No, that's not an accusation against anyone in particular... actually, I blame our expectations!
Just consider it for a moment: we've gotten to a place where we are pretty much told by society that we can "have it all" and that we deserve to have it all. So that's our baseline... which is actually a pretty tall order.
Accordingly, we end up with enormous expectations of life and everything in it — from relationships to investments and everything inbetween. It's all supposed to be so gosh-darn-awesome!
With that in place, now we add in all the people and companies and services trying to sell us what they have to offer. How are they going to get our attention?
Well, simply making a pitch that they have something that's "pretty good and will make us pretty happy" is not going to win the game! So they have to say that they're offering is going to be truly amazing and astounding, otherwise why would anybody even pay attention to them?
Just think about it for a moment: why do we have such a term as "clickbait?" Why does that even exist? Why is it needed?
I'd submit that it exists mainly because the actual truth is not good enough so you have to have a huge exaggeration in order to get people's attention.
But there's a problem with that. As a friend of mine once observed: If everything is "exceptional," then the exceptional becomes average — not exceptional — because everything's exceptional.
Now, if my sales pitch — in order to get your attention — has to be that you're going to double your money in a year, I'm in trouble before we even get started with this investment because doubling your money in a year is not an investment strategy it's a piece of wishful thinking that maybe turns out that way for 2% of the players in the market. But if everybody is promising that, you see where we end up?
While it's tempting to talk a lot about scams and rug pulls and the like, I think a lot of the things that end up getting in trouble are more a case of starting out by overstating how good something is in order to get anybody to look at it at all... and then getting a few months down the road and coming face to face with the reality that "what we were promising actually can not be part of feasibility except in an absolutely perfect world."
But we don't live in an absolutely perfect world, do we?
So the outcome is that we end up with a lot of broken promises, and a lot of disillusioned people. But it's not due to crookery and intentional malignant intent.
I just look at the quagmire of failures that makes up our own Hive community's second layer projects. Lots of great ambitions, and lots of great promises... but if we take out the harsh light of day and shine it on these things... people got caught up in the hype of initial promises that actually weren't really possible. But they would never have gotten involved if realistic returns had been offered...
The broken promises we end up sitting here looking at weren't made in an attempt to defraud anyone... they were made because nobody would have paid attention unless there was a great overstatement of what people should expect. In a sense, you could say I'm "blaming the victim" here... perhaps because — to the degree that we are the victims — we arrived with a vision of an outcome that bore no resemblance to reality.
Just something to think about...
Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!
As always, a 10% 
