Thank you for pouring your heart out in this post. Many won't read in its entirety. Since taking a redundancy package from my corpo employer in April, Hive has been the place to which I've turned for entertainment, engagement, social, and brain food.
Hive is all about the immutable connections between human beings. Some people on chain get this. Others want to establish a business, to extract, or to add value, depending on their own world views.
On the balance though every single day I see people post amazing, heartfelt stuff that other people (who they have likely never, or unlikely will ever meet) exchange stories, words, and tiny little love hears (on peakd at least) that give value to social interaction.
Sure, we all have our diverging, disagreeing points of the view, but to me the value of hive has always been (and at times, with great peril) - an immutable place where what you write stays.
Anything that you write is a reflection of who you are at that moment in time, and people are, in spite of what things in the past tell us, capable of growth and change.
We morph and change as we gain experiences, and as our bodies cry out for something different, and our minds begrudgingly prod us to investigate different ways of doing things.
We all need a break. We all need a moment in the mist to reflect and grow. One of the most annoying things about my old, corpo job was the fact that no one ever stopped to reflect, analyse, and ask "Did this thing that we do really work?" before moving onto the next thing.
The more that anyone can form a long term strategy (though - good luck in crypto, it moves so fast) - the better off people will be.
To me, since I joined steem, all those years, ago, and jumped from one fork tyne to the other, the immutability of this place, and the records that it can hold of truth to a moment is what keeps me coming back.
So many people do not see it as that, and while many view the Internet as ephemeral, odds are - even if it is not visible, corporations are holding onto that data and will give it to anyone who comes along with a large enough wallet.
By publishing content on hive, it is instantly devalued - because it will be there forever, and publishers in the traditional world will never usually want to touch anything that has been ever published anywhere.
As a result, there's a certain modesty and humility that comes with offering up content to hive, and transferring the outputs of my own persona to a blockchian, that will - with luck, out live me. I am sorry that it outlived many members of your family.
I am certain you know how much these chain means to so many people, but I wanted to articulate my views, and to remind you of some of the core reasons the "Every-day" user (not that I am suggesting you've forgotten!) uses hive, and the value it can bring to community, and that, through the power of people writing about their experience, and reading about those of others - the world can be a better place.
Thanks for everything you do.
I'm so sorry to hear about the package (unless it was something that allowed you some freedom and set you up fairly to then start thinking more about life and producing content, in which case, congratulations!)
it is an odd time to be alive. More and more of us will find that redundancy is a state we are reduced to as part of the tradfi machine, while the whole world begins longing more and more strongly for real human experience. What does that look like without arbiters or oracles, without rules or reductions on the "right way" to be an individual or an identity or an influence?
Much of it comes back to stories, and their telling. They are a part of how we define value, whether tangible or soul bound. As an every-day user, you are exactly who and what contributes to this value, even as you're told that public, free to access content is inherently worth less. We know better.
There's a time and a place for everything. I'm very much not at all against privacy chains, anonymity tools, monetization models and functional centralized businesses. But the choice of where you go and how you use or release or trade or share or purchase or protect is the crux of where web3 is changing the world. I believe strongly in the idea of the multichain functional toolkit that supports being able to human better, and this is often what really grabs people and figures heavily in what defines and delineates Hive in the wider cryptospace.
So thank you for your kind words, and more than you know, the willingness to be interested and engaged while relearning how to post corporate people. I'm there myself now and it's a pretty big leap of faith. There are many opportunities, but to stick along with one that I've watched grow and change while also potentially being able to do more to help it along is an odd one. The human aspect of Hive means that I don't feel 100% ready to just make a decision on what that looks like without finding out what other people who have built it think is important.
What tasks do you wish were more actively created and compensated under the purview of Hive as a DAO for the betterment of someone like you, the more important every[day]man?
Oh, I'm glad I got out of public-listed corpo-world that was my last employer. They were doing a big joint venture, and it was either join, or take a package, so I took the package. My wife's income covers all our basic expenses, we want for nothing, and any job I do get in the future will just be to buy toys like computers, or to travel a bit before we are in a position to retire (as early as possible).
The thing about chains, and life, and what we choose to do is simple - by choosing to focus on one thing, we are actively choose to ignore, or neglect another opportunity. Time is our only finite resource. (Well, other than all the things that Eart gives us.)
In regards to the DAO - I would love to support short term projects and proposals that are written like traditional grants, each assesed on their own merit. eg, if I was applying for DAO funding for something, (perhaps working on a new body of photographic art work with the view to exhibit in a physical space) - being able to fund things like a) The Model's time, b) Wardrobe / Costume c) Setting up a web store that can ship prints worldwide (paid for in hive / hbd etc) d) A big old sequence of blog posts documenting the entire creative process
Sort of like an artist in residence, but it is entirely enabled to be decentralised, and eternally documented on hive. It is something that doesn't directly benefit hive in terms of software dev, networking, conferences or whatever, but when I spun up a witness node last week (Several years too late, probably):
That, and of course, distribution and decentralisation - by that, I mean witness nodes in people's houses (like mine) which make the network far, far more robust when compared to having nodes geographically concentrated in data centres running on leased hardware that people don't own.
The DHF may have a lot of waste as far as many people are concerned - but I think we need to be more targeted at onboarding. I know everyone forever and always says this, but I was looking at Brave ads the other week, and it seems cheap. Whether or not there's a conversion from ads to real users... that's another story.
How can Hive's user base grow to be an explosive, viral platform the likes of tik-tok, reddit, x, etc?
For me it always comes back to the content. No one ever talks about the technology behind those other platforms. They talk about the trends their users set. Those trends always come from content.
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