"...Hive certainly isn’t alone..."

Birds of a feather...

"...change course and rebrand!"

Rebranding will only be useful if it's authentic. Simply pretending Hive isn't more censorial and every bit as centralized as Web2 platforms will not change the present trajectory. Even if we do manage to correct errors and change course we have a significant burden of negative reporting to overcome, and that will only happen by Hive demonstrating durable reform of the specific impediments to user satisfaction, which will take as long to create as it took to destroy. These impediments stem from code that enables plutocratic governance of the platform, that directs >90% of rewards to the ~36 whales that have maintained a bare majority of stake since the inception of the platform in 2016 to the present day. If stake can't be organically distributed to authors by forthright subjective curation of their market, Hive will remain incapable of meeting the societal need, of social media society controls: social media of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The myriad mechanisms potential to favor substantial stake cannot be operant on Hive, or that societal need will remain unmet by Hive. There isn't a market for these changes in the demographic presently able to effect these changes, neither amongst current stakeholders, nor those that might join or replace them. Prudence requires stake be managed to conserve and increase it, or imprudent stakeholders will decrease and lose their stake. This is not particular to Hive, but simply reflects IRL factors affecting management of stake regardless of it's form, whether fiat, Hive tokens, or beaver pelts.

Why would people invest their stake into the Hive platform without the potential to increase their wealth more than competing investments? This question is very deceptive, because the definition of wealth moderates the meaning of increase, and money isn't wealth. The vast majority of stakeholders are incompetent to correctly define wealth and think number go up is increasing their wealth, which I will here demonstrate to reasonable people is not true. Today the ruinous inflation of the dollar supply deceives the vast majority of people regarding management of their stake because they do not accurately reckon the value of dollars in real time, and falsely believe that a 20% raise in 5 years is an increase in their income when inflation is running >5% per year. Number go up from $100k/yr to $120k/yr, but if that happens once every 5 years, it's actually a 5% loss in income when inflation is 5%/yr, and inflation is higher than that today (on top of cumulative losses in years between raises).

However, an even more obscure truth is that money isn't wealth. Many things that are wealth can be purchased with money, and this is what deceives people to think of money as wealth, but there are forms of wealth that cannot be purchased for money, and honest prudence is to increase wealth, not money. Creating a robust society of competent people that will prevent tyranny is more valuable than any financial fortune, but the return on the investments necessary to do so is almost mythically impossible to attain because the means of producing that return is ubiquitously unknown. None of us, particularly not me, fully understands humanity, the universe, and our place and purpose in it. We're simply incompetent to even perceive the vast majority of reality. Given that fact we are incompetent to predict what investments will produce such a society - even if we accurately and well understand humanity and our purpose, which none of us do.

So people generally stick to metrics they do understand, and use them as stand ins for real wealth by analogy. Number go up more than inflation would be considered by almost everyone as an increase in wealth, despite it ignores the myriad subtleties of freedom and prosperity that actually underlie wealth IRL. This is the real problem Hive faces in a world rapidly falling into technocratic totalitarian tyranny, in which the internet will be leveraged to render all communications, including transactions, subject to the permission of the technate. This is an existential hurdle almost none of us correctly reckons as an impediment to wealth, because it renders our every public word susceptible to censorship, and our every transaction dependent on meeting any demand of the technate for permission to settle. Automated via AI, these permits render humanity to chattel, without exception but independence from the internet and centralized production.

Hive isn't likely to create an alternative to the internet, much less foster independent decentralized production of the blessings of civilization, which makes Hive's potential to create free and prosperous society practically nil. 5 years ago the platform was more potential to create such alternatives, but that potential was utterly precluded by ignorance of the exigency we face, and Hive has never even sought to overcome the misapprehension of wealth because that misapprehension is practically ubiquitous.

The reality on the ground is that Hive properly managed to enable permission free communications and transactions, or something like it, will be necessary for independent means to exist in a global technocratic totalitarian tyranny that is being imposed today, but ignorance and ubiquitous substitution of metrics for increase in real wealth completely obscures the needs of free and prosperous society in emergent exigent conditions on the ground today, historically, and predictably going forward. While reining in avarice and growing Hive once potentiated timely resolution of these challenges, the failure to do so in the last 5 years has all but eliminated that potential, and in fact there is such faint recognition of this existential threat to freedom and prosperity that there is no ongoing effort to surmount it, either on Hive or anywhere else. Checkmate in 5.

It is practically certain that Hive, and everything else presently operant, will be rendered subject to the technate, and only novel developments will arise to enable investment to attain to real wealth, which requires free and prosperous society. Without free and prosperous society, wealth doesn't exist. No amount of money, food, bunkers, or any measurable asset has value absent free and prosperous society, and the fact humanity has never been globally enslaved prevents people from conceiving of the devaluation of the metrics they have adopted to reckon wealth.

It's not going to be enough to simply rectify the plutocratic control of governance, and the mechanism of suppressing user growth that enables it, flagging people off the platform - and that has proved irremediable anyway. Branding won't help. Hive needs to expand it's delivery of free speech and transactions beyond what was envisioned in 2016 to mitigate the present imposition of a global technate, which requires getting around the private ownership of the extant network infrastructure that renders the internet a permissioned resource and subjects free speech and free markets to censorship. Digital ID, communication and transaction by permission only, and total information awareness combined with AI management by algorithm eliminates free and prosperous society, and wealth with it. Absent free speech and markets, Hive has no utility.

Thanks!