Dream a little Hive with me

We are ten days out from the scheduled Hardfork 26 date and I am both excited and disappointed. I am excited because hardforks are always exciting times and I think that this one offers a lot of potential to develop upon. I am disappointed in myself, as I haven't been able to stay abreast of all that is happening and consider all of the implications.

Not understanding enough about the hardfork might not be such a big thing for many on Hive, but for me, it is. Normally, I am pretty clued-in on what is happening on Hive and have been for years, but I think due to life at the moment and my own limited mental capacity, I have failed, which annoys me so, so much.

For a very long time Hive has been a large part of my daily life and also, what I can see as my future life too. There is so much potential in Hive to become a driving force behind Web 3.0, but to realize that potential takes dedication to develop and participate. It is far more than a place to earn on content, or a place to earn playing - it is a place that can be invested into and built upon to redefine social media and what it means to have ownership over experience. This has never been more important than it is today and it is only going to grow in importance from here, especially as the entire global economy proves once again why it needs to be replaced.

Bitcoin was born from the last global financial crisis and since, has spawned not only hope for an alternative economy, but thousands of blockchains that are approaching participating in it in different ways. One thing is common though, ownership is the key.

Starting with Steem and then through the infamous move over to Hive, tokenized social networks that offer ownership are the future. Tokenized networks already exist of course, because that is what Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are - but they are not longed for the content creator world, as eventually, they will become far too restrictive and moralistic to be able to capture and hold a wide audience.

Back in the day and still now, people look at this blockchain and consider the main value proposition is freedom of speech and censorship resistance, but that is not the case. The real value of Hive is the ownership it offers, of content, of words, of tokens and NFTs and of our own experience. No one is forced to be here, no one is forced to stay, no one is forced to post, follow, comment -

no one is forced to sell.

The entire ecosystem is a private ownership model, where what one person owns interacts directly with what another person owns. People focus on the value of the tokens and on the up and down votes, but what people forget is that you don't just own what is in your wallet, you also own things like who you follow. One interface can mute a person you follow, but they can't kick them off the platform, so you do not lose your list.

This is one of the things that YouTube and Twitch use to leverage content creators - because once they have been monetized, they can also be demonetized. And, it isn't just "go to another platform" because to get monetized takes a massive amount of work and requires building a strong following, and going to another platform means losing all of those follows and essentially starting from scratch.

That isn't the case on Hive or at least, doesn't have to be the case. and because of the way way stake works, the number of followers doesn't matter much at all for monetization, as that "numbers game" is only useful for when the income depends on advertising revenue. Which, isn't much of a thing on any* of the various Hive interfaces.

This isn't to say it won't become more of a thing in the future, but for now, because of the small size of the community, it doesn't offer enough incentive, especially since advertisers have very little control over what is posted where. But, as more complex interfaces are built, the interfaces can offer far greater control to moderators and therefore advertisers. However, this doesn't mean that they will be able to ever have the same control as Facebook, because in order to have users, they need to offer value.

That value could be user experience, but more and more, it is also going to have to be actual financial value return. The coming financial crisis is going to highlight this even more for many people, as they look to make ends meet in the real world, which will mean to find alternative revenue streams, or at the very least, consider the costs of consumption, including "non-generative time" lost.

The world is rapidly changing financially, and it isn't just the collapse of the economy - it is that younger generations have realized that they have largely been cut out of the economy. However, this doesn't happen "forever", because all that boomer money is going to start getting transferred into the X, Y and Z generations over the next decade or so.

But, the habits are changing as to how people spend their time and money, which is why the current governments are driving for people to put as much as they can into retirement funds and lock it away, because corporations are trying to take as much as they can to lock it away for themselves. Either way, it is bad for the average person, but if people start taking what they get and putting into supporting the emerging digital economy and web 3.0, both the traditional corporations and the governments will begin to lose their grip on the control mechanisms.

The traditional economy itself is one gigantic collar that harnesses us all, but because we are all inside it, it feels like this is the only way it can be. It is used to control us through economic slavery of various kinds and if any of us step too far out of line, the choker chain will be pulled and we will be financially punished.

But, this only works when there is no financial alternative, but in a world of decentralized business potential, there will be alternatives. This means that when they pull on that chain too hard, we will slip out and they will close on air. The more abusive they become, the less opportunity they will have to abuse.

And, this is where crypto offers a healthier alternative also, as if any project gets too greedy or controlling, people will opt-out of usage, leaving it dead in the water in a near instant - as happened to Steem. Steem is still there -

when was their last hardfork, when is their next?

It is hard for most of us to imagine the future, especially when we are talking a decade or two away, but look at what has changed in the last decade or two. Through technology, we have fundamentally changed the way we interact with each other and developed industries in that time that didn't even exist prior - digital data being the most valuable of them. And, it is this very technological change that is going to be the vehicle that carries crypto to mainstream adoption too, because it offers ownership and control of value, requires no banks or central government and, can be managed from the palm of a hand on a phone.

It is a revolution.

Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

And, day by day, hardfork by hardfork, we are part of that revolution. And while we will never have the user base of Facebook, that doesn't mean we can't play a pivotal role in the future of the industry and be valuable in our own right. We don't want the future to be filled with corporate behemoths like Amazon and Google, because that is only possible when the economy operates as it does now.

We want better.

On October 11th, Hive will hopefully get a little better.

Another step into the future.

One can dream.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]