Hive Malcontents And Their Misconceptions

in OCD4 years ago

Hive (and earlier Steem) is a complicated platform not even every long-time Hive user fully understands. Its nature escapes many of its critics. One of the most common misconceptions is that Hive is a Ponzi scheme, a type scam where the profits of earlier investors are paid for by later investors whose profits in turn are paid for by even later investors, the idea being that large stakeholders get paid by small stakeholders or later joiners. This is a complete misunderstanding.

The HIVE cryptocurrency is given value to entirely by liquid coins being traded mainly against BTC on cryptocurrency exchanges. Hive Power, which is staked HIVE is non-transferable and cannot be traded. It controls the allocation of the token inflation.

To say that small stakeholders somehow pay for the share of the inflation pocketed by large stakeholders is completely false. Staked HIVE (also known as Hive Power) is not liquid. It cannot be transferred between accounts.

When the traders of liquid HIVE pay more for liquid HIVE on exchanges, that is usually the result of the price of Bitcoin, the main trading pair of HIVE going up in price.

Another criticism I've heard is that small stakeholders work hard for a pittance and that large stakeholders collect the benefits of that. This ignores the fact that the curation rewards large stakeholders get for voting on posts have nothing to do with the stake held by the user who made the posts. Anyone who works hard to make popular quality posts gets to keep their author rewards 100% to themselves.

Of course, the larger your stake, the more you will benefit from the price of the token going up. This is because the tokens are fungible. You benefit in linear proportion to the size of your stake. If you would like to benefit more, you can always buy more tokens and power up or create better content.

Finally, there is not a single platform on the entire Internet that pays amateur content creators better relative to the quality of output and the level of effort spent than Hive. To criticize this platform for not paying even more is the epitome of greed and ingratitude.

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It's a marketing problem. People like myself sound like a broken record, but trying to attract people to Hive with the "you can get paid to blog" spiel is asinine. Hive is an investment that lets you be as involved as you want to be in the success of that investment. The difference between the owners of Splinterlands (steemmonsters) vs someone who finds no value in Hive is 100% a product of investment, involvement and competence. Those who find no value in Hive are probably contributing no value. Garbage in, garbage out.

People like myself sound like a broken record, but trying to attract people to Hive with the "you can get paid to blog" spiel is asinine.

I tend to agree with you because it doesn't seem to work very well. Still, getting something for what is basically a hobby is much better than nothing. The thing is that you don't have to invest financially at all to make gains. That is very important and what separates Hive from potentially being a multi-level marketing scheme. The piper is being paid by the speculators most of whom are not users at all.

It seems that the 80-90 cents that the median post gets here is too little to compensate for the relative lack of interesting content and engagement. But once the content and engagement reach a certain level together with better discovery, we might attract more people who show up for the content and engagement alone.

Those who find no value in Hive are probably contributing no value. Garbage in, garbage out.

Well put!

Finally, there is not a single platform on the entire Internet that pays amateur content creators better relative to the quality of output and the level of effort spent than Hive. To criticize this platform for not paying even more is the epitome of greed and ingratitude.

Yes I totally agree. I used to onboard quite a few people from YouTube early on back on Steemit. I was beyond shocked when people were getting some Dtube post reward between 50 and 100 steem, yet they still quit!!! TBH I still have no answer for it.

Yes I totally agree. I used to onboard quite a few people from YouTube early on back on Steemit. I was beyond shocked when people were getting some Dtube post reward between 50 and 100 steem, yet they still quit!!! TBH I still have no answer for it.

That is really strange. 50 to 100 STEEM is worth about $11 and $22 even now with the price at 22.5 cents. That's very good for an amateur YouTube video that these people presumably made for fun.

Nice summary!

Love it!
And yes I've gotten over a g
$1000 for my constant work here.

Free crypto? Ok. Sure. Now I have Bitcoin and that's growing. Also have here. Well life is nice. Honestly.