The value of content

A wise hive account once said: "Most of the content on steem hive is close to worthless, unless they manage to bring outside views to it." and this is sort of true still today, though I can't ignore the fact that if you at least bring inside views to it it's still way more valuable than the rest of content that gets rewarded.

Now I don't want to be a downer, but if you really think about it, it's true. Most other social media platforms wouldn't pay most of our content creators a dime creating content on their platforms. In fact only a small fraction of a percentage make a living off of these platforms and a majority of that comes from adrevenue so the platforms don't really lose anything out on that and in fact get a cut off of that revenue too. Hence compared to Hive it's sort of magical and in many ways unfathomable how a small portion of users averages out so much rewards over time with the ecosystem having paid out literal millions to its users even though it's still so small.

Now of course the main factors here are that it works in so many different ways. 1. It doesn't use adrevenue, I believe @leofinance is the only platform that utilizes ads and I remember closing my adblocker when browsing their front-end just to assist them with their token buyback from adrevenue, the other front-ends still don't utilize it and 2. it rewards content and curators with inflation which means every person who has bought and/or staked hive is losing out on their value as it is being redirected to other users and possibly themselves.

One could say that the biggest losers here are all the passive investors who buy Hive and keep them on exchanges as they lose out on inflation and other kind of rewards by having it staked but considering the volatility of crypto and Hive it's hard to feel bad for them as you don't need to be an amazing trader to buy low, hold and sell some of it high during all these movements.

The biggest winners on the other hand are those who come here with nothing, work their way into posting, commenting and receiving upvotes consistently and there's nothing wrong with that, it is after all the way the platform is designed. The gray area is when those content creators don't bring anything else of value to the platform and there's evidence that their content isn't even being consumed by accounts within the ecosystem thus the rewards they're earning is in one way "unfair".

I know some of you may have noticed that I've been downvoting some accounts I disagree with the rewards of, whether it being controversial content or the so called "censored" accounts on #web2 that often trend but never receive any engagement or any proof of them attempting to bring their followers to Hive to consume the content here, or in general posts I feel are a bit too high in rewards due to certain voters just blindly casting 100% votes with large stake that doesn't belong to them or other posts from accounts I have a suspicion aren't really deserving of the rewards they're getting for certain reasons that would be too long to explain here.

What it boils down to usually is there being "regular joe" accounts such as me for instance and a majority of accounts on hive and then "influencers" who have a larger following outside of Hive and get showered with stake here. Let me explain my thought process on how I judge rewards based split between these user cases.

The honeymoon period

New user who seems genuine and real, hooray! Let's give them a vote on their intro post, firstly so they get some stake to continue using Hive more easily without running into RC errors (though this will be an issue of the past shortly with the new Hardfork) but also so they can see how the platform works, how curators are motivated to look for them and welcome and guide them on the platform, etc. Over time, these regular users, who may not have a big following outside of Hive or bring manage to bring a lot of people onto the network, will have to bring something more to the table than just posting content and replying to a couple comments on their posts. I'm not even taking into consideration their curation but if they've never cast more than a couple votes it usually says a lot about them either way.

What I'd want to see is them getting involved in the community, start following other authors they're interested in, share the same interests, engage with them on their posts, subscribe to interesting communities and of course test out some of the many dapps we have here.

I mean if you really think about it, content in and of itself is not that valuable, if no one reads it from inside the ecosystem than the odd few curators trying to not leave the post at 0 rewards and if no one outside of Hive reads it either, then it may as well not exist. It's frankly ridiculous that a lot of content here earns the rewards it does without the author putting in the work to gather an audience which is the case in 99% of the rest of the internet where blogging is still a thing or being an influencer, etc. If no one's there to consume you, you're not going to get advertising offers, sponsorships, adrevenue, etc. So why is it so different here?

Well, stake has to go out here, that's just the way the reward pool works, and if at some point people feel too much stake is being sent out to authors compared of what they're worth then nowadays there are some other options to put your upvotes to different kind of uses. There it is important that it's not something that benefits you solely or directly though else that'll cross the border of abuse which is frowned upon. You can use an example of this such as @hbd.funder, stakeholders vote on those comments meaning a slightly bigger piece of the reward pool goes to @hbdstabilizer which in turn manages to keep HBD more stable and during depegs assists on getting it back to the peg quicker, often times helping the value of Hive if it depegs on the upside as it has recently. This is something that every stakeholder benefits from, not just the people voting up the comments. I do some times vote those comments up personally as well and a simple reason to that is that there are quite frankly not that many new authors joining daily nor being active and we don't want to overreward people for the sake of using up our daily voting mana just because. Rewards should remain realistic because before we know it the price of Hive could go up 10-100x which shouldn't mean that my shitposts should be earning thousands of $ daily just because I need to spend my voting mana every day.

Getting a bit off track here but if you keep in mind that one of the most important things of Hive is users, you'll understand the importance of bringing in traffic from the outside and getting new users to stay active and bring in new folks. Every social media platform needs users and growth, without that then there's no reason to have a reward pool if we're just going to be throwing it at each other. So if regular joe's aren't at least being socially active and "appreciating" the rewards they're getting by putting in time, effort and sweat equity, then naturally they're going to take the rewards they get on their posts for granted which in turn may mean lower quality over time, farmy/spammy forced content and of course easier decision to sell such stake because it didn't cost you much to earn it in the first place.

Now let's talk about influencers as that's something of a recent activity that's taken a lot of my attention lately.

Here the honeymoon period exists as well and may even last longer, it's understandable, a bigger influencer has joined our platform so we may shower them with rewards early on and for a while, but how long should that go on, though? There are quite a few factors to keep in mind here, how much stake is that influencer being rewarded, what is their activity like? Understandably not every big influencer will have time to socialize and use Hive daily like regular joe's so then how can they bring value to the platform?

This one's a lot easier for the influencers compared to regular users because as their name mentions, they can influence things. They can start posting about Hive, their post links here that do well on their other socials to attempt to get their followers to join. Because why wouldn't they? Many join cause they understand the immutability of text on the chain, they understand the free hosting of their content as long as they get themselves an account, they understand the ease of rewards and how direct it exists between stakeholders and content creators without any middlemen in the way and they should understand that once they grow some stake they can start curating their own section to reward their followers and fans with some rewards which as far as I know no other platform makes it as easy as Hive and cost-free.

So the question here is, why are they not doing so? There are some of these influencers that have been here for years, their reputation is as high as some of our most successful content creators and stakeholders yet their stake isn't, not just their stake as it's not that much of importance but alongside it their activity is lacking, their engagement, their viewcount on the platforms that do count it. Like honestly, what gives? Do they just not understand Hive or are the rewards just too little for them to bother? If so then why do they get upset when part of those rewards are downvoted? And why are their supporters that insistent on continuing to shower them with rewards when all signs point to it bringing close to no value back to our platform? Do they not care about the value of their stake or do they think it just won't matter in the long run. It's just quite baffling, especially when their reaction to a couple small downvotes comes with max retaliation on projects literally trying to grow the value of the stake they're using to retaliate with.

Either way, my point is that even influencers need to start bringing value to the platform in their own ways eventually and just like regular users they shouldn't take their rewards for granted because their name or presence alone isn't going to bring any value to the network if no one knows they are here and even worse, if most here don't care that they're here. It really isn't rocket science in my opinion.

I've seen a lot of regular users find innovative ways to bring value back to the platform and at least spend a lot of time building genuine connections that make reading their posts and comment section really entertaining. @tarazkp is for instance one of my favorite authors on the platform. I loved his writing early on and it's just kept getting better and by the looks of his posts I can tell that many others agree as well as they keep returning to them.

If he, on the other hand, was only to generate posts, only reply to comments on his own posts consistently, not curate, not engage with other posts, not use any dapps, start receiving less genuine engagement, etc, then yes at that point I'd also think that he could use some downvotes or less upvotes eventually, no matter how great of an author he is.

We really gotta be a bit more rational about what's going on here and where we're putting our stake. I feel like a lot of users just throw it around willy nilly and don't see it as not just trending posts but also investing in accounts for future use. Of course not all stake that goes out weekly needs to be all nitpicky about where it's going but stakeholders shouldn't be entitled that just because it's their stake they can do whatever they want with it and no one should be able to get in the way. That's just not how proof of work works, we all as a collective should be deciding on how much stake goes to where and when we see some outliers that go beyond the acceptable norm too much to then intervene. If not then we're not going to be much different from Steem or Blurt where content is a literal placeholder for ROI. It's pretty much proof of stake with an extra step of creating a shitpost daily to get that extra ROI and it shows on their trending if you dare look at it.

So as an ending note, try to bring "something more" to the ecosystem, don't take things for granted and you'll do fine. If we can't value content realistically and don't attempt to bring readers to it then we may as well just reduce the rewards that content receives because else what is the point of it? While I'm not suggesting anything as a Hive witness, keep in mind that we already did so once from 75/25 to 50/50 and while there were some people to initially complain about it I don't see any bad effects having been created by it, so who's to say lowering it more wouldn't be better? Or we could work on distributing it better, not showering a few accounts with too big of a percentage of post rewards and never keep tabs on them or try to adjust it down a bit because they should just do whatever.