"Santa looks quite a lot like Pappa. They have the same face"
It was a nice relaxed evening for Christmas this year, though only a few hours long, as Pappa Santa got a bit sleepy after a couple glasses of wine. We had a nice time though and while we spent the day pottering around in preparation, we spent the evening eating and after Santa visited, opening presents.
Christmas time is a good space to relax and take things a little easier, as well as not take life too seriously, so I don't mind porting some "fluff" content around this time and being a little lazy in general. Fluff content for me is generally photography posts, though they probably take me longer to put together than my normal content, as it takes time to take, transfer, sort and edit them a bit before they are ready.
I am not a big fan of the single photo posts, no matter how professional they are and I think those who do this will generally find they would get far more support and interaction if they added a paragraph or two about something relatable. While people might like an image, they generally don't interact much as most don't discuss images directly and if that is all there is, there is no hook for conversation. Adding in some perspective or some personal thoughts about something gives the audience multiple points to connect with, avenues for dialogue.
No one need write as much as I do on most posts, but everyone should remember that it is very difficult for anyone to build a relationship without words and if it is through photography or painting, it is the piece that makes the connection with the audience, not the artist. This means that a viewer can observe multiple works from multiple artists without having any care for the human behind the work at all. While many artists like it this way, on Hive it is good to understand that there is still a "social" side to the community.
Not only that, as I have explained before, in the world of highspeed scrolling through images such as on Instagram, the idea of "a picture tells a thousand words" doesn't hold up, as people do not stop for long enough to absorb what the image is saying. On top of this, many people are viewing on phones these days, so there isn't the same grandeur to images that there may be in other mediums, like hanging on the wall of a gallery.
I think that a lot of digital artists don't spend that much time thinking about how their potential audience not only experiences their work, but also what triggers them to engage with it. A gallery for example is a space that is engineered by design and culture to force the viewer to move slowly and quietly past each work, spending intentional time to place attention and extract information from pieces of art. Most of the digital space misses a lot of this as it is about speed of consumption, not the value of what the consumption returns to the consumer. An artist tries to raise questions and the digital culture often doesn't give the time to even hear the question, let alone contemplate potential meaning or a change in behavior - just double-tap and move on.
Speaking of double-tapping, it might be an interesting feature to have on interfaces where people would be able to trigger a like of artefacts (like images) in a post, without triggering a vote on it. It might bring in a wider range of interactions on the blockchain that blends the traditional social medias with Hive. This way, there are more ways for a creator to get feedback than just through comments and votes. For example, which is your favorite images out of these nine?
Not only this, that same interaction could trigger a second-layer event, for example a token issued on the like that is split between both the poster and the liker or, photo galleries created with the most liked images on the blockchain, with each feeding back to the original post. I think that rather than just having posts and comments as the main ways of interaction transactions, we could have all kinds of other events also. I think it would also be useful to have a few more layout options for creators, even if they are only suggested templates for now.
Because the reward and earnings is such a large part of the Hive platform and this is crypto, we forget that there are many ways to gamify an experience in order to increase enjoyment and stickiness. I personally like getting numbers and report feedback from time to time, but most of this is very unwieldy still. I think it would be handy for it to be far more automated where a range of data points could be given in a similar way to Twitter Insights or, a selection of points could be made to give readouts. Add in things like photo likes, and there are many data points that aren't attached directly to the earnings available, not only this, it also gives consumers more gateways of interaction, even if they do not have a vote worth anything yet.
Remember that like quality, value is subjective also. This means that while there are many who will argue about what content is useful or not or that content is valuable because of the time or skill involved to create it, at the end of the day, it is the consumer who decides and if creators aren't catering for them, they are unlikely to attract the attention that delivers direct value.
In some ways it is like telling a joke, if you have to explain it to the audience, it isn't funny. If the point is to make the audience laugh, the joke has to be delivered in a way that evokes laughter. If the intention is to get someone to read an article or absorb the contents of a photo, it has to be delivered in a way that engages the audience enough for them to be willing to spend the time. In my opinion, interacting with the audience in a way that attracts them to the work is part of the art form itself, a skill that artists will either have to learn, or be willing to pay someone to engineer for them. Either way - it is an investment.
Ah dammit. I said I was going to take it easy and post some fluff, but I don't think this counts - perhaps tomorrow. Those who read my content often will already expect that what I write has a range of messages in there that are included to evoke thought and hopefully, get people thinking about where they are, what they are doing and what they need to do in order to get to where they might want themselves to be. It is all about the value of taking responsibility, taking ownership and generating value of some kind, whether it be financial or personal reward.
It doesn't matter a person knows what is right to do, it doesn't matter how much a person consumes on a topic - to apply it to the real world takes resources of some kind and the mindset that is conducive to using them with intention. Too many content creators create the content with the intention of reward, paying no attention to the delivery. The reward isn't just on the effort involved, the effort also has to be applied with purpose and direction in order to cater to the audience. The expectation that reward should come to a brilliant piece of work makes the assumption that people even saw it, let alone took the time to consume it.
Did you make it this far? How much further would you like to go?
Fluffy.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]