I know this is a long post but it's good one for those who like to think deeply about Hive and content creation or are interested in the reasons behind what PeakD does. So sit back and relax and then let's converse in the comments as I explore whether the information or the transfer of information is more important.
@PeakD is doing a contest rewarding collections and giving away some money
@peakd/1500hive-prize-competition-best-collections
But the truth is everyone should be making collections anyway because they're amazing.
So I thought I'd share some of my thoughts about CCC/Collections
I'm gonna make argument supporting the side that Collections may be more valuable than Posts themselves. I actually think there is a very viable argument to be made for posts being more important and I'm not 100% set on the argument I'm making on this post but someone needs to make it. So this is somewhat why Collections are so valuable to hive and even why should be perhaps the most rewarded of all posts on Hive... because they possibly provide the most value.
Is it important to Hive that we are creating content that appears useful or is actually useful?
Is it better to have a post that one hive whale simply votes on or hundreds of random people really want to read?
Is it important that Hive has content that millions of people truly want to consume?
I guess some of these are rhetorical questions ...
I'm indeed stating that I think creating content is more than just a proof of written effort. It's more than giving inflation to people who have put in time to fool the system into giving them money. In Bitcoin there are rules and a gamified mechansism that determines who gets the inflation for that day 900 bitcoin daily. Are we stating that we are like bitcoin but instead of spending time and money setting up an electical mining system to get in on it we are simply stating that we have to put words on a page to be considered for Hive inflation?
OR... do we want these posts to actually be consumed and for this to be a place Content Creators can have the ADDITIONAL BENEFITS that come from someone reading their content?
What is the issue? A too high proportion of Content creators that don't care if their content is read OR don't know how to make that happen.
Quantitively speaking there are way more content creators yelling into the void on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube it's a shear numbers game they have more content creators in general on those platforms. But what they do have are content creators who work vigorously to get their content consumed. They have a lot of Content creators who really want their content viewed don't care where the views are coming from. The best ones spend as much time or more getting people interested in viewed their content as they did creating it.
What we seem to have is a very low proportion of content creators that don't spend a significant time promoting their content.
Why should someone care about someone actually reading/viewing their content? Perhaps it's obvious but maybe we should answer it.
They have a message they truly believe in and feel personal fulfillment if that message is read because there is greater possibility that it makes an impact on more people's lives the more times it is viewed.
More views means more potential for readers that want to read more of their content... and the more people who connect to what or how that creator posts the more potential for actual influence. Which translates to a few different things.
Influence can be used to promote a product, promote a theme, get a group to interact on things that you also enjoy interacting about.
Influence can lead to indirect ability to earn money on sells of something you are offering
They get money directly because of views on some places. Yes the gamification of many sites is that the creator gets a portion of the ad revenue from their post.
What we seem to have is a very low proportion of content creators that don't spend a significant time promoting their content.
This in my mind is simple... if the culture is focused heavily on the reward of posting on Hive being Hive Reward Pool votes then you should only focus on those who have the ability to give Hive Reward Pool votes... why focus on anyone outside of that??
So on one hand it appears OBVIOUS that our culture on hive doesn't care as much about getting anyone to view their content other than hive whales. And it's not clear to them how to win at that game in the first place... if you win by getting just the people with lots of voting power then one of those votes is worth more than 1000 newbies voting on your post and even 10k views from non-hive users means less than any of that.
There are people out there that really really value the idea of True
Ownership of their content and their connections. I have talked to large content creators and they are more interested in that concept than our small and limited daily reward pool. To be frank the amount of money our limited inflation pool has to offer will never make the really popular content creators excited. Think about it in the last couple years what's the largest vote you've seen on Hive? Divide that by 2 (author reward) will a big time blogger or youtuber be excited about having the POTENTIAL of maybe getting that? Will they assign one of their employees and pay them good money to put their efforts here when all they have is the possibility of getting a large hive vote from one person? It's a gamble.
But when you talk to them about building an audience on a place where they can truly own their own content, their own connections and their own community they get very interested. Because they already know what they can do with an audience.
I like the reward pool it is an incentive mechanism for creating posts and I love the idea that I personally have a way to push interest and encourage topics and authors I'm fond of. It's actually a pretty cool concept. It does have it's short-comings which I'm discussing and the main issue is this:
If we make it the ONLY motivation then it places itself at the foundation of why people are here and it's a pretty weak foundation.
It's dependent on who you know and the price fluctuations of a wild market that is based on sometimes the whims of unknown people. Literally we can really only guess sometimes why the price went up or down we don't actually hear from the people that make it go up or down. So we guess.
I propose a content creator who DEPENDS on creating for their living (or part of it) want's a bit more assurance. They want to know: "If I do A then B will happen" they want equations to follow that are somewhat dependable.
Though i must admit that rewarding content is perhaps one of the best ideas for decentralizing the holdings of a token which is important in theory for price independency and governance issues. In practice of course that doesn't stop people from collecting a ton because others have sold it but the reality is that we don't have very very few users that have over 1% of the tokens.
How do you put less make-or-break importance on Hive Reward Pool inflation? Well... I propose you give users options. This lessens their dependence on one mechanism and this has the added benefit of cooling the tensions surrounding the Hive Reward Pool inflation money.
@howo created and will be added to hive in the next HF in June. This means you can find your favorite author and consistently reward them. Perhaps a site like PeakD will help users to identify when the creator does things you consider worth doing that. For example as long as that creator is consistently creating content you are willing to give them a consistent contribution. etcSo all these things are great mechanisms to cool the focus. They don't remove the feature of Hive Reward Pools but add other options for content creators to focus on and some of them are more easy to recognize cause and effect. If they get X more viewers they'll statistically end up with this much more Y.
That was a ton of discussion about the importance of Collections... but at least we're hopefully on the same wave length when it comes to views.
We have a crazy amount of posts on Hive and there are actually many good posts that can still benefit someone today even posts from years ago. We can and should focus on SEARCH ... but I think we recognize that with search you are putting a lot of focus on an algorithm to find you content you may want to see.
With collections you are allowing a user who has had direct experience with that content to
Because this was brought up in the PeakD discord by 
It's true if I want to read all about the Cybertruck I'd love to have a specially curated feed all about Cybertruck news, discussions and special insights. If someone is a competent curator they would organize that collection in a way that would be most beneficial to me and they would provide a short insight into what posts may be of most benefit so I can be directed to the ones most interesting to me and spare my time from topics I already understand or am not interested in.
If someone comes into Hive and wants to know how to be a Block Producer (witness) there are many posts written over the years discussing the the importance for hive, the actual technology to start one, the philosophy of DPOS, the expectations and the benefits of running one. Having those all in one place would be the place you'd actually want to send someone right?
There are also multi-part type posts. I did a collection of a roadtrip where each post was only a part of an overall story.
It's an adaption to the old adage: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
Something like:
"If a post is written and no one reads it... does it have value?"
The actions that get something viewed perhaps are more important. That's part of the argument. Because perhaps it's the actual communication of info that provides value and not the info itself.
And what we don't have much of is a way to make content older than 7 days have life. Topic pages are designed to sort by 2 algorithms that highly favor newness and never value anything older than 7 days and then a sorting mechanism that sorts by new to old... again that doesn't benefit anything old.
Search is a big need for hive and 
It's not exactly a chicken and the egg thing. Of course the posts usually come before the good collections and a collection needs good posts in order to have lots of value. BUT... a good collection that is nicely and continuously curated may be the reason for posts to be created. If users see they will have a good mechanism for their posts to be consistently read (not just for 7 days) this may provide motivation for making it happen.
With all this stated PeakD.com will be focused on making collections better in the future.
Who knows maybe we will see lots of other things added to make collections more exciting.
I'd love to start off the whole culture of collections by promoting the concept of beneficiaries to the authors of the posts in your collection. Maybe PeakD needs to help with this culture by suggesting and if they agree helping them set beneficiaries to the authors of the posts they share. Obviously there is a limit because many collections are created FIRST and then posts are added later and beneficiaries as far as Hive blockchain is concerned do not allow adding a beneficiary to a post. (It's obvious that removal of beneficiaries is a bad thing but there is little argument to be made about not allowing the ADDITION) I think we're a little late to push for this in the next HF but maybe I'll see about pushing for this in the following one.
