We can all agree about the fact when the HIVE price is up, incentivized by seeing big numbers at the bottom of the posts, many people come and join HIVE, in the hope that they can earn those numbers too... I would be a hypocrite if I said that I wasn't like that... In my case, I came to this chain when the price was going down, but I did see over $100 posts when I realized the blogging side of the chain...
There is a never-ending discussion about how we should promote HIVE, where to promote it, how to onboard people, whether it is too complicated, or not, etc. Yes, all that matters, but... When the price is higher, when people have an incentive, they FIND THE WAY and nothing is too hard! Not even all those keys and browser extensions...

Even if we "brand differently" HIVE, and promote it differently, our best marketing will be the HIVE PRICE! We can't do anything about it, but we could adapt to those users, receive them, and show the "other side of HIVE"... I know, I know... It's awesome to earn some money through content creation, but HIVE has so many other qualities, and I bet that most of the "old users" found those qualities and because of them, they stayed on HIVE, in good times and in bad times! Money is a great short-term incentive, but not a good long-term...
The community, the engagement, the human touch... It's not all about the money... It looks like it is, but it's not... I will give you a few examples... On
@Liotes, we have this thing that we call "Wednesday Liotes Missions", where we ask people a question and they can leave a comment with their opinion... We do give people POINTS for engaging with the post, but those don't have a direct monetary value... And after a while, people don't even care about the points... But, why do they engage with the post?
People like to be ASKED for OPINION... And people like to be HEARD! @liotes isn't a huge HIVE project with tons of HivePower, but we try to pay attention to what people think and write... With our
@liotes curation project, the main rule our curators have to follow is to leave a
meaningful comment! It's not all about the upvote, but more about treating the other Hivians as we would treat our friends, or a family!
Why is that important? These small things "lure" you into the ecosystem... Commenting on posts leads to engagement, which leads to "finding your place", your community, your friends... Without noticing, you start coming to HIVE because of YOUR FRIENDS and not because of the money incentives... You WANT to support your friends even more, and you build your HivePower because of that... Until you are completely hooked into the accumulation phase forever... 😃 I mean, it's OK to take profits, but in this "organic way," you don't think about that until you need it...

Also, there is another perspective where many people don't see crypto as money... That was the best visible in the big NFT pump where people would buy ridiculous NFTs for thousands of dollars worth of crypto... It was just a number... 1ETH was "just" 1ETH, even if it was worth over 3K USD! I suppose that the "Never sell your Bitcoin" culture was the best engraved into the brain of BTC Maxis and it's not too much different from other coins...
On HIVE, it is a bit different as the token has its use case, and there is no better use case than "sharing" power with your friends... Supporting your closest ones is the best possible use case that exists!
Long story short, it's not bad to have people coming on HIVE because of rewards, it's on us to show them what is under the hood, what is beyond rewards... 1 meaningful comment under the new user's post is as valuable as much as a big upvote! If you don't have a big HP to support a good, valuable post, you can still leave a comment...
Thank you for your time,
--ph--

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