I have a feeling that the recession that's about to hit will drive a lot of people to cryptocurrency. Coins that are unable to scale with a sudden load increase may suffer so that's something to keep an eye on.
The best way to bring more users in is to make it easier to join and give them incentive to stay. For Hive that means feeding new users good curated content that most people wouldn't find disagreeable, with more controversial stuff needing user action to find. As much as it's good to be able to have open discussions, if one of the first things a prospective user encounters is some conspiracy they disagree with, it'll risk driving them away, which is bad for growing the platform.
I have a few ideas for some Hive DApps that I'm going to be looking into creating, though I won't be going into too much detail on any of them until I have some kind of functional demo to reveal or need help creating one. Do you happen to know how much Hive Power it takes to be able to claim one new account per day?