hive has unfortunately become very centralized, and this one group, which is funded by the dao, scares off more users and potential investors than the abuse they prevent. There are other whales who prevent actual abuse, which renders hivewatchers unnecessary. Not just unnecessary, but they put the most stereotypical happy merchant to shame. Hivewatchers doesn't build their own front end, because no one would want to use their commie controlled gobbledygook front end. Instead they bully off other users and try to police the front ends of other sites.
They spam the chain trying to dox users (a practice that shouldn't be tolerated in any crypto space), try to disappear users off of the front ends by attacking their reputation, engage in fights over mere pennies,then spam us notifications about how they successfully managed to pilfer pennies which somehow is a huge deal. Maybe they managed to stop a few rogue users from say making 3 cents some 2000 times a week to withdraw to something else, but they scared off countless real potential users and investors that could make hive more engaging or worthwhile investment. Hive now us almost post it and forget it; a ghost town. I mostly see hive now for archival and data purposes, others do too. Some want to end the hive rewards system, which isn't a bad idea.
Hive has other potentially fatal problems lurking in the dao. If it is going to act as a centralized chain, with this much market cap, it needs to get its ducks in a row. Instead it looks like some whale tossing the dao's money randomly to some devs in the form of a stable hdb with hyip interest rates. My biggest concern, although I need to dig the data sometime to confirm, is the hbd stabilization project and the hyip interest rates could lead to a death spiral of both main currencies-although There might be some projects that might stave this off. The positive aspect about a death spiral is that after the collapse, the little guys might be able to become whales for pennies on the dollar and replace the current centralized insanity. But it is still up to some mission critical developers, who could lose interest, to keep it functional in the future-or risk takers who can do their job for free expecting a future return on their crypto investments rather than bleeding the dao.
Hive has a lot of potential, but that potential is being wasted and could be lost due to incompetence. Even though hive keeps falling, the market itself doesn't believe that at the current price it is worth usurping the present governance-if there is enough liquidity to do so. Maybe a whale is looking, and has been looking for years, for a large private transaction to sell without crashing the market-which might help explain this present insanity.
That's what HW is for.
IIRC 4 whales own ~30% of stake. There's not enough liquidity to overcome that hurdle, but there are ways to overcome that hurdle with less liquidity. The whales should be grateful the market doesn't care enough to use them.