I'm sure we can pretty much all agree on the fact that much as Hive would like to think that it's here for many purposes — and it's all about building web 3.0 and so on and so forth — for the vast majority of participants in our community "it's all about the rewards."
In truth, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that, particularly given that many people go out and about in the world trying to get people interested in Hive on the premise that you can "come to Hive and be rewarded for creating and sharing content."
So that's not really the point here.
The actual point is that there are many things you can actually do with your rewards. That is to say, there are many things you can do with your rewards other than just immediately cashing them out to fiat money and then using that to buy pizza.
How you approach these things probably has a lot of to do with your mindset to begin with. For example, while I am very aware of earning rewards, I have never viewed my participation on Hive as a source of income; I view it more a sort of bonus payment I wouldn't be getting, otherwise. Almost like "found money."
Let's not fool ourselves here: the vast majority of the community do not earn enough to even consider this a part time job, let alone a full time occupation. Yes, I know there are a few for whom this is their full time work but comparing yourself to that and to the amount of effort and experience they have put into getting to their current position is not really a realistic comparison.
In a sense it's a bit like complaining that your 1965 Fiat 600 doesn't go as fast as the new Ferrari you just saw in the window somewhere. The comparison simply doesn't make sense so stop it!
But let's get back to what you do with your rewards money, even if you're not taking those rewards out to buy a pizza... maybe you're taking them out to buy Bitcoin or something else... but what can you do with them right here?
My interest has long been just to slowly build my little HivePower balance, and it's especially something I'm focusing on while the token price is low. Whereas I don't look at Hive as "income," I'm also not in a position to take money from elsewhere and buy more Hive for my stack... simply because I don't have any money elsewhere.
As such what I do on Hive is a little freestanding experiment that I am hopeful will allow me to very slowly build a little bit of a "savings cushion" in case we do encounter some kind of true emergency. Because you never really know what life is going to throw at you, do you?
I'm also using my liquid rewards to slowly build an HBD savings balance. It doesn't amount to much, but eventually I'm hopeful that it'll amount to enough that is like a secret cash stash that I can get ahold of with three days' notice if something bad should happen like a car repair I was not prepared for.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying the fact that I'm getting a tiny amount of passive income from the very nice 15% rate of return.
Of course, I don't put all my liquid rewards into HBD savings... I also use a few cents here and there to experiment with some of the Hive-Engine level 2 communities and tokens.
Even though Hive-Engine tokens are notorious for going pretty much nowhere — and that applies even to the ones with very active management and ongoing building — I still like to support some of these ventures... at least the ones that make sense to me.
If they crash and burn, so be it... most of them likely will.
Again these are not things I can throw thousands of dollars at, but at the same time they're interesting enough that I can give a few cents and dollars to them every now and then, and I remind myself that I'm not risking money out of pocket, I am simply taking what I already referred to as a bonus and trying to do something more with it.
And who knows... maybe I'll get lucky with something!
Now you might argue that I'm not really building anything and a lot of people are talking about the fact that we need everybody in the Hive community to be builders, but in some ways it's a little bit like music isn't it?
With music you have people who are the talented musicians who write music and play it beautifully and then you also have the people who listen with great appreciation.
I am a supporter and a listener but I am not a builder. And I think we have to have supporters as well just... like it is not enough to simply have content creators, we also have to have content consumers.
And with that thought in mind, I'm going to get back to my daily routine!
Till the next one... Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!
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