Well, in a certain way I still like HIVE, otherwise I would have completely quit yet, but:
No CEO or gatekeepers.
No, but a very high percentage of HIVE Power in very few hands.
For example Splinterlands is much more decentralizied with lots of different rather big SPS, DEC and card stakeholders.
No premine or entities with centralizing amount of coins.
Many (STEEM) early miners and former bid bot owners are now 'top witnesses' who are voting for each other, are mutually voting their proposals, lending each other their posting keys, are delegating HP to further anonymous alt accounts ... They completely control the chain and that's not what I would call "decentralized".
Even if Splinterlands has many more users (among them lots of wealthy investors) than are blogging on HIVE that fact doesn't manifest at all in 'top witness' ranks (even one of the Splinterlands founders isn't among the top 20).
Anyhow I like your enthusiasm nevertheless and respect your courage to invest your own money into HIVE. Even if I criticize HIVE I think it's just amazingly built from a technological point of view. Thus I will focus on dApps like Splinterlands and (maybe) also 'your' Ragnarok game (and concerning the blogging: well, lets see what future brings).
I don't buy that Hive has a controlling stake in a few hands. We have seen proposals that neither the top 5 stakeholders on Hive voted that still go put through with smaller stakeholder support.
Also, being an early miner in any protocol is going to have advantages. I know people who mined 50 BTC block rewards on a home computer. But over time, early miners sell. They got it fairly. This is an unavoidable circumstance when it comes to any system. But the early miners that end up not selling through the pumps are usually here for the long-term and people you want around anyway. Bidbot owners did nothing wrong, they played the game how it was best played to extract the most value. The game has changed and it is no longer profitable to run a bid bot, so they all switched to curating instead.
I don't know which witnesses you are saying that vote trade; be sure to point them out as that is not good behavior. Sure, top witnesses can vote for themselves, but they are not top witnesses from their vote alone, that is impossible with our distribution. Witnesses voting for each other is always going to happen, it does not mean it is bad, it means that they are choosing the best they feel to run the chain.
I am a top 5 stakeholder and have never reached the top 20 consensus as a witness, just shows further proof that your claims are not true, or at least at best true on a very low % base.
From their point of view they did nothing wrong. On the one side it is understandable that they tried to maximize their profits, but it is also true that they made sure not quality content was successful and 'trending' but paid content. So yes, I think it was 'wrong' (or at least bad for the platform and these content creators who didn't join that bidbot game), even if humanly understandable.
After bidbotting was more or less over, then curation sniping was the new trend: voting automatically after 3 or 4 minutes without reading anything to get the biggest piece of the curation cake. I really appreciate that after the last HF this curation problem got fixed, but the former bidbot owners and later curation snipers had had already plenty of opportunity to massively benefit.
I think early miners did nothing wrong at all. But that's not my point.
Apart from any moral aspect which might not matter here, both types of users are now dominating the chain.
Congrats, you really deserve that in my eyes! (And I am 'proud' #8 whale in Splinterlands now concerning collection power; that's where I finally decided to invest money which could have gone to HIVE instead, and where nobody had such a huge advantage from the beginning.)
You (and also @aggroed) are comparable new and in a certain way no members of the 'club' of witnesses which occupy the top ranks since the early STEEM days. There are mostly still the same names on top which I know since 2016/17!
I didn't mean to say witnesses are vote trading (sorry, in case I was not clear, but English is also not my mother tongue). I meant they vote each other for witnesses and thus make sure to control the chain.
I personally also don't like common non-transparent practices like creating anonymous accounts like for example @usain(down)vote, delegating them HP, let them downvote posts and rejecting every own responsibility, same with lending posting keys (these days for example 'you' flagged one of my chess posts without knowing it because someone else had used your posting key; I mentioned that in my last real post about 1.5 years ago).
I don't expect you to share my points of view and that's OK with me. I wish you much success and despite my criticism I hope that HIVE will thrive. Maybe one day I will try to post again.
Yes, I agree, this happens with all chains, and in fact pretty much all investments. Some will get in early; some of it is pure luck, some of it is folks who are busting their ass with market research and being active in communities. People are simply born at different times...nothing we can do about that!
And more broadly, there is no such thing as a perfect system, all monetary systems have flaws, it is unavoidable. And even MORE broadly speaking, there is no such thing as "fair", as everyone has different beliefs on what is fair or not. Nobody owes anyone anything, those that did well here at HIVE can control their votes and HP however they like, with no obligation to anyone.
Sure they can. And I can abstain from investing in HIVE if I think their behaviour doesn't contribute to a higher value of the HIVE token in the long term (and for example instead of that choose to become a Splinterlands whale).
I also don't owe HIVE anything and will criticize big HIVE stakeholders and the effect of their actions on the platform whenever I please.
Furthermore, I wouldn't really compare the situation of early Bitcoin investors (who have no option to harass smaller users) with the one of a social network.