Where's the Value?

I have been thinking about "value" - when we analyze any project, we are looking for the "value proposition", as in - where is the value? This is a fun activity, and is probably dimensionally related to an important activity in finance called "Valuation" where you try to put a number on how much something is (or could be) valued.

Recently I commented in this post that I thought our "social" content was something like worthless (and earning a nickel for it, a miracle), or at least it would be better if we acted this way. I am not sure if its true, but it got me thinking of different types of value, and I thought I would put some of those thoughts into a post today.

But - MY POSTS are valuable!

And indeed they may be; I know mine are valuable to me, so I started thinking about it carefully - where does the value come from? This led me to dreaming about this table:

By breaking down the value discussion on two axis - individual and community; internal and external - we can see that there are actually a few different vectors of value for "content". On all four of these sections, individual content could have more or less value, even zero value - but let's take them one by one.

Internal Individual Value

Both categories of "individual" value refer to the "author" or creator of the content. This quadrant was essentially my first "AHA" moment with HIVE, when I discovered that I could host my content without worrying about paying for a server, keeping my LAMP stack and wordpress implementation updated, and if something did go wrong, without losing all my blogs that I had published.

I didn't care about the nickels, at first I really cared about not losing my content, and not having to pay 10 dollars a month, plus 10 dollars a year for the domain. And maybe - not having to spend time keeping up my sysadmin skills to make it all work. I just want to see my pictures, later. With HIVE, I can see all the content I created for the last 8 years, and that is valuable to ME, the user/author/creator.

The effort an author puts into the posts, will reflect the value that the post represents for them "later".

External Value to the Individual

As a "creator", whether it be photography, writing or tree planting - sooner or later you are going to need a "portfolio" showing "what you do". I believe HIVE gives us enormous value in this department, and its a use case that I have worked very hard to support (since I need it in multiple ways for multiple projects) with our Your Frontend premium tool, which is live now for a couple months.

And I have to shout out @fjworld for this YFE review, I definitely need users to see these tools with new eyes, as my "style" is always to be building things that I need, and I just assume that other people will need them too - although often they would like them to be slightly different.

There is value in showing certain "creations" of content to other people - such that it is even worth a premium for some to put them on their own domain (site). Yes you can generically do this on sites like ecency and peakd, but that might not be good enough for everyone; so much value can be found in this quadrant even if its not the one most people think about.

Community Value - roll over Metcalfe

You all know about Metcalfe and his "law" right?

Basically he says that when "networks" (communities) get together, the network value is exponential to the number of nodes (users). So, theoretically -

If we all shitpost together, the previous quadrants don't matter!

"don't matter" just means, there is other value. This is the "social media" idea, and this (kind of silly?) idea, however true it may be, is basically what everyone thinks about facebook, twitter, rumble, etc - all "platforms" where USERS are the product.

However you look at it (metcalfe's law does apply to HIVE), it seems to me that ignoring the value to the individual users, and jumping ahead to the scaled value of users inside the community, might be putting the cart before the horse. But either way, this value is also split.

Internal value within the Community

To build and generate value for the community, internally, has to do with "building" and "organizing" ourselves. I believe that many of our HiveTools provide value in this quadrant, increasing the value of what is already here by allowing people to filter, view, organize and connect to/with that information easier.

Metcalfe's Law doesn't mention this, but surely there is value to potential connections in a network (telephone numbers I don't call, emails I don't send to), but more value I'm pretty sure is generated by connections actually made. So when we connect with each other, using HIVE to do so, we are generating internal value to the community.

Can the community generate value through "external" means?

There is more to contemplate in this quadrant. I think that the entire facebook/twitter/reddit social media model relies on this - mining OUR data (the users/creators) and selling it to advertisers, data brokers and others. I think the content stored in the HIVE block's likely does have a lot of value, but generally I think we have not tapped into it at all.

Heart is all I got

I would love to hear your thoughts - which of these quadrants do you feel like HIVE connects most too - which of these quadrants needs work? Which ones are you tapping into, with your content? Participate in the discussion in the comments below.

Freedom and Friendship