As I have said several times before, I am not a maximizer.

Or Am I?

Because to really consider this, we have to put some thought into what is being maximized. For instance, if we consider what is the perfect diet, it is going to depend on a lot of factors. Yes, there are the differences in bodily needs across individuals, but probably more salient, is what those bodies need to do. For example, a professional cyclist is trying to maximize and optimize their power to weight ratio, so they end up being very strict with their diet to a point, because they also have to build a lot of strength (muscle) in their legs. However, a professional shot-putter is looking to maximize their strength, and their total weight doesn't matter. Unlike a boxer or someone who has weight divisions, where they are looking to maximize strength, improve their foot and hand speed, but also come under whatever division weight they are in - other than heavyweight.

And this is the same for all kinds of areas where we might be looking to maximize, where in order to make the gains in one area, there is a tradeoff of some sort, a cost to the opportunity, in another.

This means I am a maximizer.

We all are.

Because like it or not, we are all trying to maximize something (likely many things), whether it be trying to be stronger, trying to be richer, trying to be happier, trying to be thinner, trying to be famous, trying to be more attractive - something. Yet of course, we are probably pretty unfocused in our desires, which dilutes our ability to maximize one at the expense of all the rest. So instead, we try to do a bit of everything, maybe improving in some areas, but there is always that cost in another, so it can be one step forward in one, one back in another, perhaps no progress at all, or maybe a larger slide down. It gets messy.

So, the title of this post was about optimizing Hive, and perhaps most people are hear reading thinking about optimizing earnings. However, that is not the only way to optimize, though it is probably the one that is most thought about and discussed. Like I explained above though, what activities are required, depends on what one wants to optimize. And this also likely changes over time in the same way our dietary needs change over time. Mother's milk might be all a baby needs in the first year of life, but it doesn't sustain an adult.

I don't think.

For example on Hive, if a new account and the goal is to increase Hive earnings from the community, it generally means finding ways to attract staked votes. This can be through creating top-level posts or comments, but it probably isn't enough to just drop and run, no matter what the content is about, or how fantastic it is. Probably, it is going to take a fair bit of grind to establish oneself as a trusted author on Hive, and that is something that not many people are really willing to do.

Trusted author.

What I mean by this is something that I have tried to optimize on Hive, where I want to be able to put out content that is good enough that if someone who is looking for decent content to and did vote blind on an article of mine, they can be assured that it is going to be decent enough that their vote wouldn't be questioned. But, "good content" isn't enough to consider it quality content for Hive, because this is a social space. That means that I have also tried to create content that attracts people to engage with it, and even if many are the same people most of the time, there is a sense of community in it, where we actually get to learn about each other, and become at least somewhat friends. This in my opinion adds value, and the conversation on Hive should be optimized.

I think it is worth noting that there are different kinds of optimization to consider in this. For example, some people see it as an efficiency thing, where value earned is divided by time spent. This is seeing earning like a wage, and in that regard, the earnings aren't very good for most people. If I looked at time spent and what I earned on Hive, I would be far better off working in the local supermarket stacking shelves.

But, that is not the case if I am looking to optimize more than just my Hive earnings, because for me at least, there is more to this malarkey than earning Hive. Of course I want to earn HIVE, but there is also a timeline of some sort for the earned value. If I need money to pay my electricity bill and pay for my daughter's education, I am not going to try and earn it on Hive, because there is just to much uncertainty, and too much variability. While I am hoping that Hive will bring m some financial windfall, that is somewhere in an ambiguous future, not next week.

If next week HIVE went to ten dollars in some kind of weird anomaly and stayed there for a few weeks, I would be powering down and selling a chunk of it for sure, because that would change my life, and that of my family forever. However, selling off bits and pieces to pay for groceries, would just be a waste and the cost would be the potential for that life-changing result. I don't see Hive as a way to slightly improve my life each week, it is more a gamble, a lottery ticket for changing it forever.

But again, this depends on what optimization target is desired, because there are plenty of people who are using it like a weekly ATM, taking out bits and pieces to pay for their daily life. That is fine, but there is a cost to this behavior too, and it isn't only that future windfall opportunity. If relying on the votes of others in order to have something to take out, if those votes stop, the income stream stops. And, a lot of the larger stakeholders will stop voting on content from those who only extract for two core reasons. Firstly, it dilutes the value of what they hold. Secondly, it isn't considered a community-minded activity. If someone isn't willing to expose themselves to risk by powering up some of their earning in order to own part of the network and in order to reward others, are they the types of people a stakeholder wants to reward and encourage more of on Hive?

It isn't just about what value someone extracts, it is also about what value someone adds to the network, the community, the ecosystem. For instance, looking at the numbers that @azircon has been posting of late, as well as some that he has shown me in a chat with friends, I hold less HIVE than I have earned. However, this doesn't take into consideration that the majority of the Hive that I have taken out, has gone into Splinterlands on Hive. This has value too, though it is a distributed value and hard to enumerate in terms of the value added to the ecosystem as a whole. And on Splinterlands, I definitely haven't been optimizing my earning potential, which means that a lot of the value I have added into that ecosystem, has been distributed to others who are looking to optimize on that game.

This is quite a rambling article, however what I am slowly unwinding is that optimization of Hive, isn't really possible in a singular sense. Sure, if a person for instance powers up 100K HIVE and uses it to vote, their earnings in curation are predictable, but this is going to be affected by what they vote on. Vote on crap and sooner or later, it is going to be downvoted, so the curation returns will be returned to the pool. There is an opportunity to vote on crap, but there is also likely a cost to do so and over time, that affects reputation. I am not talking about the platform reputation here, just reputation in general.

If someone is looking to optimize being trusted on the platform, what would they need to do? What activities would maximize their trustability? It is likely more than one thing, and it probably has a few different aspects to it, like the way they interact with others, the content, the comments, the voting practices, the hive power considerations, the powering up, the moving to exchanges, the way they support other projects. There are heaps of things to consider and to act upon one, might come at the cost of another. Or maybe in some cases, acting on one compounds positively with another.

So the question becomes,

What are your trying to optimize on Hive?

For me, there is more to it than the potential financial value aspect, because I think there is more to Hive than it being an ATM. At a personal level, I want to also be able to improve my experiences, my learning, my exploration of the world, my abilities, my observational understanding, my interaction with others and among other things, perhaps be part of something that I see as important to society - a development of wellbeing through taking responsibility, and acting accordingly.

Optimize wellbeing.

This should be the only thing that a government should be doing in all of its activities, but they are failing us at scale in every way imaginable. A monetary economy isn't not an indicator of health of a people, the health of the people is. But, health of the people isn't health of an individual at the expense of others, it is about building a place where the average person has the best chance of being healthy. And to do that, it needs a lot of average people, doing their part in creating that space.

If you answer the question honestly below,

What are your trying to optimize on Hive?

Perhaps you will get a useful answer.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]