Hive is a shit CMS compared to WordPress. We don't support custom CSS or jquery. Heck, there are some HTML tags and markdown codes that some Hive portals support and others don't. We don't really have any good way to categorize posts, nor track tag usage. And so on. Comparing to WordPress is a losing battle because in both technical and in ease-of-use features, they blow Hive away. But that's to be expected: designing a good CMS is their only job, whereas on Hive it always seems like the CMS is secondary to everyone else. 

Hive does compare better against Medium and Substack. I still try to echo my posts on both, but it is so painful to do. I think the only attraction of those two networks is the possibility of making money on posts and the examples of many people making pretty good money (much better than anyone except whales make on Hive). People read an article somewhere about how top Medium writers get $10k a month, they get stars in their eyes, and BOOM go open an account. It's a similar attraction as that of YouTube. YouTuber is one of the top future job wishes for elementary students these past few years for a good reason. Fortune and Glory, kid. 

I fully agree that Hive should deëmphasize the crypto. At least I would support hiding the value of each post. Maybe a post author can still see what they are making, and the blockchain is public of course so after a payout anyone can sniff at things and see what you made, but that should not be displayed for everyone to easily see on peakd and other portals. It attracts the wrong kind of people, and it's not even giving an accurate image, since curators get 50% of that number under the post.

But I would say, as I always do and have been for the past 8 years, the biggest thing holding Hive back is it fails the grandma test. It is incredibly hard for regular people to sign up for and use. We overwhelm people with this key system that they don't understand at all and so just give up on using. It would also help Hive to allow comments from people without accounts.