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.
