Rewards, community and gamification through price

Over the next few weeks, it is going to be interesting to watch the usage statistics on Hive, things like posts, comments, accounts and communities created, as in general, a price pump is going to see an increase in activity. Yes, some new eyes will arrive on the platform, but a lot of the accounts created are likely going to be milking alts that will try and take advantage of higher voting values. I hope I am wrong, but this is the way it has gone in the past, every time.

What is different this time is that the EIP is still in place and there are still the 2.5 "free" downvotes. However, after a long bear market on Steem, it is good to remember that price on a post is not the best indicator - it is the amount of Hive being delivered.

What I mean by this is that if HIVE has a 10 cent feed price and a post get voted to a dollar, that post will earn 10 HIVE (~5 author/ ~5 curators). However, if the feed price is 1 dollar - that same 1 dollar post will be worth 1 HIVE, (~0.5 author/ ~0.5 curators).

Because price is currently going up on the exchanges, the feed price (the internal price set by the witnesses that adjusts on a 3.5 day average) will increase also, with a bit of lag. What this means is that you will see the value of open posts increase also, even though there are no new voters on them. This works in reverse too of course, where post values will decline as price declines. Obviously perhaps, most of us are conditioned to look at the dollar value of the post without thinking about the underlying token layers. This is part of the gaming in the system that affects decision making.

For those looking to build their stake further - a lower price is likely better as there are less people posting and curators will often vote at a higher percentage to add "real value" in the moment. It also feels better to add something significant to a post than give a lot of smaller votes. However, as price increases, larger curators tend to spread their votes out more, delivering the same in Fiat/external value, but using less vested influence.

For those looking to sell externally into fiat, the only thing that really matters is the external value, the value on the post - as it doesn't matter if 10 HIVE equals 10 dollars, or 1 HIVE equals 10 dollars - it is the same 10 dollars. This sets up another set of gamification options on Hive, as the conditioning sets in and tries to compete ever more greatly for the pool, which is the same size as it has always been (it fluctuates on a few factors and will decrease over time) - the same amount in the pool at 10 cent HIVE, is 10x greater value at 1 dollar HIVE. If the pool was worth 1 million dollars at 10 cents, the pool with the exact same amount of tokens in it will be worth 10 million dollars at 1 dollar HIVE price.

This is how much HIVE is in the reward pool at the moment.

At 10 cents it is worth 91,000 dollars. At 1 dollar it is worth 910,000, at 10 dollars it is worth 9.1 million dollars.

So, what that means is that in a year at current price (60 cents - there will be about 25M HIVE printed in the next 12 months) about 15 million dollars worth of HIVE will come out of the pool - at current price. However, some will sell lower, some will hold for longer, some will power up and vote to earn more through curation - some will lose their keys.

Regardless, the higher price grows, the more attractive it becomes, the further it can spread significant value and therefore, the more people who can get rewarded enough to keep interacting. While I have said many times, this shouldn't be the focus for onboarding, we live in a world of financial gain and strain and the economy is a core part of the platform. A lot of people are going to not care about the possibility to power up and instead focus on the earning side of things.

If you have been around for a little while and haven't been powering up during the bear market, low prices and low content competition - that is pretty much on you and it is part of the gamification of the platform, one of the many, many ways to approach activity on Hive. While the monetary factors of this are drivers of many interactions, what people have to also recognize that inherent in the game are human behaviors and how they are going to act under various conditions - with many acting in a normal distribution of behave - from one extreme end, through the average and out to the polar opposite extreme.

This can create a lot of conflict on the platform and a lot of conversation and argument around things like content value, inflation rates, abuse, witness allocation and whatever else - nothing necessarily new. Hopefully though, this bullrun will be soon coupled with Smart Media Tokens that will add more layers of gamification to the platform through reward structures for authors through communities as well as the incentive to build new tokenized experiences on the chain, like games and businesses.

While price takes focus for earning, the future of the platform for real earners looking to make a consistent return, will be via the growth of the platform through developing demand for the chain, demand that leverages capabilities to bring in people to use the chain - not just claim from the reward pool. The reward pool is highly attractive, but it is also highly contentious - especially at the fundamental core layer as it is not only used for reward, it is also what secures the chain in multiple ways - like paying witnesses and distributing HIVE so there is the potential for a wider and deeper range of powered up accounts.

So, while prices increase there is likely going to be a lot more interaction with not all of it being "above board" and healthy for the platform, but the increasing prices should also be attracting new users in. Most will be content contributors that want to earn, but I think that there will also be plenty of developers who will arrive wanting to compete for the DAO, and I hope that we welcome the new blood and see what they can do - but hold them ACCOUNTABLE and make sure they deliver value.

Hive is a highly complex platform and I don't mean that it is necessarily complicated. The complexity is in the massive range of paths users can take and the way they actually walk those paths. A content creator has thousands of options open to them and these are all influenced in some way by what everyone else is doing on the platform. When people focus on key aspects important to themselves, they tend to become blind to all the other ongoing activity and how it influences their own area of interest and experience. This creates conflict too and some feel they are suffering, but don't know why - eve if the core reason is themselves.

While there is a lot of things to consider for those who like to spend time thinking, I am hoping that there will be a large number of users who arrive and decide to explore the space, play some games, consume some content and just have some fun in an ecosystem that could reward them and does encourage them to look into a different world on the internet - one that the other platforms hide from view - as they don't want to share with their users, they want to extract from them.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]