Who benefits from all this hub bubbing?

Who benefits from all of us hubbing and bubbing up these pages with new posts, er hubs, new content, new links, new ratings, new shares, new comments?

Why would I want to invite everyone on my email list to read my hubs if they are already reading my emails, my blogs, my forum postings, my text messages, my voice mail? Why do I want to create yet another profile when I'm already linkd, facebooked, utubed, gmailed, Im'd, AIM'd, and connected elsewhere in the digital world...oh, I forgot my Amazon lists, my feeds, and my critiques...

Who benefits? I know who it is, and it is not you nor I - and cynics aside, I doubt it is the advertisers either. Honestly, are you reading the advertising on this page? Is it relevant to you? Does it move you to take action on impulse, does it cause your mouse to go click happy beyond your control?

We are mere cogs in a machine - one that increases the links, references, self-references and click throughs. We used to call it the "stickiness" of a site, and a few years back we hit our heads together trying to figure out how to get visitors "stuck" on our sites - the noble web creators amongst us thought that "content was king"; that if our information was valuable and presented in an attractive way, people would come to our site and return regularly to partake of updated content.

Since then, the bells, whistles, java applets, widgets, videos, and stuff is more interesting than the content and the content is there just to be a place holder for putting all the entertaining stuff on that page, as opposed to somewhere else.

Who wins by our tireless self-promotion of our hub bubs? Hubpages.com, of course. The more we post, the more stats they can provide the advertisers and the more money they can charge for the advertising space.

Of course, the carrot is that we will get a piece of that revenue...but, its like the self-check out at the grocery store. It appears to be a service for the consumer since we don't have to wait for the cashier to ring us out. We can just go and ring ourselves out - great for the control freaks who want to bag their own stuff and are in a hurry.

However, it is really an unfulfilled promise and a switch and bait. I have found that I am providing a service to the store and also taking away much needed jobs from humans when I make use of the technology to do a self-check out. If the store wants me to do more work to service myself, I want a discount. If I am enabling the store to pay less human cashiers - then give me that savings - or keep a well deserving human on the job. Yes, it appears that one human can service 4 self-check outs (Lucky's and Home Depot in El Cerrito, CA). However, more often than not, there is also a line for the self check out and the machines break down or need resetting or require the cashier's attention. After waiting online for the self-checkout at Home Depot, since all the other lines seemed longer, I found that the item I was intending to purchase could not be processed via self-check out....

My point is that this hubbing is similar to self-checkout. It appears that we, the consumer, under the guise of being given the power to service ourselves and to assert our opinions, are actually providing more benefit to the "venue owner" (be it web space or merchandiser) than we are getting ourselves...

more to come