What's the first thing you do in the morning?
Well, I don't know about you, but I always check on my Hive account once I open my eyes and I sometimes do that through the night as well, and soon after that I go and have a look at the crypto market. I used to have a similar routine back in the day with Facebook and Instagram.
That changed and it changed for the better.
While throwing a glance at my Hive account this morning I just realized that I have recorded 25,000 in the 4,5 years I've spent on this platform. It's been a hell of a journey and I still feel like it's just the beginning. That 25,000 mark does not translate to just blog posts, it takes comments and replies into account as well.
I don't know how many of those I had with Facebook and Instagram but I sure know that that was an experience I don't want to go back to. I used to check my Facebook account once I'd open my eyes as well, I used to do that multiple times throughout the day as well and there was a reason for that happening.
That reason is called dopamine and it is the fuel for everything that has ever enriched or enslaved me. That sense of new and the thirst for more of that new is behind every big business in the world and every drug addict. Dopamine is something like a knife, you can create outstanding cuisine with it or you can just cut your veins and kill yourself with it.
It's been studied that the likes and comments and all the notifications people are getting on social media are dopamine triggers that make them(the users) come for more, post more, engage, and get addicted to this shit. I used to be in that position as well, but luckily I cured myself of the blue pill.
Believe it or not, Facebook truly is a destructive addiction. More on that maybe in a future post...
I turned my back on Facebook in August 2017. It was two days before my birthday, and I just wanted to see how many of the people who were engaging with me on Facebook, friends, and close people knew when my birthday was... None did that, except for my parents, sister, and grandma.
Luckily, just half a year later I got into Hive, and what a different world this is... I can't even imagine going back to Facebook and although Hive has become a sort of addiction as well it has dopamine of a different flavor.
The upvotes, comments and reblogs, and even the mentions that one gets are also acting pretty much the same way as likes, shares, and comments on Facebook work for "the nervous system". It's just that while on Facebook this is a false reward, on Hive these rewards weigh something.
You can add them to your HP and build up, you can cash them out and make a living out of your blogging activity and you can even donate the damn tokens, or you can delegate and passively participate in expanding the ecosystem and growing people's accounts.
WEB2 is so much about the company behind these apps, although the users don't realize that at all while WEB3 is so much about the user. It's actually all about the user. You are the owner of your shit in here. Hive makes intellectual property a reality. Owning your shit in here is real while owning your account on Facebook is just an illusion.
Social media can heal, expressing yourself freely, to the extent the platform allows that, getting in touch with people alike, and asking for help in certain situations is healing, but in my case WEB2 social media was a killer rather than a healer.
Hive has played an important role back in my early days on the platform in overcoming depression and anxiety. It managed to feed my brain with "healthy dopamine" and that's why I keep on praising it. The reverberation effects go beyond monetization although both are highly valuable.
That was about it for now. Hope everyone has having a fantastic day and see you in the next post.
Thanks for your attention,
Adrian