Now I know the original quote is heavily misused, Gen Z or whatever using it as a "yolo" excuse or to defend them being assholes, and probably the original quote was also not much better, just because it was uttered by a famous person.
I wanted to talk a little about some things that affect me personally and after reading through the recent proposal by .
It's mostly going to be about myself and my project, however, so if you're not interested in that and thought this was going to be mostly about the proposal, this is your warning.
The way I launched Holozing is something I think is a big strength for it and its future. In many ways it is similar to Hive, although for now I'm still being quite a dictator towards where the project is heading compared to Hive. By that I mean that it was launched fairly, one could even say fairer than Hive itself considering the History of Steemit's ninjamine which now resides in the DHF fund. It's been many years however so I do still consider Hive to be one of the fairest blockchains out there with how it rewards more than 65% of its inflation to content creators and the rest going to individual block producers, hive power holder inflation and 10% back to the DHF.
Similar to the DHF and its proposals, it is meant to reward contributions to the game. We've kept it quite simple where most devs who are on par in terms of experience are paid on an hourly wage. Let's for simplicities sake say everyone gets paid $50/hour for work done towards the project. This may seem like a lot, and surely sounds like a hell of a lot now, but in reality it's not really as it aims to only pay that towards actual work done and not sitting around talking about the project or writing posts like I'm doing now. I also consider my own contributions to it similar to how other contributors have done towards the project, meaning, I also count my hours I've put into working towards the project, even though it's mostly been planning, organizing, and various similar work. So far, I've only paid myself about 6000 Hive and I don't think it's a good idea to mention how many unpaid hours I have cause it'd be a bit depressing.
I don't plan on paying myself for this work now. One could think it'd be a good time to do so so I could buy back some Hive in the events that we'd make another proposal, especially since I've spent a ton of Hive helping fund the project myself that I consider to become kind of like a DAO at one point where it rewards similar contributions in the future. But the important thing right now is that the crucial people are rewarded to push the project forward since funding is super tight and we keep getting in the red over and over. Hive delegations are barely covering a few hours worth of work per week at these price points and I'm often forced to add extra funding even though I'm also running low on reserves.
It hurts now, but it may be good later.
I was talking to Claude earlier about the comparison between CEO's and their workers, it is currently at a staggering 420x average pay. Meaning on average the CEO earns 420x more than the average worker's salary in the same company. Naturally CEO's payment is not purely a salary but covered in stock options (they can just print stocks out of thin air is my guess - or it comes from heavy premines) and bonuses based on how well they did for the shareholders that year along with buybacks, etc. But like, think about that for a minute. One CEO is worth 420 developers according to the norm of the world right now. (Although I'm guessing this mostly applies to american corporations as they also like evading taxes so they can hand bigger bonuses to CEO's)
If we had 420 workers working actively on Holozing, we'd have 15 different games and 10 other large ones being built right now.
Anyway, to get back to the point about the proposal system and how I'm treating Zing right now.
It doesn't make much sense for us to halt development completely to wait out better Hive prices, because the rest of the world is moving forward. They have funding, they have VC money, premines, etc to splurge on whatever they want. But guess what they also have, a lack of coming up with something that's going to take over the web2 world bacause right now there's still very few that've created an app or a project to become big enough to attract noncrypto people. Maybe cause they're quite similar to web2 and thus competing against them really since they're not too keen on properly rewarding their community the way Hive does.
I can already tell I'm going to sidetrack so hard in this post as it seems hard to keep to one point. But maybe you're able to discipher it anyway.
Funding things right now hurts. Stakeholders who've been here for years staked up seeing their evaluation drop to very low amounts I'm sure are hurting and it hurts seeing some projects get funded and seeing how some of them are using those funds to just power up when you're unable to. But they are after all getting a "salary" in a way, because if they weren't, they wouldn't be here building things that may elevate the platform further. So yes, it hurts, but that's just the way things are. Doing nothing is not an improvement, doing nothing risks losing those developers/ideas to other blockchains.
I'd love it if I could get all my hours paid now at these hive prices if I were to make a new proposal, but I'm still holding on and waiting for better times, both for Hive and the game we've working on. Once things turn around, I believe the way we have things set up is going to be quite a lot more efficient. As long as we've learned from things, i.e. some spending we've done over the years that most likely was not worth the return and we're barely even using the return to market what we've done which i find super dumb (valueplan stuff is mostly forgotten already and no one's even sharing it anywhere).
Maybe things will get worse before they get better. Maybe I will eventually have to put out a proposal where I ask for some compensation for the work I've done and postponed for so long if my reserves are dried up and I can't find another solution other than spending the last of my hive power. I can't see the future but I hope it won't come to that, but for some people I'm guessing it has come to that. If they've been working for years and years and hoping that eventually things will generate them some revenue, I understand if they have to pull the trigger now. I'm not saying random work that no one's asked for, but important work that we can tell by simply looking at some things that it's bringing value to our network, for instance the Hive activity on Twitter alone and the multiple spaces and collaborations and soft partnerships that've come from it throught that mainly ran by Crimsonclad. That's real value there that Hive is better for having than not having. Similar maybe once our game is launched and we manage to bring in people or bring them back, that's going to be value for Hive that'll be worth the Hive we've had to sell to create the project and manhours put into it. For now the game however is still a "what if".
My point is, are we really going to become this weird about DHF funding where we risk losing some important people from our network just because the markets have pushed us into a corner? Can we not take another -10 or -20% dip if it means some projects/people on here continue being here for the sake of the network and future potential and value they may bring to it?
People are being extremely cautious now and while that's fine, you have to try and think about things in a longer scope. Very few were this cautious when we had money and funding, myself included. That doesn't however mean that we should overcorrect now and stifle some things completely just because it hurts seeing where things are now price-wise and how much Hive they may create towards inflation with their funding.
Anyway, to get back to a more positive vibe about a comparison I did earlier. Imagine if all contributions towards Holozing were paid the same, with maybe an increase all over the board in terms of hourly wages if we start doing better, but not the way companies and corporations work now, where some people are massively overrewarded just because they're in leading positions. That's something I'm looking forward to, along with many other metrics that are going to make the franchise much stronger than current existing ones that mostly just look at extracting value from their followers.