Just saw someone talking about secondary-market royalties, saying that creators can’t live off royalties for long—they have to rely on selling their work at high prices? 🤔 Actually, isn’t this the old topic of “the work goes up, but the creator doesn’t make money”? I, on the other hand, think royalties are reminding us: where value lies is not in the trading itself, but in that one second when it’s being used. Like how I just saw a musician post that they sold a bunch of albums, yet the royalties still weren’t enough to cover their internet bill.

Social mining has been getting hot again lately, saying that attention can be mined—I’m a bit skeptical: can attention really be mined as a resource? And if you mine it, what do you even get out of it? Anyway, I trust data more myself: data can tell me what most people in the market are doing. Intuition is more like helping me pick a direction when my data is arguing with itself—like the other day when BTC dropped to 69 and my social circle was full of people yelling “buy the dip.” I felt something was off; instinctively I thought things needed adjusting. And sure enough, it then dragged on for two more days. But then again, don’t be too obsessed with data either—sometimes data is just a manual explaining human collective delusion.

Sometimes I think maybe the real “creator economy” shouldn’t be about who can sell faster, but about seeing who can get more people willing to stop, and figure out what exactly they’re mining. Forget it, that’s it for now.