Hive has the structure to utterly dispel free to use with get paid to use. It only fails to do that because of DV's. The idea of a rewards pool and UV's from inflation that don't come out of the voter's wallet is genius, but the misapplication of DV's is moronic. Many blatantly and falsely misstated that DV's aren't censorship, despite the explicit demonstration of how well they work to eradicate spam, scams, and plagiarism. Further every authoritative definition of censorship says it's any suppression of speech, and no better demonstration of financial taxation targeting offensive speakers could exist than Canada seizing the bank accounts of supporters of Freedom Convoy truckers. Many continue to maintain that Hive can't be censored because speech is on the blockchain, but that's a ridiculous standard. What speech that was ever censored no longer exists? Every book ever banned continues to be read today. It is literally impossible to utterly eliminate speech even by double tapping the backs of the heads of the censored.
Their ideas always outlive them.
The outrageous censorship of Hive through DV's needs to end, except where it is necessary to prevent spam, scams, and plagiarism. Even the vile plutocratic governance model can be tolerable if we have free speech, and end financial taxation wielded as censorship. Dapps are fine and all, but there are myriad mechanisms that enable people to post and all of them are more or less successful, including Hive. We have had millions of people that took the trouble to onboard and begin using the platform since 2017. The form and mechanism of speaking here isn't the problem.
The censorship drove them away. Fix that censorship problem and demonstrate to the market that it's fixed, and the market will respond. The competition has only gotten worse, censoring ever harder (almost approaching the flag happy on Hive!) and the market for a free speech platform is stronger and larger than ever. The concept of being paid by consumers for posting instead of advertisers surveilling, tracking, and lying to you is compelling. It will draw millions of users, as soon as DV's can't screw the pooch.
Our views on the social media side of things are not all that different.
One issue that I recognized early on with respect to DVs is that if Hive sees some substantial growth as a social media platform before fixing the DV disparities, it could backfire in a major way, making Hive well known but for all the wrong reasons.
I’ve not given up on that fight, but my focus at the moment is more on attracting new Devs than new social media users. That’s mostly an issue with my own limited bandwidth.
That is exactly what happened, albeit before Hive was forked off.
A significant (THE significant) impediment to resolving the matter is that the ~36 whales that control Hive governance see significant growth as the one threat to their governance. It is a sad fact that controlling the pond is more important to profiteers than the size of the pond. It is thus the plutocratic governance of Hive that continues to preclude user retention, and why massive stake is thrown at HW to flag n00bs off the platform, because that maintains the financial dominance of extant oligarchs and that maintains their plutocratic governance which assures they will capture the vast majority of rewards from the pool.