Thanks for sharing your story! I think you are one of the key users which Hive should really attract. How we do it on a larger scale is indeed a perplexing issue. From the comments on this post, I can take away that I might have been looking at things from too big a picture. Maybe the real key to Hive is finding your Niche and growing that. I've always tried to consider how we can grow and expand Hive as a whole rather than draw in smaller niche users and communities.
Indeed, the 'whales' should take more responsibility for the overall Hive growth. At the same time, they're sitting pretty, making money for doing nothing, so why would they bother?
The real users who control Hive are those who use it daily, make content/interact with others, and create the social space we're all actively enjoying. The replies to this blog post have certainly given me plenty to think about. Thanks for your opinions!
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.