Many years ago, when HIVE started, people came up with some ideas on how to market a protocol where you could receive cryptocurrency for creating high quality content for your readers. Some of the ideas the community came up with went something like this:
Post your blog. Earn. It's that simple.
Or how about this one
Blog. Get paid.
While "Blog, get paid" could have worked initially to attract people to the HIVE unique ecosystem, we must remember that humans are driven by incentives. And with a proposition like "blog, get paid", which almost sounds like "come... free money", we should ask ourselves if it could it be possible that some people will be incentivized to find ways to earn as much as possible, as often as possible and with as little effort as possible.
input: blog
output: money
There's an episode of The Simpsons where Homer has to work from home on his computer. Being extremely lazy, he figures out a way to use a drinking bird toy to do his work very repetitive work for him.
Kind of like when we see new accounts trying to maximize output:money by maximizing input:blogs, and simultaneously minimizing effort by outright copying and pasting someone else's work or by prompting AI to write a blog post.
You've seen it.
One of the most memorable statements put forth by our friend Taskmaster4450 over and over again is this
You've got to treat HIVE as your business.
This statements is powerful for a few reasons. I'll quickly mention three, and focus on the third.
Like any business, you can't solve every problem for everybody. If you start a business thinking EVERYBODY is your customer, you've already lost. You need to find a group of people that have something in common who you can solve a problem for.
You need to cater to your niche in a consistent manner. People want to business with other people they know, like and trust, and part of building these three elements is showing up consistently so that they see you, start to like you and eventually trust you.
And finally...
This, my friends, is the absolute most important part of your business and in the context of this post, the most important part of your presence in an ecosystem where value can be exchange freely and voluntarily.
Jim Rohn said it like this
We get paid for bringing value to the marketplace
So why don't we ditch the outdated "blog, get paid" and embrace a much more powerful and sustainable philosophy: value for value.
Value for value is not "streaming sats". Bitcoin maxis want to appropriate the term, but it's not what it means. And while, yes, it was put forth by Adam Curry (the Podfather) in what he dubbed podcasting 2.0 as a form for podcast listeners to send creators sats over the Lightning network through podcasting apps like Fountain, v4v is much more profound and universal. A value-for-value economic model is one in which anybody who finds value in something someone else is supplying, can reciprocate by returning value to that person. If I'm not a very technological person, for instance, and I stumble upon a step-by-step guide on How to onboard a friend to HIVE using Keychain, which might be of great value to me, I can return value to the creator by sending a small amount of cryptocurrency, and NFT or I can prompt a second-layer script to trigger a BEER bot so that the author receives a sip of BEER token. All without leaving the platform I'm on, whether it's PeakD, INLEO, Ecency or any one of Hive's multiple front ends.
Value for value.
Let's look at an example that happened to me last week.
My friends, the Cold Beetroot Soup boys (
And that's exactly what we did.
They sent over the files, I whipped up a little video sequence, added some music and a logo and sent it off into the internet.
Nobody hired me to do the work, but the Arcade Colony folks found it valuable, the HIVE and web3 gaming communities that saw the video on X found it valuable, and fellow community members on HIVE found it valuable too. The result: I got some upvotes on my video and even a few likes, reposts and follows on X.
This is value for value in action!
Can we shift the narrative to this, which is much more compelling? Let me know in the comments below.
