There is an owner, it's just an association of whales. A few dozen whales command the vast majority of rewards, and tailor their capture to their needs. The user base has been reduced to a few thousand actual people, which actually lend a veneer of legitimacy to the platform and extend the duration of Hive to it's profiteers.
I await the eventuation of an actual censorship resistant social media platform that delivers what Hive only promises.
@ned well revealed the motivations of oligarchs. Plutocracies are contraindicated as management of societies, for the obvious reason that plutocrats only seek their benefit. Actual decentralization will eventuate, somewhere. Somewhere else, apparently.
Well, yeah I suppose, functionally so.
They have come and gone dozens of times. I remember feeling threatened that our project here is to vanish with the latest competition over and over again. They all centralise and vanish... That says something about the idea, I reckon.