I see this as a buying opportunity.
Selling Hive now is a stupid idea, you will regret it.

Everybody seems intent on skirting the layer 1 issues and that is a mistake..I guarantee it.

I've already pitched what needs to be done but while people are sitting with their dicks in their hands other alt tech platforms are scooping up conservatives.

I saw you were chatting on the same discord and perhaps you didn't see but seems rather y'all are seeking solutions that are oblique to what is the straight line to the goal.

It's ok to be a squeaky wheel but what matters in the end is the direction that wheel is going.

100%

> We have seen that non-blogging applications on Hive can be attractive and popular, even to people outside of our bubble. We've even seen social media interfaces like LeoFinance do quite well on Hive with their own token distribution.

This.

These days, I'd rather spend time on some of the games and focus on certain tribes than mingle with most of the so-called "content creators" on the chain.

My take away from this is the need for a new foundation of Hive. If the censorship resistant blogging doesn't make us gain traction, then what will? The chain hemorrhages funds with only a minute return and only games seem to bring eyes and usage now.

Maybe we need a promotion that will give people a reason to join? Oh wait, we've tried that... 

How about freedom? 
No one cares.

Maybe the "rewards"? 
History has shown how that works out for anyone new.

The disgust with other social media sites, Maybe? 
Not likely, humans are not willing to change their comfort level. Learning scares most lay people and this new thing will just make them run. 

We still have gaming!
What chain doesn't? Ohh, we have splinterlands, weee. That has done nothing for chain adoption.

At this point something has to drastically change or else we will be sitting in an echo chamber of a few thousand people in a world of billions. At some point the wake up call happens and I really hope this chain is able to rise to the occasion. 

But his all comes from a user of the chain, not a dev, so what the fuck do I know.

<b>We need to make Account Creation free and easy again</b>
Back in the days when we could send people directly to steemit.com for easy quick signup, we did grow in users by great amounts, and for every X user we got Y amount of them invested and powered up. A numbers game really.

Then came the restrictions and RC. All of a sudden we were no longer going to be progressive but conservative due to a fear of Noganoo stealing the best names. 

afterwards, there was no way to target groups on the Internet to just come and create an account anymore, everything stagnated as new users now had to either pay for an account or get an account from someone who had accounts to give, this problem destroyed any efforts we did in marketing and we gave up trying to onboard new users, it was just too hard after the restrictions came.

I suggest we remove anything restricting new accounts from being created for free. Onboarding needs to be as simple as to just send people to hive.blog and other front ends and have whoever that wants sign up in a few very easy steps. 

<b>I am certain it will be profitable for everyone, and we should do it quickly
</b>

You and Marky said it better than I could. 

Let’s double down on what works instead of repeating what doesn’t work ad nauseum.

Just as a thought experiment, let's say one month from now there's a hardfork so all inflation is cut in half.  And let's also say that it has zero effect on the marketcap.  What would the next step be?

In my opinion, letting unit price and ranking on CMC drive your technical decisions is not the best strategy.  That is an eternally moving goalpost.  Aside from many people with significant stake built it by gaming or exploiting the system, it basically shuts the door behind those people in regard to participating in base chain governance organically.  If it needs to eventually be done for survival sake, so be it, but...

Many arguments for blog reward removal are based on the premise that additional functionality is there (I.E. SMTs, etc.), that I think most of us can agree is needed.  Either way we need this additional functionality.  Hive Engine has been a decent stop gap, but we need a more robust base layer.
 Let's get this built and in place. In theory, the demand for base token post rewards and base chain posting should diminish because people will be too busy posting from the shittoken.io interface for their shit tokens.  At that point, perhaps this argument will become more self-evident and can be revisited.

Long powerdown time put us nearly 0 interest from outside hive bubble. Hoping to keep price by reducing liquidity hasn’t worked out. 

until Bitcoin breaks 20k and Ethereum and other coins break all time highs alt coins will bleed. Once everyone is pumped and in profits they will feel more like gambling on alt coins. its just how it goes. The problem is not Hive the problem is the market.

Many of us have been calling for gutting inflation rewards on the common reward pool for years now, and I still remain firmly in support of this move. Or at least an interim solution that sees inflation drop to 2% or so, before we have the vision for a complete overhaul. 

> Another reason to get into cryptocurrencies is to use them as transactional currencies and to facilitate payments. I think this is where Hive can excel. We can take advantage of 3-second block times, free transactions, and personalized account names. These are features that many end-users want.

While this was certainly a legit use case for Steem in 2016, I'm afraid this is no longer relevant. 

1) The DPoS consensus mechanism has proved to be a catastrophic failure, and after the Steem debacle no one will trust this network with any significant value. DPoS cultists love to point how the fork proves that it works, but it really doesn't. Steem is still under 51% attack, and will forever be. Despite how flawed PoW is, this would never happen there. 

2) Even if people were OK with the severe decentralization and security compromises DPoS brings, there's a far superior version of it out there in EOS. They have raised $4 billion, pushed hard on various fronts, and still failed to capture any meaningful economic activity. Hive has no chance. 

3) But that brings me to the biggest issue, all of this is now possible on Ethereum. ZK Rollups are the single greatest innovation in crypto since bitcoin invented blockchain, and ethereum made it programmable, in my opinion. Today, we have services like Loopring Pay and zkSync which offer <$0.01 transfers with 0.3 second finality for ALL ERC-20 assets. Other dApps like Gods Unchained are also starting to integrate similar technologies, and I'd imagine within a few months scalability will no longer be an issue on ethereum. Wallets are starting to integrate ENS names. E.g. you could open on account on Status with ats-david.snt.eth for free; or pay something to secure ats-david.eth or ats-david.crypto or whatever. So the account names thing is no longer an advantage either. And of course, all of this achieved with the massive decentralization, security and network effects ethereum brings.

Today, there are only 25 people at most who can run Hive profitably. IMO, there is only one or two of these with any sort of credibility and reputation in the crypto space, most of them are random yahoos, conspiracy theorists and opportunists (No offense meant, you know this is true). Do you think people would trust this network, with a history of consensus failure, with any kind of significant value? I certainly wouldn't and no one I have spoken to with any real stake in crypto will either. As a contrast, the Ethereum 2.0 Medalla testnet has 100,000 validators, with more likely being present for Ethereum 2.0 when it launches. That is what massive decentralization looks like. This is the very steep cost to giving away free transactions without a revolutionary technology like ZK Rollups to optimize them. 

Finally, Reddit is introducing tokenization on ethereum with some scaling solution like zk Rollups (they haven't decided yet). Why on earth would anyone use Hive?

In my opinion, the best case scenario for Hive now is to completely overhaul the system to be a niche outlet for social media and gaming. 

PS: Hive is #151 on Coingecko today. Damn, how far we done fell. This is now the single greatest failure in crypto, for what was once a top 3 project.

100% agree with what you said, but I think the transition should be slow. We can't completely remove rewards instantly as that will cause massive selling. Maybe start by reducing inflation a little bit, then using SMTs and airdrop one for the social media usecase. 

Lots of work ahead as always. 

Indeed. Compounding inflation is going to sink us completely. Main chain should have a steady supply of coins to make things robust, 2nd layer solution, apps, games can have their own thing as they already do have. Main reason why ethereum is still strong is because the supply of the coin is predictable and steady, Steem, early mining, insane inflation, lock periods, more inflation, when you step back and think about how every idea failed miserably and most of Hive community still thinks 9% inflation on Hive is a good idea is insane. Only a miracle can save this system or some insane bull market that happened few years ago.

Based on current evidence you're completely right, people aren't interested in sticking around and we can't compete. 

However, we've never actually paid anyone significant amounts of money to develop a social media application - I mean PeakD has been put together for hardly any funding, and it's not bad for free!

It would be nice to actually pay Devs to just put something world class together, or just pay the LEO team from the DAO as they're on the case with a working model. 

However I get the impression that there's not enough HP interest to get such things funded, so I think we've no chance of giving Hive as a blogging chain a real shot. 

I don't necessarily think reducing the rewards pool is a bad thing, I'd hate to see it go altogether though. 

As to marketing, that is a real tragedy - I mean the twitter campaign, I'd best not say anything as there's nothing good I can say about it. 

I think that's a case of 'anyone thinks they can do it' but clearly everyone whose involved is just crap at it.

We probably are fucked already. As someone else said in the comments, who fucking looks at page 2 anyway?

I'll repeat what I said in another place.

---

I am a big fan of taking social media out of Hive, turning into a dapp on a native smart contract, moving rewards to a smt and keeping the same look and feel of "hive" but as a dapp rather than the entire point of the blockchain.  Then we will be far more attractive to projects like Gods Unchained, Crypto Kitties, and the next best thing™

---

I would like to see the core Hive functionality as attractive to dapps as possible, not social media dapps, not reward pool dapps, all types of dapps.

The reward pool puts a strain on the Hive token to the point any new investor that comes here needs to participate in posting, curating, and abuse fighting to keep up with the loss from inflation, loss from others doing it better than them, and the loss from reward pool privilege you see taking over trending.  

Custom JSON is the only real support we have for Dapps outside of transactions.  It is very difficult to build a trustless system using custom jsons without building a 2nd layer p2p network.  

Hive Engine is a good example of this.  It is centralized and the only way to protect against them up and leaving is building new consensus layer (aka Hive Engine witnesses).  This is the same for every other dapp that wants to come here and build a trustless system. 

The thing is, most of the dapps that want to do something like this (Hive Engine, Splinterlands, and other games) are "interactive" and performance is critical.  With stacked conensus layers you are going to see even slower response times than what you see on Hive now.

I think the two biggest things we can do to make Hive take off is get native smart contract support so we can build trustless systems without a second consensus layer via trustless transparent smart contracts and reducing the strain on the primary Hive token.  Then we will have something everyone wants and it will be hard not to successful.  This is something I think people would want to invest into.  Look at how bad ETH is for this sort of thing, then look at how many people using it anyway and how much ETH is worth.  Imagine giving them that same experience without the large variable unpredictable transaction fees and slow confirmations?  

Just to be clear, I don't want to get rid of the social layer of Hive, I want to see it as a dapp in a smart contract using a SMT reward token on a more flexible Hive blockchain, one of many potential social media dapps.  To average joe user, there would be almost no change at all to the social media experience if done right.

This is a huge undertaking and a radical view, and not something I think that can happen right away, but I think it would be a drastically change Hive's attraction.