Hive, and before it Steem, still suffers from one crucial problem: lack of marketing. Steem squandered millions of dollars on "running servers" and development, it remained in the "beta" stage for years; who would want to adopt a platform in perpetual testing? Not very smart marketing-wise. Hive is no better, sure we had a major improvement in the code that significantly allowed system operators and witnesses to cut down on resources requirements and costs (i.e. API nodes going from the super expensive 512GB RAM servers to only 20-64GB), but despite the technical improvement there's little investment in marketing. Therefore Hive remains a niche in a highly competitive and emerging free speech space. Hive doesn't need more devs, it needs more professional salesmen.
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100% agreed. Marketing has a bad rep for good reasons and engineering people (like myself) tend to reject it (as I did).. However, in the real world nothing sells or gets used without being marketed and rejection of marketing is mostly due to ignorance of what it actually is and also bad experiences with bad practices (and maybe slimy sales people. lol).
In reality marketing is a somewhat scientific process and can be engineered based on a combination of maths, psychology, research, analysis and experience. In Hive's case it's good that there has at least been some money spent on professional promotion, but UX (User Experience) starts at the blockchain level and spread out right through the eco system - including the actions of the community too. We can do massively more to orchestrate, optimise and improve every level of user experience on Hive - it has barely been touched. However, doing that requires some consensus and shared vision/understanding.
It seems currently that no-one with larger stake and resources wants to take responsibility for this gaping hole and stakeholders either don't have an interest in changing things or they are waiting for dApp creators to take the lead. However, experience has shown that dApp creators tend to be software people more than marketers, psychologists or business specialists and so the gap between user expectations and reality continues.
I also think that there is a prevailing idea that the reward pool is a negative to the system, yet nothing has really replaced it as a key selling point and it remains a key feature. The result is a lack of focused direction and lack of solid marketing foundation (plus other confusions in the community regarding voting and rewards).
Step 1 really needs to be market research, including carefully designed questionnaires and data collection to assess market sentiment. Given that I am on multiple social networks constantly, I have a pretty good idea of where sentiment is at - but it's always better to have real world data to go on.
also, marketing is not free and you pay twice.
First for marketing, second for onboarding.
Besides the cost barrier, hive is not an easy product. People need to stay for a network effect. I don't see it anytime soon.
It would need the promise of tokenized the internet + soft wallets.