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The future of Hive as the uncancelable culture

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@tarazkp
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One of the problems that has arrived through the rise in power of social media corporations is their stranglehold on users, especially those who have built up their public profile or business around a particular platform, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or YouTube. Once the brand is established and the monetization model is in effect - content producers are effectively "chained" to their platform and must fit in or get out.

Because the platforms offer a free product, but are very top-heavy in their business structure, they have to finance their endeavors somehow, and this is almost entirely done through two mechanisms, selling advertising space and the data for advertisers to target. Both are lucrative, with the second being able to be leveraged with the first to drive all kinds of campaigns through society, including political.

What a lot of people may not realize is that even the applications that are paid for are tied into this model and remember that apple and Google take 30 percent of all money an application generates from sales of the app and the in-app purchases. But, there is still a very high incentive to have a viral app and developers and investors are willing to drive their product through advertisements in the hope that they will become popular enough to sell advertisements themselves - it is a self-perpetuating, weird type of Ponzi scheme.

But, because advertisers provide the income, a corporate investor owned platform that is driven by profits must maximize their gains, which means anything that threatens profits that can be mitigated or replaced by something that doesn't will be removed - including users who have previously been supported as value adding.

Combined with social movements that target individuals, this means that the "cancel culture" that will effectively demonetize accounts through bans, shadow-bans and cross-platform campaigns to purge users is becoming more and more common place.

There is more to it than a simple not fitting in with the advertising model due to social pressure, it is also profit driven. Even a person who spends years creating a niche and building up a following so that they can earn well from the platform and does nothing wrong is at risk, because of profits. Why pay someone well when they can hijack the followers by driving similar content straight to them from someone who is up and coming and will work for far less?

What this means is that more and more, affected or potentially affected creators will be looking for ways to mitigate their own risk of being demonetized, which means taking control and ownership of not only their content, but also how their content is distributed. This currently means going to great lengths to be able to make oneself uncancellable, with people like Sam Harris building his own website and experimenting with payment walls and subscriptions, standalone apps and rejecting advertisement to stay "free" on the internet. The problem with this is that it is going to get very messy if everyone is going to have to build their own interface.

But as you can probably recognize since you are reading this here, decentralized content delivery platforms and more importantly, the infrastructure, can not only help those who have lost their seats build again, but help them monetize through a global network of users who can provide value in many forms through micropayments, either directly like tipping, subscriptions or from inflation pools like HIVE, LEO and other tokens, potentially personalized tokens too. This means that they no longer have to rely on advertising revenue and a centralized corporation for payments, nor do they have to fear being demonetized or squeezed out from those same mechanisms of control who choose who "gets made" like in the Mafia.

With patronage coming back into fashion and the ability for Hive to not only distribute content, but also track and distribute all kinds of transactions, including micropayments that can be delivered for free around the world, the shift for content on the internet can be immense. It isn't just about cutting out the middleman or reducing the harm from centralized profiteering, there is also the redevelopment of interpersonal culture through a far more direct demand and supply model, where everyone has more control over where and how their wealth is used.

We might seem a long way off from having solutions that allow for this to happen at scale, but the potential of second-layer tokens and experiences being able to integrate into existing websites means that there can be a lot of movement happen very fast, under the right conditions. I think we are starting to see those conditions align, with economic and social instability being a driving force toward people looking for ways to take more control over their lives, which will start with the content they consume first - as that is such a huge part of what we do as a society now.

The internet as we know it is going to rapidly shift in the coming five years, with even more people coming online, more social disruption, more poor behavior from corporations, more economic hardship driving us toward some kind of digital awakening, that will take Web 2.0 into Web 3.0 and beyond. It is all about people going forward and the platforms that seek profit at the cost of people will start to see their market share come under attack and, their top-heavy business models will suffer, as more and more wealth shifts into decentralized environments that are people-driven ecosystems at all levels that drive value back into the userbase, rather than extract it into the pockets of the very few.

It is exciting times and we are just at the start of the journey, but here we are testing and playing in ways that the rest of the world are still unaware about, but will come to realize as essential soon enough. I think it is wise to invest into what people want and the best time is likely when most don't even know they want it yet - which is where we are now, but things are changing rapidly.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]

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