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I think we're a bit stuck in some ways. The rest of the Internet is pushing for short form content. People do engage massively with the topics we share here on Hive elsewhere. For example, the photography I have posted here that gets little engagement actually surprisingly performs well on Tumblr of all things! And on things like Twitter or Instagram/Threads, there is an algo which will slowly shape a feed for you and promote similar topics to you. Which means the same for your posts, eventually someone will see it and engage with it. And those are posts that have less than 100 words to them, sometimes even no words at all!
Social media has changed massively in the past five years in particular, and Hive in some ways was/is ahead of the game, but in other ways we're actually now behind. Some people can now make a living on web2.0 from something that costs next to nothing. On Hive, to make $1000 you may have to post daily for an entire year. Whereas someone in their bedroom making art tutorials can make that in a month. There's luck involved (even here), of course. But maybe my point is coming across?
But there's also the video side of things. Most of this short form content comes in the form of imagery now. Either literal images or videos. We don't really have the tools for this, and people end up just linking YouTube videos here. Naturally, because YouTube is easy to use and also offers growth on there too. But on here, that 7 (one) day window will screw you over. No more reach after that. Which also brings in the quality problem: would you spend an entire week preparing a high quality video with good lighting, good videography and lots of research and editing just to post it here and maybe make $20, or would you post it to YouTube and link here knowing that the YouTube channel, while making nothing at first, could grow in time? Then there's the question that's big now of what can a person do with the rewards? All that effort but you'll get downvoted for cashing it out? Not gonna work.
And through a lot of these teething problems, we end up quite limited in what we can create here, without burning out or getting discouraged. We are human after all ;^)
I think I remember peakd talking about an ad revenue concept a while back, which I think would actually be really beneficial to certain people in that sense. If we could work hard on creating engaging content that does appeal to the masses, while properly getting rewarded for it, we'd see a creator economy on here boom. People reinvesting into their gear and skills to improve. More engagement as the topics change and people can get rewarded even for niche posts since they'd get discovered and picked up on web2.0, bringing in that ad revenue.
Perhaps we should start sharing content that would pull readers into hive possibly?
What do you have in mind for this anyway? I rambled on quite a bit haha, but yeah maybe there's something I could do as well
I share your frustrations with this.
But what we do not do on hive is write to be read (or create art in any form to be seen) but to earn.
We post, we get paid. Nice. Repeat tomorrow.
This isn't the way it should be -- art should be felt, it should be burned from the soul in a way that you want others to see it.
You care not for the money, only to be seen.
The money will come naturally as a biproduct then.
All of us here at hive care not for the art, but for the rewards (me included)
We could be great -- but we need a spark, a seed planted in the wild, something to take root.
What I'm doing is reversing the roles. I'm elevating our artists -- I'm selecting the best, and I'm letting hive curate us.
Instead of elevating curators and letting artists fend for themselves.