It's an interesting dilemma for sure.
Paying for content is a model that's been under stress for a while now. Streaming, pirating, and the web2 approach of we'll-sneakily-accept-your-data-as-payment-and-you'll-think-it's-free.
Hive's upvote inflation rewards are quite interesting, but come with the web3 learning curve, and may or may not be the best indicator of value-for-content. Because of DPoS, even if 1,000 people love my content, if their Hive stake is teeny then it's not going to support me in the way a traditional subscription model would. You'd have to hope some larger accounts coordinated to take notice in a consistent manner—not that they don't for some folks, but it's not as consistent or reliable as some of the established mechanisms we've mentioned. Therefore, lower incentive for new creators to "give this way a shot."
I wonder if there's a middle ground between upvotes for "payment" and a DHF proposal.
DHF is a tough road for anyone without some solid Hive cred/connections to manage, from what I can tell. What's the threshold, like 35–40M votes? And unless you've proven that your bringing value to the chain I don't think a full DHF proposal is suited for content creators.
So the middle ground could be something like:
- a group of trusted Hive veterans initiates a DHF proposal for "attracting creative talent." Let's call it 100K HBD over 1 year for illustrative purposes
- the mandate of the group is to find or attract content creators from here in Hive or abroad. Proposal should outline % thereof
- the group "signs" creators for certain periods of time, at agreed disbursement amounts. A popular (or promising new) photographer maybe gets 1,000 HBD/month for a few months
- there are caveats: the creator has to produce a certain range of high quality posts. The creator has to engage with their audience. The creator must strive to share the Hive content outside of Hive. The content must be exclusive to Hive. etc etc.
It's an incubation program, I suppose. Not unlike what OCD does for communities, but focused more on individuals with the creative firepower to potentially put more eyeballs on Hive itself (thereby justifying the DHF spend).
Centralized-decentralized hybrid approach too.