If you came to Hive or Blurt because you wanted to earn tokens for writing articles, making videos, taking photographs, or creating other content, I think there is something you need to strongly consider. You might be looking in the wrong place for the money.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who has spent 10 years using these chains and continues to see value in them, but that's exactly why I'm saying it. The problem isn't the blockchain. The problem is thinking the reward pool is the entire economic opportunity available to you.

If you publish an article and receive $5 worth of tokens through upvotes, you've earned $5. That's fine, but what if that same article demonstrates a skill that someone outside the blockchain would pay you $100, $150, $300, or more to use?

Now that $5 wasn't the value of your work. It was simply the amount somebody decided to pay you through one particular mechanism. Those are two very different things.

THE UPVOTE IS NOT THE MARKET

This is where I have seen a lot of people get trapped on these chains. They start thinking about their content in terms of votes. How many votes did I get? Who voted for me? Why didn't the whales vote? How do I get noticed? How do I build enough reputation to eventually receive stronger votes? And then the answer is usually some variation of:

Keep posting. Keep engaging. Keep building your reputation. Eventually the rewards will come.

Maybe they will, but usually for a very few people. Very few. Eventually, after much time passes, they lose motivation because they didn't get noticed enough, or didn't receive enough to make it worth their investment of time and energy. In reality, most just didn't see the hidden potential they have actively demonstrated and left as a result. But that's not a financial strategy I'd recommend building your life around, because you don't control the votes. You don't control who has the voting power, what they decide is worth rewarding, or whether their priorities change tomorrow. You certainly don't control whether the reward system eventually produces enough income for you to live on.

You are spending your time trying to obtain a position that was never yours to begin with. That doesn't mean your effort is worthless. It means you need to ask yourself what that effort is actually producing.

WHAT ARE YOU ACTUALLY BUILDING?

Suppose you've been writing for three years and have hundreds of articles. You've developed a recognizable voice, learned how to research subjects, organize arguments, edit your work, create headlines, communicate ideas and publish consistently. What do you actually have?

If your answer is “A reputation for getting upvotes,” that's a pretty fragile asset. But if your answer is “A portfolio containing hundreds of examples of my work,” now we're talking about something different.

That portfolio can exist independently of the reward system. You can show it to a potential employer or client and demonstrate that you can actually write instead of simply claiming that you can. The years you spent creating weren't wasted just because the rewards weren't substantial. You were building evidence that you can do something, and this is where I think Hive and Blurt are potentially far more useful to creators than people realize.

Use the blockchain as a RECORD of what you've done. Use it as a PUBLIC PORTFOLIO and a place where your history of work can remain visible. Build relationships there and discover opportunities there. If you happen to earn tokens along the way, great. Just don't confuse the token reward with the value of what you're building.

YOUR CONTENT CAN BE WORTH MORE THAN ITS PAYOUT

An article doesn't have to have only one source of economic value. You can publish it on a blockchain, where it becomes part of your public body of work. Someone can discover it months or years later and see exactly what you're capable of. That person might not care how much the article earned. They might care that you can write, research, explain complicated subjects or make a compelling argument.

That is where the larger opportunity can begin. The same thing applies to video, photography, design, translation, research, programming or almost any other skill you can demonstrate through your content. The content can be proof that you know what you're doing. But if your entire mindset is “How many tokens will this post earn?” you've reduced all of those possibilities down to one number. And probably not even the biggest one.

YOUR TIME HAS A PRICE

There's another problem people don't think about enough: opportunity cost.

Your time isn't free just because nobody is sending you an invoice for it. If you spend four hours producing an article and it earns $10 worth of tokens, was that a good use of four hours? Maybe. But you can't answer that by looking at the $10 alone. You have to consider what else you could have done with those four hours.

You could have been producing something specifically designed to attract paying work. You could have been contacting potential clients. You could have been improving a skill that increases your earning power. You could have been doing paid work directly.

The question isn't simply “What did my post earn?” It's “What did I give up by spending my time doing this?”

That's a much more uncomfortable question, but it's one that anyone trying to turn content creation into an income should be asking.

AN AUDIENCE ISN'T AUTOMATICALLY A BUSINESS

Another trap is confusing attention with demand. You can have followers, comments, readers and people who regularly upvote your work. None of those things necessarily mean you have customers. Someone clicking an upvote button isn't the same economic relationship as someone paying you $200 to write something for them.

One demonstrates attention. The other demonstrates demand. I'd rather have a smaller audience that produces actual opportunities than a huge audience that only produces vanity metrics. The goal isn't necessarily to become popular. The goal is to become useful enough that someone is willing to pay for what you can do.

STOP OPTIMIZING YOURSELF FOR THE REWARD SYSTEM

This is where things can become especially backwards.

Once you depend on upvotes, you naturally start thinking about what will get rewarded instead of what is actually valuable. You start worrying about what topics the whales like, which tags to use, who to interact with and what kind of content gets the strongest votes.

Eventually you can end up producing content for the reward mechanism rather than producing something because it has value in the first place.

That's dangerous because now the platform is determining what you think is economically valuable. Instead, ask a much simpler question:

Who would actually pay for this?

If you write about finance, who needs financial writing? If you make videos, who needs video production? If you translate documents, who needs translation? If you research, edit, design, code, analyze, teach, repair, build or create something useful, who has a problem that your skill can solve?

That's the market. The blockchain is not the market. It's a tool you can use while participating in the market.

TAKE AWAY THE REWARDS

Here's a simple test.

Imagine Hive and Blurt stopped rewarding content tomorrow. Not forever. Just for six months. What would you have left?

If the answer is nothing, then you weren't building an independent income stream. You were building dependence on the reward system. But if you still have your skills, your portfolio, your reputation and the ability to take your work somewhere else and get paid for it, then the loss of blockchain rewards would be inconvenient. It wouldn't destroy your financial life.

That's the position I'd rather be in.

DON'T LET TIME TRAP YOU

There's also something psychologically dangerous about spending years chasing a particular outcome. Eventually people start saying, “I've already spent three years doing this.” So they keep going, but time already spent doesn't make the strategy better. Ask yourself a different question:

If I knew everything I know today, would I choose to spend the next three years doing exactly the same thing?

If the answer is no, then the previous three years aren't an argument for continuing. It's useful information. Use it. Change the strategy.

Changing the strategy doesn't mean abandoning the blockchain. It means changing what you expect from it.

USE THE BLOCKCHAIN. DON'T DEPEND ON IT.

I still think Hive and Blurt have something valuable to offer creators. You can publish without asking somebody for permission. You can establish a public semi-permanent record of your work. You can build a portfolio and a history that you can point other people toward. You can interact with people, experiment with alternative forms of money and earn rewards along the way. There is plenty of value there, but I don't think the smartest strategy is to spend your life waiting for somebody with a large stake to decide that your work deserves a larger vote.

Document what you create because you have something to say. Publish because you want your work recorded. Build because you want to create something that exists. Then take that work beyond the reward pool.

Your article might be worth far more than the vote attached to it. Your video might be worth far more than the tokens it earns. Your knowledge might be worth far more than any reward pool can provide.

The mistake isn't using Hive or Blurt to earn tokens. The mistake is believing that earning tokens from your content is the limit of what your content can earn.

You don't have to leave the blockchain to escape that mindset. You just have to stop looking at the upvote as the destination.

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