The return of healthy business

I took this shot last Autumn of a bloodmoon event. I didn't have a tripod, the lens I had planned to use was acting up and I have no idea what settings are best yet, I did get a shot of the bloodmoon. Is it the best shot possible?

Definitely not - but it is my shot.

There are two things that I want to put out there at the start of the post because my mind tends to wander and I forget what the point was and add additional points I didn't intend. Firstly, what we create ourselves has more value to us than what others create, no matter the quality. Secondly, to create all one has to do is show up and give it a go.

The value of personal

On the first point, even though we might be able to consume from much more qualified sources, people are increasingly connecting with the more real, less polished formats that give a sense of life lived, rather than high end production to fool the senses.

Any parent knows that a drawing made by their own child is not the greatest drawing in the world yet, they attach to it deeper than if someone with more talent drew it for them. The value isn't saleable though, no one is going to pay for the picture my daughter drew of her and her mother holding hands for Mother's Day.

The world is changing and the distributed social networks that connect people and provide an economy means that talent of all kinds has more of a chance of being recognized. Someone asked the other day why people would consume low-grade content, it is because it is accessible and, people enjoy variety. There is no one who loves reading who only reads one author, they can still have their favorites of course.

Showing up to show

What this means is that people from all kinds of backgrounds and skillsets are able to take part in the skills economy even if they wouldn't be directly hired for the job traditionally. The same person added the question of why wouldn't people only support the best and this is again because people like to connect with people and, support those they connect with.

Last week I was at a 40th birthday party and while they had a paid band to close out the night, various friends put together musical performances early on, including the birthday boy. Only some knew he played the guitar, few knew he sang and almost no one knew he also played the drums. The feeling created in the crowd was great.

Would the audience pay for it? Maybe not directly but once the value is tied into the consumption mechanisms, they just need to keep doing what they do and people's talents get rewarded by doing, what they do. While most people won't get rewarded much, there will be a much wider distribution of value across a much more diverse network as there will be consumers from all over who consume more, word of mouth content rather than advertised directly.

Look at it on Steem

I can only speak for me personally , but I spend so little time on the other media platforms these days I would consider myself a non-user. The reason is that while I might be able to get higher quality content itself, what I don't have is any access to the people doing the sharing of the content as generally what people I know add on those platforms isn't about their talents, it is about what they do and consume.

The entire model of the platforms is a loop of data collection and advertising monetization which drives users to be included in the propagation of advertising by incentivizing the sharing of purchases. Look at my new car, or my new phone, or my new purse. This is all part of the engineered advertisement structure.

While the people of Steem might have a much lower quality output than the publishing and advertising houses who deliver polished quality, it is real people putting their hearts out there in the form of content. At least for me, I support the people over the content they produce. In time, the quality will increase as professionals start to arrive but, the beauty of the system is that people can still reward the people they enjoy, even if they are not tied to a centralized monetization model.

The growing spread

While people are pretty down on Steem because they think quality or lack of quality content is going to be the driver or killer of Steem mooning, that is not the case at all. What is going to take Steem to the masses is that we are real people, not just people who got into crypto to make profits, not faceless investors who buy and sell at the drop of a hat, not publishing houses who have a top-heavy middleman model or a monetization algorithm that leverages the masses for profit - real people.

Real people who are sharing their lives and their skills at whatever level they can in not only the hope to make a little money, but also become relevant in a wold that has forgotten that consumers are real people too. Rather than seeing the masses as something to leverage and extract increasing amounts of value by targeting them emotionally, Steem rewards users for their consumption and does it in a way that doesn't impose content or behavior and can be achieved across multiple medias and use cases.

This is why the advice of "be yourself" works on Steem but doesn't work in the centralized society because to be monetized in the centralized world, you have to fit the model they are supplying, not the one the market is demanding. At the moment, most consumers don't really understand that they don't have total freedom of choice in what they consume and they also don't know that they can take part in the spread of economic availability and, also contribute. They will soon learn though.

Energy return system

Someone said that if Facebook spread all their value to their users, there wouldn't be much to go around, and I agree, there wouldn't. However, what would happen if the entire economy that surrounds Facebook spread to its users - the advertisers, the data collectors, the product sellers, the gaming platforms, marketing services? The economy of Facebook isn't just what Facebook makes, it is an economy.

The models of all the various businesses and services including Facebook's are not made for that kind of economic spread of value to their users which means, they are largely unable to implement a healthy economy where the users are the largest part of the profit sharing model.

Health is an important factor to find in a business because if the model is healthy, the growth, profit and sustainability will be automatic, a symptom of good health. The blockchain and crypto industry is trying to find this process of health optimization which must include a feedback loop of value to the consuming mass, otherwise the process eats itself, much like the solely capitalistic model does currently as it incentivizes growth until there is no food left, much like the thought experiment with the AI tasked with optimizing the creation of paper clips.

Moving along

The health of this emerging industry, improves the more people who take part and, the more people who take part benefit as the health of the industry improves. It becomes a sensitive system that is able to react and evolve to the changing people no matter how or where the change and, it is able to be utilized at the local and global levels simultaneously without the conflict of borders and national egos.

Yes, this is a long way off, but all it takes is for more and more people to take part, more to see the benefits, move their interaction on to the chains, their businesses online, support what they find, create what they can. People just need to take part and eventually, most of the normal internet consumption and process move over also.

This process of increased participation will also increase the need for development and innovation and will provide the incentive for all businesses of all kinds to take part and that means, we as consumers get to more accurately drive supply and, get our demands met.

Taking part

The world of content is changing alongside the consumption of content and eventually, it will decouple from centralized structure and become increasingly healthy for users and the viability of businesses. How much have you made out of watching YouTube videos, listening to Spotify, using Netflix? They extract value out of you yet return nothing but content.

While I might not be the best writer in the world, while there may be much more value for you to read an article on Medium instead - you are reading from a real person, one with a family, one that hasn't a team of editors and one who hasn't bowed down to a centralized monetization model. But on top of that, one who is going to provide you a return for your participation.

The system is imperfect, but the goal isn't perfection, it is sustainability of humanity.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]