Elon Musk is going to be making even more money. [Congratulations to all those who dutifully support him. He should be very appreciative of Hive for what it is doing for him.
Why do I say this?
One word: Grok.
Are you not familiar with that? We will cover it in this article. However, we are also going to point how many on Hive are doing all they can to support him.
So let us begin into Elon's money making venture.
What is Grok?
Remember all those people espousing how foolish Elon Musk was for buying Twitter? Do you recall 11 months back when we were told the platform was going to collapse?
If so, did you see what recently happened?
Grok is a new chatbot hitting the market. It was developed by Elon and the X.ai team. It is going to be incorporated into X.com (formerly Twitter). Anyone want to guess what it was trained on? You guessed it: Twitter data.
Elon might have paid $44 billion for something worth half of that. Or maybe he didn't.
He claims that he never thought of the AI applications when buying the company. That seems highly unlikely in my opinion. In fact, it would be completely out of character. I never bought the freedom of speech rhetoric. Even I could figure out from the start Twitter was a treasure trove of data.
Seven months ago Grok was nothing more than an idea. As of yesterday, it was a product released into alpha.
It is also going to be a money maker.
According to reports, the service will be available once in beta to X premium+ members. This means forking over $16 per month, an extra $10 to use it.
Back in July, Elon touted there were 540 million MAUs on X. These numbers tend to always be inflated since a lot will log in once in a blue moon. For that reason I will knock it down to about 300 million.
Here is where it gets interesting. We are likely to see at least 1% sign up for the service. That would be roughly 3 million people. At $10 (extra) per month, that comes out to $30 million, or $360 million on a yearly basis.
Trust me, these numbers are conservative.
As we know with software, most of this is going to be profit. The margins are at least 80%, closer to 90%.
Supporting Elon At All Costs
Here is where Hive enters the picture.
Elon's database is very valuable. If data is the new oil, how come many on Hive prefer to keep making Elon look alike a Saudi oil oligarch. Hive has a database yet a large number of people opt to fill Elon's.
But, we are using Web 2.0 to pull people to Hive. Yeah, how is that working out? For all the Tweets (Xs), how has the userbase done over the past 12-18 months? For the millions of Tweets, comments, and posting of all kinds of information, what does the proverbial pudding look like?
Since the userbase is flat, I would say hasn't had much of an impact.
What activities do we see people on Hive doing on Web 2.0 each day? How much data is being fed those databases housed on servers owned by people or companies like Elon?
My guess is we are looking at hundreds of thousands of Tweets, FB/Instagram, and Discord entries daily . It could even enter the millions.
Draining Web 2.0
It is interesting to note there are many who will not support the banks and removed most of their money. They will not support entities that are out to screw them. We can see the logic in this.
Yet, these same people will turn and spend hours on Discord, X, or the Facebook family posting anything they can think of. Does anyone believe that Silicon Valley is less nefarious in their intentions than Wall Street?
If you think that is the case, I have a bridge to sell you.
These mega technology companies are known for their surveillance, control, and ability to monetize what you do.
On Hive, we profess immutable text database. If that is the case, how come so many of us spend our time filling up Web 2.0 databases?
I know we assert it is best to pull the people over from there to Web3.
Aside from it not working, this isn't what history shows.
Web 2.0
How did Web 2.0 become such a major part of our lives? What path did it take to become a success story?
If you are old enough, do you recall early companies saying "We need to get Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw on our platform. We need the major broadcast influencers."?
Did that happen? No.
Was the success of Facebook due to the attraction of major celebrities and sports figures joining in the early days and leveraging their names (following)? Again, nope.
Ironic that somehow, in spite of not pulling the people from traditional broadcast, Web 2.0 exploded. It is highly unlikely that Mark Zuckerberg hung out at cable television conferences seeking ways to attract users. Nor did he sit in front of the television all day long supporting their business structure.
We are in the attention economy. For that reasons, isn't the most important question "where am I focusing my attention?". If your attention is on Web 2.0 all day long, why should anyone else care about Web 3.0.
Certainly, we cannot offer every single application that Web 2.0 does. At the moment, we do not have a solution for something like Spaces. However, for the things where we have alternatives, why are people still using Web 2.0?
Because that is truly what they are. Just like many of the influencers on YouTube, they like to talk about Web 3.0 but they are not very active with it. A post each day and a couple comments do not constitute use in my opinion. Not when an individual does 10x or 20x the activity on Web 2.0 platforms.
Feeding Elon and Zuck more data is not the solution in my opinion.
On Hive, We Do Have An Impact
Can you imagine another 100K text based activities on Hive? We now have a number of applications that can offer microblogging. There is Threads, DBuzz, and Ecency. Each has the basics of what Twitter offers.
We then have the additional benefit of the exponential nature of things. Let us look at doing things on chain can have a greater than 1:1 impact.
- Extra engagement: each comment or post opens the door for others to respond. This is where having more posted to start offers the opportunity to have other actions to follow behind it.
- More transactions: not only do we see more actions in terms of comments, there is also voting. When people post on Hive, anything is eligible for a vote. This means that each action could result in 2 or 3 more transactions.
- Ideas for others: I cannot tell you how many ideas I got for articles from the comment section. People post their views and it can trigger something else.
- Multiple Front Ends: since the data is available to all front ends, we effectively start to help the value of those applications with each piece of information we post. Put something on X and you can see it there. Most that is posted to Hive is visible through a number of front ends. It essentially grows the database for that site.
Number 5 is probably the most powerful from what we are seeing in the world today with technology.
- Data: Each time someone posts something on Hive, it is in the decentralized database. This means there is more for the developers to tap into and feed their algorithms. We all know the major tech companies have a huge advantage due to the data they control. X and Reddit both took steps to protect the gold mine by restricting the ability to scrape the data.
They understand it is the new oil.
Once again, why are we giving them more of it especially in light of the fact that tens of thousands additional posts or comments on Hive would have an outsized difference? The proportion compared to what is here presently would be stunning.
Of course, there is another factor, we can call it number 6:
It makes Hive a more engaging and interesting place.
Nobody wants to arrive at a site and find it dead. When that occurs, the thing people do is leave. If we have a lot of activity, people will pause to see what is going on.
It is much easier to share a success story than plead people to try to be part of building that. That is the issue Hive has. We do not have the success to share.
For that reason, it is important to start building it. To me, this starts with the simple question:
In the attention economy, where are your eyeballs primarily at?
If your attention is on Web 2.0, why should anyone else switch?