Everyone on Hive knows that posts get paid out after seven days from the time posted. Hypothetically, what if Hive didn't give out monetary rewards anymore. Would I still be writing here or not? Honestly, I would keep writing here on Hive but I'm fairly confident I wouldn't be as active as now. Of course, this would also be dependent on whether Hive would still be running.
Aside from our content being immutable by being on the blockchain, I think one of the main selling points about Hive is being able to get paid for our time and effort in writing good content. If the monetary reward went away, then I feel a lot of users that treated Hive as a job may quit being on Hive. There's a lot of people from countries like Nigeria, Philippines etc that can make a living from Hive due to being able to make crypto which is mostly tied to the US dollar. Only those that remain would be the loyal ones but would it be enough to keep Hive going?
Let's look beyond the writing on Hive. What would happen to those that put money in the ecosystem to vote and reward authors? Would they just get a return on their money only? Then what difference would this be than staking it on some other platform, providing liquidity to LPS, etc. What would stop them from taking their money somewhere else for better returns or more meaningful returns. Based on this, I think there would be a chance for the ecosystem to come tumbling down. If there's a lack of funds in the ecosystem, then how can Hive continue to pay out developers like Ecency and Peakd to keep building. If developers stopped developing because they weren't funded anymore, would we still have an interface to write on because someone has to pay for the servers, domain etc.
If we look at crypto in general, people are hopping from project to project. Once there's no money to be made from a certain project, most people will leave to the next one. There will be some faithful ones that fell in love with a project that remain. This is sad but it's the truth. If you feel I'm wrong, do argue this in the comments below.
Now, I want to mention my final point. I feel once people have something and it gets taken away, there will be a big backlash. In general, people don't like changes when they are losing their "benefit". I believe this is something psychological and totally normal. For example, imagine labor day was abolished and everyone had to work on that day every year onwards. What would working adults feel about that?
Personally, I enjoy writing so I think I would still write on Hive now and then even with no monetary rewards. Even before Hive, I did have my own personal blog and a blog for translating Chinese lyrics to English. With no monetary rewards, I would continue to use Hive as a social media to share about my life, food, games etc with random strangers and online friends. I believe the true value in Hive is the networking and connections we make from engaging with others. For example, I met some friends here that I talk on Discord. We play some games together and share about life or crypto projects. This is something you can't really put a value on; it's just priceless.
Just for some final thoughts. I saw quite a number of people write about this topic for the weekend engagement topics which made me interested in writing it as well. From what I saw, I think they didn't go as deep as me. So what do you think are the possible repercussions of removing the rewards from writing on Hive? Would Hive still exist in your opinion and would you still be writing here?