ICOs are like a bad fever dream at this point. (Remember when we used to pay millions of dollars for any one that built a website and provided a half-assed white paper?) DeFi is still floating around, but it has lost its charm. Those hot NFTs from a year or so ago are starting to just look like any other ape.jpeg.
I've been in the crypto game quite sometime, and while I still remain thoroughly excited about the implications of it decentralizing the world (and broke), I'm waiting for the next big social "greater good" impact. There seems to be so much focused on monetary gain. I'll admit that I love the dopamine hit that I get when I see "nUmBeR gO uP" 10,000x, but does everything have to be linked to money?
The economic incentive is an excellent motivator for most: Be good, participate, and collect those checks 💸. What's not to love about that? But much like the (seemingly ubiquitous) infinite death scroll popularized by TikTok, it seems that crypto has keyed in on what drives us. In crypto's case, this is money. It's hard to argue against the decoupling of economic incentive from blockchain, when everything we do costs a gas fee. (I'm looking at you Ethereum 👀.)
Hive is one of the few examples of where we can put our "sweat equity" to work. We have the luxury of using (at least at this point) perceivably infinite resource credits. As some would say, we are leveraging the attention of a collective body of work to increase attention on the platform. Interestingly enough though, I think Hive is also one of the most charitable of all blockchains. Why is this? Is it because we're in this "together?"
One way that I've looked at this blockchain in recent years doesn't have anything to do with the perpetual debate over quality or value. I like to think of the Hive algorithm as: A user logs in daily to prove participation and "mine" the resource pool. Through a series of their own choices they get to decide who they want to share their mined tokens with for the day. Does this subconscious sharing of resources play into the charitable nature of Hive?
I read a paper recently (even though it was not so recent) that anthropomorphizing (or humanizing) social causes can yield better results than the typically utilized tools to incentivize participation in these sorts of social campaigns. The experimenters slightly modified calls to action, and used "faces" to garner a response that we would typically greet humans with. For example, a campaign to encourage people to put unused food in a compost bin had a face drawn on it for the anthropomorphic condition, while the non-anthropomorphic condition had no face. The results showed that anthropomorphism of these non-human entities had a better participation rate. When the study was tried in an open field test, not only was the participation rate increased, but experimenters also collected more money for a cause to help the environment per participant.
It wasn't necessarily because it made people feel warm and fuzzy inside though, but rather it was a measure to circumvent anticipatory guilt. As Hume said, we have a natural tendency to view the world through a human lens. It's easy to assume things have humanistic qualities when that's all we really know. Just the perception of thinking our actions (or lack thereof) would harm this anthropomorphized cause, we get hit in the feels and it makes us empty our pockets.
It reminds me of the video below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1572yhv/donate_a_dollar_to_save_a_dog/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Could this be why we are more giving on this platform? Minus the economic cost of most blockchains, we don't have the risk vs. reward inequality seen elsewhere. It doesn't really matter who we vote for, the "costs" are equivalent. Someone is getting half of our "mined" tokens per our vote. I'll be the first to admit that I've voted for friends and others on this chain because I have felt guilty for not supporting them. Is this where some of the "circle jerk" perception comes from?
Regardless of how you may feel, Hive is the most human of the blockchains. This allows us the potential to be leaders within the greater crypto ecosystem to do the most for the "greater good." This very well could be the perfect environment to make a monumental societal impact. While there is some luck and social factors involved in the success of our posts, there is an underlying egalitarianism that suggests we just might earn what we deserve, or if we're lucky maybe we'll have friends that feel guilty for not giving us an upvote.