You touch on a lot of issues here, and you've put them out in a way that impels me to answer you.
I, like yourself was a big Steemit fan, and benefitted greatly from the site. I too saw issues that I thought would get fixed eventually as they ironed out this brand new concept. However I saw a reluctance from Steemit Inc to invest the millions they were making to market the site and get people using us while we were on a hot streak and being mentioned in various mainstream media titles. Unfortunately this has not changed, and in fact this is less likely to happen for one major reason, there is now a hell of a lot less organisation.
We all beat the drum of decentralisation, but the plain simple fact of the matter is, you cannot have true direction without some sort of centralised organisation making decisions. Let's not forget that Communities actually started out on Steemit. As piss-poor as Ned was at organising, he still managed some organisation.
The next problem is that the site is run by programmers and not savvy business people, this means that they get excited about things that normal users don't care about. This is easily confirmed by looking at any random announcement by the Hive team, it's full of technical jargon that only other developers understand or care about. You will see this by reading the comments, there are so many that basically say "I don't understand this, but I guess if you're excited about it, it must be good"
Next we have to look to good old fashioned economics as to why Hive isn't worth more. Possibly the oldest rule of an economic system is you have to have supply and demand. If you have an infinite supply of something for which there is a limited demand, the price for that thing will be low. The Hive elephant in the room is that this site creates millions of Hive every single day, over a billion per year, to be honest it's remarkable Hive is worth anything at all.
Then if we look at it from a creator's point of view, as you yourself opined, unless you have direct Whale assistance, or you yourself are a Whale, then earning a living wage from Hive is impossible. Even if you are in that exalted position, making a living is still pretty difficult as the 7 day payout model hampers you from making like you would on other platforms like Youtube.
If you make a video on Youtube, you could potentially earn from that video in 5 years time, on Hive you could have an article viewed by a million people, but if only fifty Hive users click on it, you'll earn a few bucks. Plus of course any advertising on Hive doesn't go to the creator.
Will we ever see a $5 Hive? Maybe if millions of people start using Hive, but that won't happen because the only way to find out about Hive at the moment, is to have someone who already uses it, telling you about it. Maybe you'll click an article link, but in that scenario a user is more interested in the content of the link than the platform it has shared to. For instance I have clicked a story this morning about Facebook blocking Australian users. I clicked it from Twitter, and whilst I could tell you the contents of the article, I have absolutely no idea what platform it was on.
For me Hive is just a place to keep practicing my writing (not that I have done that lately) and a good place to find out about what's going on in the world of crypto.
I hope this article gets more than the current $1.00 it's on, it deserves it!
Cg
You make some really good points. I think they stand on their own, but it's a bit rude to not reply.
I believe Leo is using their advertising revenue to reward users with, and I believe that more front-ends should do something similar. Facebook tried to pretend they didn't care about advertising for years. We see how that worked out. I think we should establish rules and precedent for the types of advertising that's acceptable for different front-ends now, and use the income, with tracking statistics, to tip users that continue to use the block-chain and encourage people to use particular front-ends. That is one potential solution to the continued revenue issue.
I think that particular issue may require an actual rethinking of the chain itself though, to allow for Hive income beyond just one week. The advertising model may work, but I think it may be necessary to consider a change to the actual payment model.
You're right that it's run by programmers, and it's obvious. Eventually we man solve these issues and my post may mean nothing in time. Maybe some of the other commenters are right that some of the efforts underway will on-board users. But I wouldn't have posted this if I don't think these issues are actually a big deal. We should be thinking about not just on-boarding new users, but what might keep them from staying. Perhaps Leo will solve these issues enough to on-board many new users, but it may also be that they onboard a ton of new users that abandon their accounts in weeks or months.
Of course they may come back in months or years to an account that's now worth hundreds of dollars. Hopefully they saved their keys.
I think what might really help onboard users is a way to somehow allow easy comments even from those not on the blockchain. Then they may comment on a post and get engaged. But we still need to make it easier to use, for once they create a real account.
But key to doing that would be to do it right. Many sites offer you easy comments with a login from FB or Google, but then it's your real name displayed. I'd do it with a quick AJAX signup with some kind of temp account, and an email to signup for a real one with detailed instructions.