I know that virtually nobody reads this blog, mostly because I never advertise it, so perhaps I’m just talking to myself, but I’ve been thinking lately and I wanted to see what others thought, if anyone ever sees this at all.
First though, I need to talk about YouTube and that might also spawn another entirely separate post about YouTube stamp channels and my thoughts on them specifically, but for now, we’ll just talk generally.
See me below the fold for more.
If anyone has been out in the world of stamp collecting lately, you’ll know that there’s been a lot of talk about modern post offices putting out NFTs of their stamps. It’s very limited at the moment and thankfully so, it’s desperately trying to make money by doing anything but the actual job that the post offices exist to do.
What else is new, right? But here’s why this isn’t a part of philately, even though there are a few voices that are adamant that it is. Here is why they are simply wrong.
There’s always a lot of talk in the hobby about recruiting new stamp collectors and I’ve never really had anyone that I could encourage. My kids, as I’ve said before, they were both born without the collector gene and they aren’t interested in collecting anything. Nobody else I know cares. It was only very recently that I finally found someone who showed a little interest and…
Well, read on and see why this isn’t turning out well.
There’s a sub over on Reddit called r/askastampcollector and the only thing it ever gets used for, virtually always in fact, is people just show up with stamps that they found or inherited or they were given, looking for a big paycheck.
It doesn’t work that way and a lot of them get positively upset when they receive the news that what they have is worthless, but honestly, can we just stop worrying about value when it comes to collectibles? You people are going about it all wrong!
Okay, maybe complain isn’t the right word, but there’s one thing that I’ve noticed in poking around there, the overwhelming majority of videos made about stamp collecting over on YouTube, they all tend to be aimed at, shall we say, the beginners?
So let’s talk about that, please.
Now that I’m back to collecting stamps, and having a great time doing it, naturally, I looked over on YouTube for some channels that might be entertaining to watch. While I did find some, and I know there won’t be a ton, I noticed one thing about the overwhelming majority of them.
They all seem to be aimed at the uninitiated stamp collector.
