For countless ages, the Commons has always been a part of human culture.
Wikipedia defines commons as:
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values (social practice) employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can be also defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.
For some, this post is going to seem like I'm stating the obvious, but bear with me.
For a vast majority of people online, they instinctively know what a commons is without ever thinking about it, and companies like Google and Facebook take advantage of this instinct. These entities run social media platforms that imitate the environment and structure of a Commons, but behind the scenes they are privately owned and controlled.
This deception pulls the wool over the eyes of millions, if not billions of people each day. It seems that on a weekly or sometimes daily basis I see youtubers discussing the latest channel to get taken down by YouTube, and discussing this as though YouTube were a public Commons where certain rights exist. The truth of course is that you have as much right to publish on YouTube as you do in a local newspaper.
While some are waking up to this deception, many still haven't. There are some people who have opened their eyes and found Hive or a similar platform that doesn't just act like a public Commons, but is in fact a public Commons.
The thing to keep in mind is that while the Hive blockchain itself is a Commons, the Dapps that run on the Hive blockchain may not be. Threespeak, PeakD, Splinterlands, and many other Dapps are owned and controlled by private interests. In that sense, uploading a video to Threespeak still has some level of risk involved due to private ownership, and the potential for ownership to change hands at some point in the future through a sale or by other means. I'm not trying to target Threespeak in particular as I have no agenda against it or Dan, I'm merely using this Dapp as an example because it's well known.
My point of this post is to remind or inform others of a selling point of Hive. While Facebook, Twitter and all of the privately owned platforms out there have all the characteristics of a Commons, they are clearly not.
People complaining about cancel culture have to understand this, and I believe many do not yet. If you create a channel on Youtube, or an account on facebook or twitter or TikTok or any other privately owned platform, you do not own your content and you do not have the right to add content. You merely have been given licence/privilege to do so on the terms laid out, and those terms can change or be interpreted however the owners of said platform want, whenever and however they want. You have no ownership or say in this (unless you happen to be a large shareholder).
This is why Hive is different, among other reasons. It's not just that hive is decentralized and is a cryptocurrency, its that you actually have equal rights to access the chain itself. You can create your own Dapp and built a platform on top of the chain for your own purposes, and if what you're doing has value, people will invest their time and energy into it.
The sooner the online world understands that private social media platforms are not Commons, the sooner Hive and other decentralized platforms take over. I believe it's not if, but when this happens.
Spread the word. Thanks for dropping by.