I hear you, believe me. I LOVED Leofinance when we had LeoMarketTalk in the runup to "Project Blank" now Threads, and enjoyed every minute of interacting with Taskmaster and the others. I tried over and over again to simply post a photo in Threads or even just having a regular written post show up, and kept hearing the same thing about "clearing cookies". They act as if it's some kind of cult over there where you're not allowed to point any issues out, and I finally gave up (I was just about to order Inleo Premium too).
I don't mind the 5% as I usually set multiple beneficiaries to my posts anyway, I just need a front-end that works.
A couple of years ago, I started noticing a slow trickle of people leaving Hive (or being driven out), and accpted opportunities to write for other platforms. Since I specialize in long-form content, I'm also looking at possibly writing for Medium since I can't get any traction here with my long-form content.
I've been here seven fucking years, and I think I've trended TWICE. When I take a look at what DOES trend, I can say they sure as hell aren't always supporting QUALITY content, that's for DAMN sure!
It's the same old people upvoting each other.
They play games by putting you on secret lists and telling people not to upvote your posts, (I've been here since 2016, I've seen it all. Don't drink the Kool-Aid, folks!). They're commiting the same shadow banning that they complained about on Web 2.0 platforms. Who has time for that nonsense? You write a well-written and researched post which (if you're lucky, gets upvoted to 70 cents), and some jackass takes 5 blurry pictures of his walk to the corner store (with very little text), and it gets upvoted to $30. What message are we sending here? We're not gonna grow Hive that way.
I may just pay the $50 per year so that I can support other deserving writers (even if I don't write on Medium) that I enjoy reading on that platform.
You should NEVER put all your eggs in one basket. If you're a good writer, branch out so that you have more opportunities to maximize your talent.
You mention having a larger reach for your community OUTSIDE of Hive, and I see the same with me. I'm already a "Whale" of sorts on one of the platforms that I write for after just a couple of years as a contributing writer. It really highlights the possibilities available when you have a more level playing field for those of us that are good writers.
I have been looking at writing on Medium myself. For crypto related stuff I also post to my site, https://coin-logic.com but I don’t have much monetizing me over there yet as I HATE Google ads and alike with a fucking passion. So I double post to Hive hoping for someone to upvote. I am thinking of doing a private advertising thing to get sponsored for some of my articles. I may start putting my trading related posts on Medium for the Logical Trading Academy so I can try to get monetized for my work more than the little crumbs I get from Hive upvotes.