shit works in the real world
No it doesn't. The real world is horrifically broken, and millions of body pave the path to that truth. Crypto is an attempt to break away from that plutocracy based on inhuman and inhumane psychopathy endemic and inherent to institutions, like government, church, and corporation that have centralized wealth and power by sacrificing billions of people and healthy society on the altar of profit.
Social media has proved there is a greater power inherent to society by becoming the dominant industry across the entire market - despite financial rewards being centralized and enabling the affliction of propaganda and indoctrination via the advertising model. Hive hasn't devised a sound mechanism to fix the bugs despite the innovations it introduced via the rewards pool and curation, because it retains too much of the financialization that reduces wealth and power to hierarchies IRL. Keeping ads to a second layer is smart. Restricting advertisers access to that API and keeping those sharks from our governance token is critically necessary, not only to our extant oligarchy, but to our potential to evolve through tweaks that can unleash the power of social media to take Hive to the moon, where it should be.
Those tweaks will necessarily defocus the rewards pool off oligarchs, because society can't blossom as the bottom of a pyramid. Curation rewards will have to go because they derange the curation of content and misapply rewards for pecuniary interests rather than broader social values of which money is a minor subset. Purely plutocratic control of governance will have to go because that is why the extant oligarchy must prevent Hive from mooning lest they get gobbled up by the circling sharks, lost in the glare of a new Sun that outshines them financially, as happened to Steem. I suspect bonds can be a part of these tweaks, perhaps offering higher interest rates for longer lockups, whatever the market can bear, and some other consensus mechanism than stake will be necessary to secure governance from sharks. Frankly, after Steem, that is long overdue already.
It is only the absence of a suitably competitive bonding mechanism that can emunerate stake nominally other than curation rewards, and the will to power, even if over a mound of ashes rather than a vibrant society, that have prevented wiser men than I from devising these tweaks and implementing them.
Ads aren't the way. That way lies behind us, and we can see what it wreaks on society by the million examples of derangement of society extant. That's just financialization, which doesn't lead to greater freedom and decentralization, but to less of each.