Information is Currency

I've read a few posts lately where the warm fuzzy feeling of Hive has worn off. That part of me has been dead for a while but I still love the place. At the end of the day this place is a million times better now than Steem ever was or is. (Thanks again Mr. Sun for the donation.)

Everyone likes to arm chair quarterback the situation. There's quite a few possibilities of why we're not seeing explosive growth. It could be onboarding. It could be the fact that 90% of the crypto bros segregate in two categories: Bitcoin maxis or perpetual chasers of shiny new scam/memecoin projects, 'cuz gainz. Or maybe it's because we can't ever seem to STFU about crypto. (Yet here I am again, rambling about crypto.) The one that keeps coming up though is, "the content just isn't that good."

We can't all have the crazy lifestyle of the monumental names on other social media sites. They go to the Maldives. I go to McDonald's. Potato, patahto. I like that we're kind of normal here. Obviously we're not too normal or we wouldn't be crypto-evangelizing the world, alienating all of our friends and family, but otherwise we're vanilla. If you say the content on Hive sucks, well that means we suck, because we're all in this thing together.

Just like the crypto naive ALWAYS ask, sometimes we too have to ask, "wHeRe DoEs ThE vAlUe CoMe FrOm?"

"It can be worth whatever you'd like. Value is subjective."

While that may be true, I'd bet that we can intersubjectively decide that most content here isn't riveting stuff. More importantly though, the value of Hive is dependent upon our posts. You have to look at it like Hive is a giant sponsor for advertisement. When we put words on the proverbial page, we are promoting the brand. All traffic that gets linked to this site is likely because of us. I don't know about you, but there's not a time in my mind where I Google'd something and Hive was the first search result.

Knowledge is power, but information is currency. If you've thought more than four seconds about AI you've realize that the guys who hold the data will be king 👑. Do you think all of the large technocrats open-sourced AI out of the goodness of their hearts? No. They did it because they hold the keys to a majority of the world's data. They know whenever that great algorithm comes out no one will have a better training set than them.

Information was so important to Venetian glassmakers that they were assassinated if they were suspected of exposing their trade secrets. This is stuff that we completely take for granted today. You can buy some decent looking glass at any store. Much like currency, more availability of information about a topic can dilute the valuation. In the same breath, I could say that scarcity doesn't necessarily mean value. Like any worthy data-set there has to be a decent sized foundation to train your AI on. I can't just pull out an obscure and unpopular topic and expect it to be valuable.

I've heard that Hive was the attention economy. Sometimes it feels like the "I had to make a post today" economy. If your words or posts are currency, what makes them valuable? I've always given the advice for those to "tell the story only you can tell." If you strike the balance of relatability with that, you're gold. Be personal and informative.

This informational currency is paid for by the attention of others. In some ways, the currency itself is a condensed amalgamation of previous attention. To better utilize the potential of this currency, maybe we have to ask ourselves: what are we going to spend all of this attention on?

In what ways do you think information is like currency?