The user retention growth trend is exponentially decreasing one instead of an expected exponential increase. It just shows that the people onboarding do not make this platform a tool to engage with others or interact with its existing content.
This highlights a fundamental problem in this platform.
- Due to the reward/earning structure, this platform only suits those with higher hive power. The more hive you have the more hive you earn. Instead it should be the more quality content you have, the more you earn.
- Automated voting system should be removed from this platform to encourage users to engage with the content instead of using it as a money making tool.
- The increase in supply of hive should be limited by removing 20% APY earning in savings and 2.5% hive power staking. Only user content and organic growth of the community should result in increase in its supply.
The times when you earned 1000$ for a post are not coming back. It was the privilege of early adopters, when price was high due to speculation but participation was low, so reward pool was split between few accounts. Now even if Hive reaches 100$, it will do so only as a result of higher adoption, which means bigger reward pool will be split between even bigger amount of users. Unless you are living in a country where 1$ a day makes or breaks your budget, you will likely never see substantial rewards for posting. The value of Hive as a blogging platform is not in that you can earn for your posts, but that you own your account and your content, and you cannot be censored.
There is zero correlation between earnings as an author and amount of HP you have. Even if you could point out some examples where there might be such connection, it is rather result of "social standing" (such account is likely to be an old one and other whales might know the user personally and might want to vote for their posts) and it is definitely nowhere near linear - whales are six-seven orders of magnitude bigger than plankton, the differences in post rewards span 4 orders at best (between .10 and hundreds of HBD).
The big accounts earn on curation as part of their investment - they would actually most likely prefer to just earn that passively as effective curation takes time, so they frequently end up redirecting votes to hbdstabilizer or delegate their power to services that do curation for them. Unless you employ the bot it is hard to squeeze your voting mana properly. The plankton falls under dust vote threshold (and rightfully so, otherwise it would incentivize Sybil attacks) therefore earning nothing on curation. It is actually "the middle class" that is in best position, since you earn the most on curation by digging out articles that are so good, yet underappreciated, that other people would not mind voting for even outside optimal voting window.
'Quality' content in so far as it gets attention and engagement and inspires participation. If we're not optimizing for attention, but instead optimizing for PhD articles worthy of being published in Nature then we are in a very archaic and frankly non-current social meta. Quality =/= results. In the words of smooth, you can put all the effort into creating quality, and for that, you get a gold star. What matters is results. In society, we don't reward people for high effort, we reward people for merit - whether or not the absolute effort required to achieve that is a lot or not is beside the point.
Automated voting is an issue, but like your point 3, so is removing the incentive for people to 'work' for their rewards, be it curator or author. A curator is literally anyone and everyone who has stake and is participating in the proof of brain mechanism. This is also a value contribution as crowd consensus is a big part of how we reach value determination of anything. By encouraging idle participation, we are actually incentivizing people to walk away from the underlying social elements offered and embedded onchain to keep the wheels turning.
I have mentioned elsewhere that I find rent-seeking incentives to be a gradual but growing headwind for advancing the overall value of Hive. Hive that is printed as a result of rewards is coupled with 'work done' through crowd assessment (curation) but also the time and effort of the creator to attract eyeballs (posting). (As mentioned above, the attracting attention part is some what the point of the attention economy, and quality as a metric should be determined by this outcome more than anything else). HBD on the other hand is the same capital input, with no additional work done and yet, nominally earning more than HP holders who accept market volatility tail risk, time-duration risk. Balancing it out without touching the APR would require increasing the time it takes to withdraw from savings. I'm talking a minimum of 13+ weeks since that is in line with the time duration risk of HP. Otherwise, the APR needs to adjust to at most, the amount HP holders can earn through legitimate activity which is currently ~ 12%.