Ultimately, I think the real problem is that the Hive developers still labor under the same delusion that the Steemit developers have for years.
No, not that China should be the authoritarian censor of social media. That's a new development.
No, I literally mean that the token represents the value of the content of the blockchain. They either never new or completely forgot that tokens are not valuable in and of themselves – they are only valuable insofar as someone wishes to possess them in exchange for something else.
You can buy and sell things with bitcoin. Real things. Actual things. The token has value insofar as someone wishes to take it in exchange for something that you want.
For both Steem and Hive, the only value is the intrinsic value of the content being generated and placed on the blockchain. You acquire token as a result of creating that content or showing it to other people. You park that token, locking it up so that you can't trade it away, in exchange for the potential ability to make more of it, in a real sense. The only reason to gain more token on Steem/Hive is in order to make more of it in the long term.
But that requires that the social media component of the underlying platform be valuable enough to enough people for them to go out of their way to engage with it through the medium of the token.
Unfortunately, it hasn't been for some time. It's just not. The number of diverse posters has dropped. The diversity of content has dropped. The amount of content which is worth reading here? Dropped. The actual underlying value proposition of the token – blown away.
There's just no interest in recapturing it, either. Look at the proposals about the available platforms for interacting with the social media side of things. Are they about improving the environment for creators? Are they about making it easier and more transparent to consume that content that people consider valuable? Are they about customizing the experience for a given consumers so that they get more of what they like?
No, they're about tinkering with the mechanics of the token. They're about creating hype rather than content. They're about screwing around with governments – something that nobody except whales and a damn few of them actually care about.
Hive doesn't have even the Jesus-money that Justin Sun has to play with. So they can't get ahead on raw investiture, they've made it publicly well known that they are perfectly willing to take away the ability for large investors to make use of that investment on the blockchain – one of the core elements of selling the blockchain in the first place, and they don't care about creators.
Aside from a general air of bitcoin raising all boats, why would it go up? There are a lot of reasons for it not to. That it hasn't crashed out altogether is probably a miracle in and of itself.
Im powering down cause the community gave 30k to a girl for basically being a pretty face on hive.. #simpchain
Dude, they'd been doing that since the beginning. @sweetssj was a solid harvester since day one.
But even that's an improvement over a platform purely populated about content about the platform, right?