Overdrive

Back in 2018, when I joined Hive, we were in the early phases of the bear market that followed the blow-off top that Bitcoin and the whole crypto market experienced in 2017. What an epic bull market that was, but unfortunately, I was too dumb to make any money off it.

At that time, this blockchain was called Steem, and there were a ton of posts written on the topic. There was this dude, though—I forgot his name—who was blogging literally every day about Bitcoin. Sometimes, he just shared his comments on some of the news from back then.

Other times, he shared his visions for BTC’s future, and that was his niche. Bitcoin. However, at some point, he burned out from creating content. He was earning pretty damn good from what I remember, but this one post of his left my jaw on the floor.

He was literally asking his followers to suggest topics for him to write about, which kinda sucks, imo. I mean, if you don’t feel like posting anything or lack the inspiration to blog or vlog, just leave it at that. I’ve managed to blog daily for over seven years now, sometimes posting more than once a day, but I don’t force it.

This situation isn’t unique to Hive. I stumbled upon a YouTube video the other day where a guy was in the same boat (he admitted it in his video). He usually makes tutorials on faceless YouTube channels, but lately, he was out of ideas.

Still, he felt like he couldn’t miss a week without posting, so he put out a video where he basically shared his strategy for making catchy videos. The clickbait he used (something like “full tutorial on how I make $20,000 on a video on YouTube”) was just that—clickbait.

When it came time to actually show how he edits his videos, he simply said YouTube wouldn’t let him because…

Well, because he tried it in the past and got a warning from YouTube. Yet, he tricked a ton of viewers into watching the whole damn video based on that clickbait title. This is the problem with the attention economy these days. Sure, some content creators on legacy social media make bank from content creation, but not much passion shines through in many of these accounts.

A lot of them are hitting writer’s block, like that dude I mentioned in the introduction, but instead of pausing until they find something meaningful (more or less) to blog or vlog about, they take advantage of their large followings and post all sorts of crap just for views and cash.

This thing has snowballed, and it’s landed us where we are now—a place where most of the content on the internet is clickbait bullshit. People literally film themselves eating just for views, some fake all sorts of shit to make their videos spicy, while others are risking their lives or others’ for clicks.

There was a video going viral on TikTok, I believe, where a group of teenagers literally drove into an old man riding his bike just to stand out from the crowd. Are we that fucked up? That was the first thing that hit me when I saw it. What’s happened to humanity? How has social media warped us?

I get the attention economy—I crave some of that attention myself—but I wouldn’t do just anything for it. I don’t believe in writing stuff or vlogging just for the sake of views and likes. Quality over quantity should be the norm.

With the likes of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and other similar trends, there’s way too much content on the internet right now, and so much of it is irrelevant. Anyway, I don’t know how much sense this post makes, but it makes a lot of sense in my head.
We’re the ones validating what spreads around the internet, though.

Seeing how many people are glued to their screens every day, watching all sorts of bullshit content, I feel like things will only get worse. Personally, I wouldn’t stare at a phone screen watching TikTok videos for 4-5 hours a day, even if someone paid me.

You can probably sense some frustration in this post, and it’s true. I was hoping the internet would make us smarter, more creative, and more productive, not obedient bullshit-consuming sheep. That’s about it from my side. Wishing you all a great day ahead, and I’ll catch up with you next time.

Thanks for your attention,
Adrian