It's easy to make it on Hive. This may be something many will instantly disagree with, but let me write a bit more before you decide to start hating me.
Have you guys seen the shit people do on X ever since they introduced adrevenue sharing? Some are literally spamming all day every day, doesn't matter what they say, as long as it gets them impressions and followers they'll do any trick in the book to start collecting a paycheck. Even though X keeps making it harder and harder to collect that paycheck, even though - as I've mentioned many times in the past the main reason you can't compare author rewards on hive to web2 earnings - they literally don't lose anything by sharing adrevenue with their top attention-getters.
Do you think Elon is giving their 0.1% top users stocks in X? No, he's not, nor does any other social media website. People have to fight tooth and nail to get to that spot and many have been grinding it for years expecting something like that to happen similar to youtube and facebook where adrevenue is shared. The old-timers and now newcomers focusing on getting attention are investing a lot of time and resources to get there, it's definitely not easy and who knows how often they'll keep moving the post for minimum threshold to earn in the future. Even once you make it - it's not going to be a lot. I saw a post the other day of someone sharing their youtube earnings, here it is, naturally that'll seem like a lot to many of us here, right? Someone in the comments found his youtube channel so I got curious as to how much views he's getting to get about $1k per month. Here's an imagine of his socialblade:
Look at the total subscribers weekly, by the looks of it he started uploading videos 8 months ago. He seems to be generating original songs on a daily basis, I'm not sure how many can compete with that but I'm quite sure he's one of the few who've attempted to make an income on youtube before they gave up or it just never happened.
What does web2 have that we don't? Well, they have literal billions and billions of views per day from billions of monthly active users. Naturally the amount of advertisement they receive is up there in the billions as well, although lately it feels the quality and diversify of ads has been on the decline along with adrevenue earnings.
What does web3 (hive) have that web2 doesn't have? We can give out rewards with our votes without it costing us "directly" and we're all sharing the same token in the ecosystem so we all want it to do well hence we go out and curate users of all kinds - or at least that's what we should be doing. (Not going to go too much into curation in this post), but point is we are incentivized to share with new people joining our network which means anyone can earn instantly after creating an account. No minimum threshold required, no KYC and bank transfers once a month once you "make it".
Naturally some take this for granted, some maybe don't believe in the future of Hive or either need the funds right now or want to rather bet on other assets or simply don't care as they think it'll go on forever. I've personally placed some value on other coins this time around for a change as well thinking once that does well I'll get back to Hive but times are showing that maybe Hive isn't going to lag behind too much this time around, every month is getting more and more expensive to get back into Hive what I was hoping and I keep wondering how many others feel the same way, if any. Hive still has another decade of decreasing inflation so maybe some think that they'll get back into it at a later date or they'll keep earning up until then, but similar to how the price of hive is acting different this time with the recent volume spikes it makes me wonder what people left with no stake today are gonna do once a big influx of users starts coming in.
For new, genuine users however, earning and becoming part of this network should feel like child's play compared to the other ones, especially for us "regular joe's" who don't really have a big audience outside of Hive. I often browse reddit and keep thinking at the amount of effort and time people place into comments, moderation, etc, without ever seeing any value come out of it. Even the little activity I had placed on r/cryptocurrency over the years got me an airdrop but Reddit decided it wanted nothing to do with tokenization of subreddits and opted out of it all. Even when they were planning on moving forward with it, they'd made damn sure to give themselves a big fat part of the supply which they now burned, but that kind of proves my point - why no one has created something like Hive is because no one wants to give away power and control to the wider crowd.
Here we are though and although things could be working better if things were a bit more centralized, we're still doing quite well moving forward as a community and giving people and option to opt into something different where they can participate and earn stake in the network that others will then later have to, not pay a large sum of money to a company, not incentivize creators to brainwash their viewers with ads and sponsorships to get a payday, but to literally buy your tokens off of your hands or give you rewards by buying/leasing stake in an effort to drive attention to themselves.
Anyway, I know many of you OG's here understand this and are never going to sell everything you have bought/earned so far, but once things are settled and more commonspace with the OG coins there's definitely going to be a lot of attention flowing in all directions looking for the next "real thing" after this mania with memecoin gambling, AI bullshit and centralized trash dies out. Be prepared.