Let's address one of the biggest red flags in your proposal, your Syncad profile being private:

This should be an instant red flag and non-starter for people. I know you've done great work over the years and have been instrumental in some of Hive's development, but you expect people to fund someone who has their contributions to a decentralised blockchain set to private? Come on man, that just makes it look like you have something to hide.

There is zero reason to set your profile to private.

A 17% reduction is not good enough, sorry. We're in the AI era where devs of your stature can ship 10x faster, honestly, in your case it's probably higher than that (just based on my own experiences as a dev of 15 years and using AI). This is going to be a VERY hard sell. You're asking for over $100k USD a year for this proposal, but you haven't cleared up whether you're working 8 hours a day, 40 hour weeks for Hive. I highly suspect that you have a job already and Hive is a nice little side income for you, which is fine. But if you're going to ask for a full-time salary at a time when Hive is at an all-time low, that's poor taste in my opinion.

That said, I think it's misguided to focus all the pressure on reducing spending. We are living through a moment where AI is changing the economics of software development.

You contradicted yourself. You said it's misguided to focus pressure on spending, but then you point out the economics of software development thanks to AI are changing, meaning the cost of developing software is crashing and not as expense or exclusive as it once one. I don't think it's misguided, I think it's sensible we're focusing on spending, the Hive token price is collapsing.

That can be used in one of two ways: we can go at the same pace for a third of the cost, or we can go ten times faster for the same cost. Every serious competitor in this space is choosing the second option.

Nothing you have outlaid in this proposal has provided any detail as to how you're going to go ten times faster or what you plan on doing beyond mentioning reputation system fixes, focusing on the content aspect and small fixes. We don't need any of that, we need big ticket items that bring in developers, make onboarding easier and improve Hive a whole. We've got so many UI's for Hive, it's just wasted effort focusing more on the UI aspect and like 98% of the content on this chain is AI slop now. Focusing on the content will kill Hive, it's zero value.

Also, being honest, a lot of the things you mentioned could be achieved in a month or so using Claude Code or other AI tools. You haven't mentioned anything that I can see requires extensive planning or complex development.

This isn't personal. I've been scrutinising all DHF proposals and expenses. You mention this is income for you and I am not against paying people what they're worth, but you need to update this post with your biggest accomplishments and sell yourself better. Saying you're planning on working on lots of small tasks isn't inspiring confidence that funding this is going to provide value.

I also take issue with the fact you're focusing on the content aspect of Hive, Hive is more than content. Sure blogging is the main showcase application of the Hive blockchain, but it's so much more capable and I think it's wasted development effort fixing up UI bugs and focusing on feeds and content discovery when Hive is missing lite wallets and still doesn't have an officially supported layer-2 solution, despite the fact the official Hive roadmap promises it in Q1 2026 (which I doubt will happen).

I highly encourage you to read the room, the bar is so much higher now. People are rightfully pissed off. The DHF has been rorted and abused for far too long. And I am not saying you're one of the people who have done so, I am saying the bar is just so much higher and your proposal really doesn't give any detail whatsoever as to how many hours you'll be working, the things you'll be working on and so forth. If you can edit the proposal and truly be transparent and provide realistic KPIs you can achieve, you'll have better reception and success with this.