Well, lots to unpack here, and I appreciate you taking the time to write out your thoughts like this. Overall I love the passion for (and focus on) transparent, win-win projects, backed by the community and leveraging Hive's strengths that I'm reading here.
To me every project is basically a 'business', whether people openly admit it or not. (I understand some people get upset at such a label, but it's the most appropriate I can think of.) Even a charity is just a business that doesn't operate at a profit. And because projects are run by people, each project is either invested with enough heart, passion, belief, resources, and backing by humanity to thrive, or a project is unable to sustain such investment and dies. I wrote about this more in my 'Business Is Simple' guide, so I won't get into it here, suffice to say that the most thriving businesses are the ones that encourage people to do as you've outlined:
improve on it and feel invested, but they'll also get the most out of the project if you're doing things with the long term profit in mind instead of short term.
And I'd love to see more of this around, whatever form it takes. Thanks for the great read and food for thought man, and huge props to all the projects you've already launched. Psyched for whatever you have planned, and wishing you a great day. 🙏
I don't like the word business cause it entails quite a few things I think we can live without in this technology. One of them and I'm a prime example of not following it is people thinking I'm supposed to act all professional and nice to people who turn out to be assholes or have ulterior motives when approaching me about something. I'm someone who prefers actions over words and behavior. We have the power here to do real things, with transparency on our side even charities could operate on a whole charitable way compared to the centralized ones which 99% are most likely scams and owners pocket some money here and there along the way. If you want you can call it business but I'd much prefer doing business with people who treat certain things as hobbies and are okay with it, there's many examples of great projects being created where people just had an idea, did the work together with other likeminded people and it became some great things without needing to treat it as a business or forcing people to show up and complete their part of the tasks. That's also something that with opensource can be done where some drop out and others come and take their place to continue working on where they left off.
Another aspect of for instance POSH is that if something were to happen to me the project wouldn't die off but others could continue it as it brings value to Hive.
I totally agree. And as those projects thrive due to humans investing their heart, effort, and contributions into them, personally...I still think of them as a business. POSH would continue as long as some people kept investing their energy/efforts into it, or it would die if no single human wanted to invest in it.
To me, 'business' is a huge blessing for the world, and has been since cavemen discovered bartering. But I get why people don't like the word and associate many negative things with it.
Ultimately, I don't get too picky about language. Regardless of what you or anyone calls it (biz/project/hobby/endeavor/collaboration), successful 'projects' are the backbone of the economy, have been since the dawn of civilization, and I celebrate and encourage yours. :) 🙏