Recently, I read a newspaper article about the topic of job dreams of youngsters. They asked a certain number of kids between 14 and 18 what they want to become professionally speaking. I don't remember all the results but I remember that one job in the top 5 was „social media influencer“. I wasn't even surprised to see that there but in a way it disturbed me all the same. What does it mean that so many kids want to become influencers?
Do we really want our kids to become influencers?
I wonder whether it's the same for you, but I kind of struggle with the term influencer. I talked about that in the latest HHHlive ecency discord show lead by @ph1102. When there are influencers there are obviously also influenced people. I don't know about you, but I don't like to be influenced. Being influenced sounds like being manipulated in my behaviour by the person influencing me.
The whole concept of influencers sounds like a game of power where people try to legitimize their position through a certain number of followers and then use this position in order to influence or manipulate the people following them. I believe it sounds bad on so many levels. Do kids want to earn money with their content or do they want to reach a position of power where they can use this power to wield a certain authority for the sake of having power over others?
Do we have influencers on hive?
Like all the web 2.0 social media networks, I see a lot of actors who want to be influencers on hive. They want to impact and lead the people that follow them. Let's be clear, they are not doing anything wrong but couldn't we do better on a decentralized network?
Let's have a look at the interaction that happens on hive...
When I look at hive, I see a big portion of fake interaction. People following and commenting posts in order to get the chance to get some upvotes here and there. Do these people bring any value? I'm not so sure about it. Then you have all these give away posts where people leave comments to get a prize. Let's say you take all that away, what is remaining of the interaction?
When you go through a lot of posts, you see that most of them have zero up to a handful of comments. Among these comments, how many are signatures of curation projects? How many are real comments where people give their honest opinion?
What I want to say with all that is that probably around 90% of the posts of hive have very little real, meaningful interaction. Is it because people don't care? I believe rather that it's because 90% of the posts on hive bring very little value to readers.
On web 3.0 we don't have algorithms that place certain content in front of the eyes of others because this account has tons of followers. On hive, we need to work very hard to get some real followers who are willing to spend some time to read your posts and interact with them.
On hive, simply creating content isn't enough!
Interacting and showing appreciation
We need to interact and value our followers. I've heard quite often that users won't visit an author again if they don't get an answer to their comment. We need to answer the comments on our posts just to show appreciation and let's not forget that we have great tools to show appreciation with upvotes as well.
Offering real value
Basically, when you write a 1000 word post, the chances that somebody reads it from beginning to end are probably very low. If I see such posts, I tend not even to try to read them (says the guy who just creates a post with over 1000 words 😅). I only read them when I'm really interested in the topic.
In order to bind your followers you need to offer real value to them. You either need to enlarge their knowledge-base, to entertain them or to trigger their curiosity. It's not enough just to produce content. We need to produce content that people want!
Building relationships
On web 2.0 you might get thousands of followers but on web 3.0 you might get a handful of friends. Hive offers a way to learn about other people, interact with them, know them, earn their trust and maybe even become friends. It's the friendships that you created that will help you on the way.
Increase your skin in the game
When you look at traditional social media, you can grow your account basically only through growing your followership. Here on hive, your followership matters but what matters even more is how your account grows financially. The more Hive Power you wield, the bigger the part of the reward pool is that you can distribute!
Your hive power is your influence on the chain and your personality will define how you use it
On web 2.0 you influence, on web 3.0 you help, value and create bonds
The whole influencer concept simply doesn't work that well on web 3.0. Your impact on the chain will grow with your hive power. It will depend on the value that you give to others through your content or through your curation. It will depend on the relations that you managed to build and the friends that are around you... When I look at that, I believe that on hive we can have better and more human values to strive for than what we have on web 2.0. I prefer to have 5 friends rather than 10'000 anonymous followers...
Therefore, I don't see us as influencers but as members of a same blockchain where we can create relationships with the people we want to, support the authors and the projects we want to and define how the chain will look like tomorrow. Because let's not forget that you are part owner of this chain and you participate in the way this chain will evolve, with your votes but also with your values and your actions!
Let's connect ! You can find me on these platforms: