It's just a matter of time, isn't it?
This is how I feel in regards to Hive and the various applications and communities it enables - at some point, it will get the attention it deserves and "overnight" it will be flooded with interest, attracting all kinds of users and developers in looking to take part and learn what all this "Web 3" nonsense is about.
What is interesting is that I am hearing people at work talking about it now who aren't into crypto, but they are still tech nerds in way way or another. Pretty soon, it is going to be mainstream narrative, however what is going to take longer, is people actually understanding what is and isn't web 3, as for instance the other day, someone explained it as web sites that allow people to earn.
Patreon and YouTube do this already - they are not web 3.
Decentralization is core to this, but many don't yet understand what this means, nor why it is important. However, as people excitedly bound into the hustle side economy in the hope to earn, they don't really care about what allows them to do it, they just want that mula. It is amazing what people are willing to do for money and often, it doesn't take much for them to change their behavior. A tweak here and there and people are suddenly moving in a different direction.
I see this often in regards to salary bonuses tied to KPIs, which for me have never been a driving force, unless the KPI makes sense to accomplish. However, I have known many people who will drop what they are doing and pick up something different, even if it doesn't make sense, all in order to get an extra few percentage points on their salary a year - but achieve nothing significant. This doesn't make sense to me, but it demonstrates how incentive-driven people are, as they are willing to do almost anything, as long as they get paid for it.
Don't get me wrong, I like bonus money as much as anyone, but if it isn't tied to useful activity, it isn't worth, what it is worth. It is very much like the value of a token being connected to usecase, where if the usecase isn't valuable, the token shouldn't be valuable either. Often though, the people who design bonus systems don't know what should be incentivized, so they tie the activity to a lot of useless. People chase it, but the company doesn't get the ROI on the bonus, as the wrong thing gets done.
Incentive is powerful, but it doesn't mean that what gets achieved through them leads anywhere good - it just leads where it where the changed behavior takes it. However, if the "right things" are incentivized and rewarded correctly, it not only works as an incentive to do, but concurrently works as a disincentive to do alternately.
It is this that finds the equilibrium between supply and demand in the attention economy, where the "material" that gets attention will see the curve of reward increase until the supply increases to chase the incentive, lowering the reward, but distributing it more widely.
This is also why the decentralization aspect of Web 3 is so vital, because it means that it is far harder to influence the demand and supply across many nodes, meaning that there will be a tighter correlation between what is supplied, and the demand it receives. Currently on for example YouTube, the platform that benefits the most, is also the one that decides who should see what, when. This means that although it might feel like the user decides, it is actually the platform working on a tenet of maximizing profit, whatever the cost.
However, while many seem to think that in order to be successful Hive has to compete with Facebook and Google, this is not actually the case. If anything, Hive might be more successful financially catering for a subset of well staked users, instead of trying to attract the masses. Ultimately though, the masses will come because of the laws of supply and demand, because as interest and reward increase, more people will come in to fill the supply gap by catering to the needs of the audience.
While my opinion is that it is just a matter of time, this doesn't mean that it is a waiting game until we get there. At the point the masses do turn this way, there has to be enough reason to attract their interest and retain their attention for the longer term, all the while encouraging them to take ownership of their account, experience and ultimately - lives.
This is one of the things that I find interesting here for me, as while I spend a lot of time online, it has also fundamentally changed the way I experience and my own activities in the world at large. The reason is that while there is the financial reward incentive, there are also other reasons and perspectives that make me want to take what I know to participate here, and take what I learn from here and close the loop IRL also.
Hive isn't a side-hustle platform - as it becomes engrained into life and affects conversations, perspectives and opportunity daily. Facebook does this to many people too - but what does it offer in return? Nothing - users own none of it. It is just a matter of time that people wake up to this also and start demanding what the centralized platforms can't offer - ownership and the ability to use what is owned, as one pleases.
The world of information transfer is changing.
Each bit of data carries a cost and a reward.
Come get some.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
