If you think about it, other social media are effectively made by people joining and attracting their own niche. We all make or consume content, join communities and share other people's things. Meta, YouTube, Reddit and tiktok all works this way. It's in fact the population itself that promote a platform.
What developers and whales should do would just be to make Hive a simple place to join. We need more tools to make it entertaining; we need bugs fixed; we need uploading speed; we need simple sign-up procedures.
We all have the enthusiasm to promote Hive with our friends and followers and I thinks that's much more powerful than any ads campaign. But it's not clear how to join. What happens if you hear about Hive for the first time and you're interested in joining? Probably you google it. Well, good luck on finding an easy way to sign-up then...
Yeah signing up has always been one of the major downfalls of Hive. I think Ecency have one of the simplist methods, they allow email sign up with a quick verification. Managed to do it myself a couple month ago as part of a tutorial post.
There's lots to learn, but if we can being people in and let them learn at their own pace it certainly would be a better place all around.