What Has "Value" and What Doesn't?

In my 25 years of blogging, I often come across debates about what has "value" and what doesn't when it comes to online content. Sometimes these debates get quite heated and people have extremely strong opinions about this topic.

But I think it is very difficult to determine what actually has value, because value is — as often as not — in the eye of the beholder.

Some might argue that posting a bunch of pictures of the landscapes around where you live doesn't have much value. But who is to say that that is true?

Thinking back to a time before the Internet was really much of anything, I used to buy quite a few pretty coffee table books that contained little more than beautiful pictures of places far far from where I lived. I still have quite a few of those books and sometimes I pull them out and look at them.

To be honest, such pictures tend to be timeless, and I must confess that I still get enjoyment from looking at them. So we could quite safely say that these books have value, and that the pictures in the books have value, at least to me.

After 9 years of posting well over 2,000 times here on Steemit, one of the things I have really become aware of is that what has value here versus what has value in the greater world is deeply connected to the fact that we get rewarded for our content here.

If you want to look at it from a purely objective angle, such an assertion essentially suggests that the beautiful pictures of the landscapes around where I live have plenty of value when they're free, but no value when there's a reward at stake.

Now, I'm not entirely sure why the two should really be different. Regardless, the viewer is gaining some kind of utility from looking at the pictures (just carrying on with that as an example).

We could also turn the whole thing on its head for a moment and instead of viewing it through the lens of perception of whether something provides value in the context of there being a reward for it, what sort of thing would you actually pay money for (for example via a paywall) to enjoy if that was the only way you could see it?

My bet is that we suddenly become a little more particular about what has enough value to actually fork over money for it. But does that make it any more viable, simply as standalone content?

Considering my own habits, there's very little I actually pay money for online. In fact, the only things I have paid subscriptions for involve one of my hobbies — where I have a subscription to a monthly journal — and a news aggregation service that helps me determine whether any article or story I'm looking at is actually real or some kind of "fake news."

Unlike many people, I don't really want to live inside some sort of cognitively biased echochamber! I want to know what's actually happening, not what I would prefer to be happening.

Where value starts to get a bit sketchy, is when we get into the area of personal stories.

Does somebody who tells about their daily life and what happened on any given day in their world provide value to others? I would say "it depends." Frankly, I really enjoy reading about people's lives and parts of the world I will never visit, and that is one of the things I really enjoy about the very international nature of Steemit.

Would I pay money to read such stories? Probably not... but I don't think that is a good metric for whether or not the stories add value.

Perhaps is this sometimes easier to determine what does not add value, as opposed to what does add value.

And that is an area in which I often stand in opposition to general consensus. For example, what does not add value for me is the 400th iteration of some financial report about some security. I don't need 400 opinions about whether Tesla stock is a good thing or not. I also don't need 400 opinions about whether crypto is dead or not.

And yet? There are lots of people who would insist that that's "really valuable content."

And, as you might be able to see now, we have pretty much come full circle in this whole question of value. It's really a pretty individual thing, so trying to establish it in any kind of absolute sense is pretty much an exercise in futility.

Now, of course, we can probably all agree that extensively copied or plagiarized content does not add value, and 99.9% of AI slop does not add value. But beyond that it mostly becomes a gray area.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? What kind of content is "valuable" to you? What is NOT valuable? Do you think the potential for rewards changes our perception of "valuable?" Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2026.04.07 00:10 PST
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