I don't have a pitch. I don't think Hive as it currently is can compete with any other service out there. The blogging engine is terrible—Wordpress was better than this 20 years ago (I know; I was using it). The design of any of the portals is terrible; true or not, they all look like they were programmed by programmers who think they understand how design works but actually don't understand how design works. We do have a great community here, but that great community is tainted by the "Hive Police"—the Orcas and whales who use their stake to enforce their own standards of morality—who bully and chase away so many people who join.
I've been saying it for 8 years and no one has listened, but saying "post for money" doesn't work. It works for some, but then they come here and find they only make a few pennies, and if they try to withdraw those pennies they start to be DVed by the Hive police who yell that they are just extracting value and don't deserve anything. These days it works even less because there are so many other places on the web that pay potentially a lot more. If you work to build to a presence on Medium or Substack, you can earn a lot more than you can here—and you don't have to deal with all the Orcas who get upset with what you do with your money.
To go along on that point, I think showing the money each posts makes is terrible. It inspires some people to be jealous, in inspires others to suck up. YouTube doesn't publicly show how much each video makes, books in the store don't show how much the author is making, my WordPress blog doesn't show how much I make from donations to it. I don't think showing the post earnings publicly is useful or beneficial.
We should work on the blogging engine here and make it competitive. We have been relying on this "get paid for posting" to make people overlook the absolute terrible blogging engine. Perhaps we can't compete with WordPress, but that is a good target in improving the blogging engine here. If we can do that, then our pitch cam be "Come here to blog, we are decentralized and everything you post will be permanent and not disappear like your old Geocities blog did"
Many good points here. Never thought about the showing the money thing. That could just be if you choose to search what someone's post earned, not up in your grill.
The stake factor is tricky. Everyone who bought and earned stake have the right to use it how they wish. But im still very interested in someone who could show real metrics. I have a sneaky suspicion that all this policing aspect you speak of is not as significant as the user loss. Reward pool drain vs. retention drain. What costs more? But thats just a feeling...im just not the guy who can find and show the data.
Does this help?