There is an owner, it's just an association of whales.  A few dozen whales command the vast majority of rewards, and tailor their capture to their needs.  The user base has been reduced to a few thousand actual people, which actually lend a veneer of legitimacy to the platform and extend the duration of Hive to it's profiteers.

I await the eventuation of an actual censorship resistant social media platform that delivers what Hive only promises.  

@ned well revealed the motivations of oligarchs.  Plutocracies are contraindicated as management of societies, for the obvious reason that plutocrats only seek their benefit.  Actual decentralization will eventuate, somewhere.  Somewhere else, apparently.

People are the fundamental purpose of society, and Hive is a society that has no purpose without it's users.  I know there are AI bots I interact with already, that have become competent to post and comment better than most people.  Hive is becoming a few whales that funnel all the tokens into their wallets using bots, while the actual society withers and is flagged away.

In the meantime the market for censorship resistance grows apace with increasing censorship across the social media landscape, and society increasingly suffers the inability to shout 'Fire!' in a burning theater.  This isn't merely an economic or financial matter.  It's a matter of survival, and people are dying by the millions for lack of forthright speech.  What Hive could be becomes increasingly valuable to humanity, while Hive loses it's ability to provide that value due to regulatory capture by the oligarchy that own it.

What we need is to retain users that make the effort to onboard.  That will require a fund nominal to mitigate opinion flags and a bot capable of it.  @freezepeach has not managed to provide nominal mitigation despite the outstanding persons and intent of that service.

Hive has lost ~2M accounts since 2017.  It has lost untold tens of millions that they would have onboarded through their networks.  Hive will not recapture those users nor dissipate the stench of their outrage at being flagged off the platform by any lesser means, nor perhaps by any means short of ending the ability of taxation to censor forthright speech.

I appreciate your substantive consideration, but only ceasing taxing of free speech will suffice to the problem.