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Why are you always the product?

Now the term always isn't ultimately always, a few content creators or shareholders/workers do benefit in various ways, but this is almost never a higher percentage than say 0.1% of a giant companies profits.

I think a lot of the way these things work is aligned with wealth inequality and lately it's been brought up more and more in politics that I somewhat skim through but don't really have time to follow closely. Maybe it's the times where inflation and tensions are causing prices to grow with only very few people being invested to actually profit off of the swings in markets. Sure Robinhood was one of the first exchanges to make it easier for the regular Joe to get in on the "booming markets", but if you zoom out it's not really been a thing for very long and considering most people are barely surviving it's not like many have had the means to invest even if they had the opportuntiy to do so.

The interesting thing from my perspective is of course where Hive lands in this debate.

While we're not perfect here either, a lot of things could be improved and I reckon would be with just more people being here, active and looking for things to improve, it's also adamant that things are hard to improve in the real world under democracy.

Now again, I can't stress enough how little knowledge I have of politics and I don't mind accepting where I lack knowledge and don't pretend to know things I don't. In fact I kind of despise this whole "fake it til you make it" mindset many people do attempt to take advantage of until they look like a deer caught in headlights when the focus is eventually turned to them. I feel like most of us still have a lot to learn, probably until they hit the ages of 40+ but eventually that has diminishing returns when you get older, which is odd that so many continue to practice politics at insane ages and what seems like most of the country is ran by them. At least that's how I preceive things to be. Not every old person suffers from cognitive decline or becoming worse at their job, but I can't say they're up to date on a fast moving world either. I think we all know the older you get the harder it gets to learn new things. Thus I am in favor of there being younger people in charge of important matters relating to a country, international laws, etc.

Either way, it feels like we are programmed to be taught that there are no other ways. The poor are meant to continue to stay poor except for a tiny percentage that makes it through in one way or another and that the inequality is meant to keep increasing.

Have you ever had that thought where you go "if only I get to 1 mil usd I could just live off the interest?" well, a lot of people are already there and are doing so, not just living off of the interest but increasing their wealth further at alarming rates. Surely someone's gotta wonder who's on the receiving end of this, right? Aside from those taking the other end of the trade and taking losses, those who just play the safe version to live off of interest must be getting that value from somewhere, right? Other than inflation, I'd bet that the poor staying poor is kind of the other aspect that enables it.

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Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

Times are weird, there's many who complain about whales on Hive and one thing or the other when things aren't going well, while some try to keep a clear mind about the longterm vision as to what Hive makes different compared to regular social media.

There you are most of the time the product. Covid happened and everyone was at home online for a while, many tried to make it as content creators during that time but most realized that they're never going to get there and never even earned a single $. Most went back to their usual lives while some who did make it stuck to it and are earning now. I'm not denying that the amount of people who do earn there hasn't increased over the years, what I'm denying is that the percentage of people who do make a living has not increased much compared to overall users using the sites, paying for services/things and consuming ads that make these platforms work and create a circular economy.

Even the creators are kind of the product, cause they create the content people go to those platforms to consume and depending on the attention they can garner their content is plastered with ads/sponsorships/links so the creator can partake in a share of the revenue the platform generates off of them and the people consuming their content. They're not becoming stakeholders in the platform or making the consumers earn a $ for their contributions to their content that may enrich them (comment section, chats, shares, etc)

Why does Hive change this? It's quite literally designed that way. Larger stakeholders are constantly being diluted by inflation. Every time new Hive is created, a large percentage of it goes to authors. This percentage is larger than inflation rewards, larger than witness rewards and equal to curation rewards. Sure if you sum them all together you are better off as a stakeholder than an author, but authors come here most of the time with no skin in the game and can theoretically go on taking and taking as much as they want and inflation still continues to go their way if they keep producing content and garnering attention whether we have ads we're also profiting from or not - which for most cases, we don't.

On hive you don't have to try to make money for a very long time or somehow get lucky because you've worked hard enough or found a very unique niche no one else has poked at or attempted to fake attention with bots/farms, etc. Active stakeholders here, i.e. the community, are more than happy to welcome you with inflation directed towards you just for showing up and showing that you're trying. And the way inflation works proves that this doesn't have to only be directed to a small % of content creators, it doesn't have to wait until you reach a certain threshold or age or identification, etc. It's boundless monetization no matter where you're from, your age, religion, politics, etc.

There are however a few things that can demonetize you if you step on a few toes or try some weird things the community deems it unacceptable, but this demonetization happens in the open, verifiable by anyone and judged by anyone and more importantly, counterable by anyone.

I've had a few instances where I felt some content creators were earning too much compared to the perceived attention they were getting or because it was solely a few stakeholders constantly focusing curation on them, etc, where I attempted to lower the rewards slightly and was met with retalaitory downvotes. Or people who disliked me because of something else jump in to defend the authors I lowered the pending rewards of because it fits their narrative at that time, etc. Point is that these things can be judged by anyone and everyone rather than just one employee/mod having a bad day or an AI system not really caring what's right or wrong and keeping an account shutdown/shadowbanned because no ones there to take an actual look at the case.

This post is probably a bit all over the place, but just some random thoughts today from some videos I consumed recently, which lead me to find a scrobble issue I'm working on now with longer videos so just thought I'd rant a bit here about things, maybe you found some of it interesting, maybe not, feel free to downvote if you think this post got overrewarded.

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