In my opinion some of the main issues are:
1 the DFH. I believe it brings more harm than good, the way it is, and also drives the prices lower. Having people basically get funded to implement their ideas, setting up their own paychecks and adding close to zero value or way less than they got paid, only has the opposite results.
Due to that a lot of people are taking advantage of it and again due to that mostly nobody does anything to change it.
2 We don't really have well-coordinated efforts in every aspect. We decided that there will be no leadership and that we will keep "decentralized". Although i believe that at least we should have some form of representatives doing coordinating moves. Basically, we got like a "chaotic" situation where everyone does the initiatives that they want, due to the lack of coordination, most of these initiatives have smaller target groups and to add to that mostly no one knows what's really taken place.
To add to that, a lot of people don't even know about Hive, or know it and think it's a scam, following the logic ("how can i earn money investing 0$") or tried it, realise they need to spend some serious time to earn something decent or have people to interact with and leave. That's why we have so many people from third-world countries (1$-10$ for someone in Nigeria or the Philippines is way more than for someone from USA or EU), and people who are over 30 years old. (Gen Z won't bother with this kind of social media, they will focus on TikTok and Instagram)
All in all my opinion is that we need to think again about DHF should work and we also need to do some coordinated moves in every aspect to attract and retain people. The competition in web3 is crazy and i agree with you, it feels like we simply exist at the moment.
I think we are sharing similar views. We need this ecosystem to attract investors and users which will stay long term and not sell on a weekly basis for one reason or the other. And the DHF seems more to consume funds without bringing back value and even multiply it, thus that's like extracting value from the system in the end as well. I like Hive so much and I don't want to see it having a slow death... 😔
Same here, i was here pretty much since the early early steemit days and i honestly believe that there is still room to grow. DHF is a total mess and i say this for at least 2 years now. It should be refactored and new rules should apply in every aspect. Even If someone receives some funding he/she needs to be held accountable based on the results. And if we don't want accountability, then we should make way way stricter "entry" points. The logic of i have a friend with tons of HP who votes me or "i am good at misleading" 1-2 guys = funding need to stop.
Investors need to come, more people need to join and we also need builders. Building sussesful projects and dapps is a top tier key in attracting new people. Above all to do all that we need coordination and let's not kid ourselves, a structured business/marketing plan. We are at point A we need to go to Point B, let's do it together.
I salute Leofinance for that. Didn't agree with everything they've done but the guys are not only working nonstop, they have some goals and work towards achieving these goals. Some of their initiatives may fail, some may not but they keep on working on a goal and at least for the time being, they showed some results.
Hive doesn't have that as a whole. I even consider that the interaction and manual curation levels are off this year. I am part of the problem as well due to my limited time, but from what i there is less engagement than what it used to be, maybe others have limited time, or they decided to leave Hive, or simply they only have set autovotes, follow curations trails, and engage with specific people. (This is just my opinion though, i may be wrong.)