Nice to see alternatives coming up, and non coders users making sugestions and creating / projecting in different concepts, interesting to separate the votes from rewards.
Faith in humanity and adoption of hive would lead me wondering there as been alot of different phenomenons and this is growing pains of hive and as more active users come in (with more or less money) hopefully things would balance (see on the thousands the votes on reddit), if not there might be adjustments to the code of downvotes, it seems some easier than others, and then which is best.
But also agree with what you say about L2 and the audience in a way, but why would hive be like any other mainstream social media ? I don't know... cabals and things that must not be mentioned or speculated.
The centralized argument reminds me ura-soul made a sugestion about witnesses changes in the voting some time ago that seemed sense, among many others he and others have been sugesting / analysing, but you probably hit a spot there with DPOS.
There is need for more witnesses of course the normal "safe" would be 3 4 or 5x more ? Would be fair to say that a crypto of the old days (POW/POS) would have 1 to 5k nodes at least?, because of a bit higher DPOS (node) hardware requirements it didn't get the speed of adoption of other cryptos at least in nodes / witnesses and not being POW (slower rewards or lesser for mining in the beggining or short term), witnesses have to resort to posting or other way to pay for the costs, maybe not so much as an inexpensive hobby specially in the beggining or all the way trough now.
The ninja mine makes things hard to balance from the beggining but right now there is hive available on the exchanges and like you say someone could pick up the money and get in instead of accumulating with posting for example, but like you i dont see much productivity in fighting in some sort of big flag war, but (edit) they would bring more audience probably.
I think that with a balanced HIVE blog with rewards and there can be gifts donations directly, journalists and independent media would have at least a stable and light wallet and i think that many would become one of the tops of their crypto holdings. If they are "allowed" to, of course they can use the wallet and the text is uncensorable i believe, but if they are going to come in with an "handicap" alot just won't, and alot are probably eagering watching hive evolve, or not i don't know.. just wondering, glad that many are already here tough.
Anyway thanks for "snipping" this out of the discussion, keeping an eye on some of it and also left a comment on logiczombie megapost it's getting ridiculous long which is good i guess :)