You guys are doing great overall, thanks.
My issue is with attracting new authors.
Does the payout on this post better serve the chain by paying you, or could that 280htu be better spent allowing 2800 accounts come closer to getting .1htu in payout?
Fully 1.5 million people have come here and left because of this issue.
Would you like to give some feedback on that?
First, as much as I would like to think otherwise, I don't think 1.5 million people have come here and left. It's hard to know just how many accounts have been created by the same people (some for legitimate reasons and some not), but I'm sure the figure is quite large.
Second, you've made what I believe is an unwarranted assumption:
I'm quite certain that it is not simply rewards that cause people to come and go, because I did experiments on this issue several years ago.
I invited several friends to the platform, and while some have stayed, several have not, despite being rewarded pretty well, as I was more than happy to vote up some of their posts to see what impact it had on retention rate.
What I found was that the rewards just didn't matter much to them. The ones that stayed, stayed because they found something appealing about the philosophy of the site. The ones that left, generally left because their friends weren't here, so they returned to sites where they could easily share their posts with their friends. This network effect is the primary strength of sites like facebook, which is where my friends usually posted before, and where they returned.
I'm not saying the social media component of Hive isn't important: I think it's very important. And I think the posting rewards system is a great way to create a useful faucet for spreading the currency to new users.
But, I think it's very easy to overestimate its power, which is surprising to me, since given how much currency actually has been distributed over time via Hive and previously via Steem, it should be obvious that the rewards aren't enough.
Without the data I collected via my experiments, I can see how you could have assumed it was some "unfair distribution" of the rewards that was primarily responsible for people leaving the platform, because they felt insufficiently rewarded. I've seen that argument before elsewhere. But this theory was directly contradicted by the results of my experiments, so much so that even my "over-rewarded" friends didn't stay. As a side note, I did this experiment with people of various economic levels in the US, with the "richest" being a doctor.