Hive Is A Social Media Platform Unlike Anything Else (Except For Steem and All The Steem Clones, Of Course)

The nature of the game

The rewards add a dynamic that changes everything. There is a game on about building influence on the platform. That is really what this is about. All the serious people tend to take the game very seriously. Taking this platform for a social media platform where it is appropriate to post whatever you want would not be playing the game correctly.

Hive is not a platform where you can do the same as on regular social media platforms but only get rewarded for it. This is not even an online publishing platform for artists and other content creators to create an income stream to support themselves on.

Closing the economic loop

There is a critical element missing from Hive to close the economic loop: an audience to give value to the token by paying attention to the content, which would allow for the monetization of that content through advertising. When it comes to content, there are basically only creators here and few consumers. Few other people are paying any attention to the content.

This is why you see people announcing that they will not be supporting content creators who do not power up their earnings. That behavior is partly motivated by the fear of the token losing value if too many sell. It's a problem when others sell before it is convenient for oneself to sell.

But yes, it's better for the stake distribution if all earners powered up. The more of their earnings they powered up, the faster the distribution would decentralize to secure the chain better. That's a valid reason to prefer to support the builders.

Attract the masses or focus on building the foundation first?

The critical question is whether we should aim for growth to attract a sufficient mass of content creators and consumers to close the economic loop as soon as possible or to continue to exclusively support the builders.

As we have seen stake distribution is enormously important. On the other hand, this platform cannot remain in the influence building game forever because it gets this platform sidetracked from the original purpose of this platform which is the monetization of content and attention through tokenization. The tokens are not the end all and be all.