess it goes the same with Hive: we are basically unknown outside of the platform until we find ourselves in a position where the majority already knows about us because Hive has become known and is now relevant to the lives of the masses.
A lot of these people who are trying to make an earning off of things facebook youtube etc. have no clue about hive. I don't know how many times I've told people that my content creation helped pay for my computer and their immediate response was to look at my Youtube channel and tell me that I don't have enough subscribers for that. I would then tell them "Hold on, I said my content creation. Content creation just doesn't mean youtube."
I even had one person keep on arguing with me so I sent him a link to my hive wallet at which point he proceded to call Hive a "scam."
The fact is for every big youtuber there are hundred of thousands dead channels. And in order to make enough $ to live off of you need to get major views/watch time. A 24k view video ,in my experience, only earned around $60.
The only scam here is that people buying hive may get diluted from others selling it over time. 🤣
Right? But some people will believe whatever the hell they wanna believe.
I have no doubt that eventually there will come a day where I actually start taking money out of HIVE. Either that or I ride it down to zero, I don't really see any other option. Barring any major life circumstances, my plan is to never stop growing my stake. I might move some post rewards out here and there one day, but never at the expense of my HP. That's just like shooting yourself in the foot.
Yeah selling some here and there isn't a big deal IMO, some can afford to wait for better prices and even if they sell then it's good for distribution. What we need to work on though is to have less hive on exchanges and more here in unique hands participating in the network.
until then we can enjoy diluting the liquid hive there by being vested.
The only way I would power down right now is if Hive jumped over $1. Then I might move some into HBD and wait for the price to come back down and move it back into Hive. I'd need to be sitting at something like 200K HP before I thought about pulling anything off the chain.
In 2017 or 2018 I created a facebook page for my art. I thought that now I will be set- people will buy my art all the time. Yet here I am in 2024. And I only had 5 art pieces sold so far. My dreams about conquering the art world were premature/insane.
I think it is hard to onboard the masses to crypto in general because a lot of people associate crypto with scams and shady activity. Additionally HIVE is hard to get into from US because it is not listed on any major CEX like Coinbase.
Sure but buying hive doesn't mean you can't be here and collect some rewards for contributing.
If you want to sell there's always swaps available.
I think people tend to gravitate to what is popular. For fans, it's because their idols are there in Twitter and Instagram. For those that want to make it big as their career, they see YT and Twitch as where the big money is. A lot of people still see crypto as a big risk, and putting their effort here, there is a chance they won't be rewarded. If Facebook decides to create a blockchain version of FB, then that will be a big rival to Hive, and can easily overshadow us.
An interesting question: we want to be part of a large project or owners of our own work, even if it is small. I prefer to work for and on myself than for someone else and I will most likely generate the same money.
HIVE is still to difficult to onboard people to. I have a friend who actually makes about $30/ month on Facebook.. he wants to try HIVE.. I have plenty of account creation tickets yet we still couldn't do it.
What part did you get stuck on exactly?
In particular, for me Hive has a track record that is indisputable. I like to post on #Hive, it makes me grow as a person and reflect.
Hola , me pareció interesante leer esto, pues , hay que darse cuenta que los malos hábitos son más abundantes en la sociedad 🤔 y siempre hay que estar pendiente de los vivos que engañan para lucrarse, pienso que la diferencia entre los ricos que logran acumular mucho dinero es por su conocimiento y su constancia, pienso que la constancia se puede aprender como norma y hay quienes la tienen por su grado de ambición, pero es importante para lograr surgir en todo, por eso es bueno que este tipo de tema salga siempre a la luz para que exita reflexion
I hope your thoughts will be heard from the people of this platform and the solution that you mean will have a support.😊😊
I got blacklisted on the holozing community without knowing my offense, please help me out.
And I discovered my little brother was also blacklisted, just checked his account no and found out he was too. He managed to make a zingtober post yesterday night and is still sick lying on bed. What would be his thoughts when he wakes up to find out he was blacklisted for a reason we know not of
I'll check but spamming about it is not the way to go and whatever else you mention in the comment
Okay my bad, thanks btw
Adoption is the most important step, that is why our work as content creators is where we should focus mainly
!PIZZA