One of the things I learned from years of trading in collectibles is that something can be quite rare and yet not have very much value. Unless somebody actually cares about that rarity it doesn't really amount to anything.

Similarly, something can be quite common and yet have considerable value because it is highly desirable, and people keep buying everything that is available as soon as it becomes available.

Of course, the truth of pretty much anything that is traded in an open marketplace is that if there are more sellers than there are buyers the price is going to go down. It doesn't really matter whether somebody is sitting out in the wings, filled with the desire that the thing being traded is amazing and should be worth more... if everybody just wants to sell it, it isn't going to become worth more.

One of the things I learned from collectibles was the importance of having a niche that really worked, and that niche tended to be to specialize in only the very highest quality of something collectible because it tends to appeal to the elite of the collecting market and they are the ones that generally have money and often are engaged in an "ego contest" to see who can get the best and most luxurious version of something.

That can be a workable approach even in a market that is in decline because there's always going to be somebody who cares enough to spend a lot of money on the best. However if you reach a point where the market is truly oversaturated with items for sale it ends up affecting all parts of the market. Even so, the elite end of the spectrum tends to hold up best.

So, what does this have to do with anything?

Well, the challenge we invariably end up facing is the execss commodification of something in the marketplace. In the case of paper collectibles that I dealt with, everybody lost sight of the fact that it was a market made up of collectors upon which suddenly the specter of investing was overlaid.

I have a feeling this is often what we tend to lose sight of with the Hive community. Chasing the almighty buck has totally drowned out the model of a venue that was about different kinds of censorship resistant content creation, regardless of whether that was written, audio, video or artistic.

So I remind myself that my original idea behind coming to Hive was content creation.

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