This is not me circlejerking or stroking the ego of everyone here, it's a fact. And I'm not talking about just HIVE either, it's all other blockchains based around the same concept.
Whilst HIVE can be used for many things, like in games, NFTs, etc, it's the blog part of it that really interests me and that makes me have a very very positive outlook for the future of not only HIVE but web3.0 and a decentralized internet in general.
A lot of people come here and see just a neat way to make money and don't really understand the technology and philosophy behind it, that's not a bad thing necessarily, more users still make the platform grow and these users will inevitably become more invested, but it's much more than that.
When I first layed my eyes upon on how this works, when my friend 
This is a kick in the teeth to the tech giants that hoard all data and sell it to others, no one owns these databases, the platforms we use are interchangeable. Don't like PeakD? Use Ecency or Hive.Blog or whatever. I think they're all great and everyone has their own reason to use each, something you don't get with proprietary private social platforms like Facebook. Your experience sucks? You can try to make a frontend but the underlying problems are still going to be mostly there... And you're still getting spied on hard.
HIVE changes that, no one here can sell info about your browsing habits or what you like to others. Of course, a lot of what you do here is public, it's all kept in the blockchain, but it's permissionless, everyone can take a look at it, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. You're not losing privacy like this because if I wanted to I could still see what others like on Facebook or whatever, the difference is that here that information isn't going to be sold to the highest shady bidder.
And about the economics themselves: I think this is the future of work. The way HIVE works incentivizes people to do better and better whilst at the same time letting everyone have access to content. It's basically an open-source model but with easy monetization. The system itself gets you paid, gets you feedback and gets other people using your product without them actually having to spend a dime.
It's revolutionary.
The more this is scaled up, the less we'll have to rely on being paid by employers who don't care about us, the easier it'll be to team up and make content together without a company making demands, the more we'll break away from the chains of classical capitalism and its love of corporations.
I never thought the solution to achieving a fair manner of paying creators and workers would be through the internet, or crypto. Some years ago, I was a skeptic, this all seemed so weird.
But now I believe in it, I believe in it more than I believe in fiat currencies and in the old ways of worker-employer relations.
Here the community owns the means of production. The community supports itself and filters out the bad for the good whilst making the bad become better. Here people are truly free to experiment and try what they like while still doing something that is proven and profitable, without any of the chains of having to meet expectations for people who don't care about you and only see you as a cog in a money printing machine, an investment. Here you're actually human.
We always knew technology would be the future, and that was both exciting and frightening to me. The prospect of big companies owning more and more of our lives, the thought of something going wrong in a server somewhere and everything falling into complete chaos (Just look at what happened when the Facebook servers went down late last year);
But now I'm actually hopeful, I'm rooting for the success of crypto, for the widespread adoption of web3.0 technology and since I like this place so much, for the continued growth of HIVE.
I never ever thought I'd be one in love with crypto, that I'd be actively using crypto for tons and tons of things, but really, you guys made me change my mind. I can now see what's so beautiful in all of this.
Photo by Arif DALKIRAN
Like the cogs in a clock, the cogs of this blockchain and many others still need to turn. And just like with a clock, it's time (and energy) that'll do that.
I have great expectations for this in the future, and hopefully we'll all, and I do mean all, come out of this technological and economic revolution happier and freer.
A new year doesn't mean much, but let's pretend it like it does and make each and every year better and better.