Some good insights here, however I am a bit challenged to find examples to support the following claim:

"You're right when you say many left when they realized there weren't enough curators. Thousands left."

I still follow some of the people that left here, and followed many before they left. Never once did I read someone state their reason for leaving was they just couldn't gain traction, they just couldn't get readers.

Various other complaints that have been alleged to be the reason for the abysmal user retention of Steem, and now Hive, demonstrate have not either been supported IME, save one. DV's.

Flagging was responsible for every single ragequit or departure I was told the reason for. Flagging into the dust, forever, on every post and comment. I also don't think they were wrong, because it is mathematically demonstrable that flagging concentrates and centralizes stake on the platform. Hive remains woefully centralized today, because flags concentrate stake in the accounts of whales. BT practically owns the platform today, and his extraction of DHF grants is among the primary reasons Hive is below $.1 today.

~36 whales have continuously maintained a bare majority of stake (excluding the Founder's stake) from the inception of Steem to this day, and they continue to monopolize >90% of the inflation issuing from the rewards pool. That's the issue that drives people off the platform, and it always has been the issue that has crippled user retention.

Social media became the largest sector of global financial markets about the time Steem advented. Today it is still the largest sector of that market, and this platform has crashed from #3 in coinmarketcap to >400 last I checked. The innovation of the rewards pool, consumers curating the creators and content they liked directly, no ads, and no censorship had potential to dominate social media, the largest sector in the global financial markets, yet has eroded it's userbase and polluted the market with the stench of the honest and true complaints of the quitters that the claim to be censorship resistant was complete BS, and that's what drove them away.

Hundreds of influential creators with substantial followings were censored by that mechanism, robbed of the rewards their followers provided them for their content, and ragequit for good damn reason. DV's are essentially taxation. Every stakeholder can tax every producer on Hive to the limit of their stake for any - or no - reason at all. Can you even imagine how IRL business would operate in that kind of tax environment? No significant businesses would make products to sell them, because no profits for their work could be counted on. Ford would destroy Toyota, and BMW would tax away every pfennig Chevrolet earned. Some few monopolies, just like on Hive, would extract >90% of the purchase money spent for their products, because no one dared to tax them because the retaliatory taxation would utterly destroy them.

After April 2017 Steem experienced a mass influx of users that overcame the onboarding and UI issues to begin blogging here. The whales sucked up every satoshi of their earning if they didn't powerdown and flee in disgust. >1M accounts came on and left because of flags from Bernie and curangel, Marky and the rest. I have discussed with hundreds of them what happened and why they left, and ubiquitously they left because of flags. None of them ever cited any other reason.

Hundreds of us remain, and we remain because we aren't ambitious, don't care about financial rewards, never stuck our heads up to get shot down, or just can't stand Big Tech censorship and put up with almost anything else to avoid it. Right now KYC and digital ID is crashing alternative platforms like substack across the world. It's Hive's big chance to capture all those creators that are unwilling to comply with KYC to post, and unwilling to self censor to be allowed to post. Are we gaining any new onboards because of our censorship resistance?

No, we're not. No one believes we offer censorship resistance because >1M ex users flagged off the platform have infused us with the stench of durable outrage and hatred for our lies. Taxation is theft, and taxation applied for opinions is censorship. We aren't better than X, Fakebook, or Goolag. We're worse - and they're terrible.

As the price continues to collapse because BT is mining the DHF for the millions of $ left there to steal, what's left of our userbase continues to dwindle, and people that have endured for years finally lose all hope and give up.

At the same time Blurt's token value rises against Hive's. Despite the other issues Blurt has (which I'm not going into here, but are substantial) the lack of flags makes it preferable to Hive. We're at an existential boundary.

If we don't fix it, Hive will collapse to nothing, the witnesses will quit paying for servers they can't afford, the last Hive will be sold to some sucker for $.0001, and you and I will each wait for the other to leave so we can turn off the lights when we go.

~36 whales will have to find some other opportunity to profit by renting stake, and it will be up to Blurt to enable the tech Steem advented to take over the social media space. Maybe they'll get some investment - which will probably turn the platform into the private domain of someone like Sun Yuchen, and that will be the end of that.

Flags will have killed a platform that could have taken over the largest sector in global financial markets because of greed for birds in hand and a pathological need for control. Even if we get rid of flags, the fact that Hive is a pure plutocracy makes it incapable of enabling free speech. One big investment captures the witnesses, and then it's a private playground, just like Steem is today. I don't even think Blurt is any different, so it's just as existentially fragile.

Is it really so hard to reward and value other metrics than money? I guess so, because we never managed it.

Edit: also curation rewards aren't payment for looking at content. They're payment for upvoting content, regardless of the content. They replace the subjective curation of content with purely financial incentive. They're the bulk of rewards today on Hive, >60% of the rewards paid out of the rewards pool. The profiteers are averse to marketing Hive, which is what quality posts and happy creators well rewarded do, have little time and interest in creating content, for the most part, and prefer circle jerks and curation rewards to pump out ROI.

No platform without curation rewards lacks for upvotes on quality content. No one reads content to get curation rewards because that's not what provides curation rewards. All they have to do is upvote Taraz, and they get a fair return on their vote. They don't have to actually read the (good) writing he produces. They can dump 10 100% votes on similar guaranteed authors and call it a day, every day. Lots of other good authors get ignored because the rewards on their posts aren't as consistent as are Taraz's.

Curation rewards are a complete failure to incentivize curation because that's not what they reward. They financially reward upvoting highly rewarded posts, and that's got nothing to do with actual curation. Four things could fix Hive. 1) burn the DHF. 2) use some other social value for governance, or create some kind of voluntarist witness list that enables people to choose their preferred witnesses rather than living with the choices of substantial stakeholders, or something other than pure plutocracy. 3) eliminate curation rewards. 4) eliminate at will flags. Limit flags to plagiarism, and other scams that mine author rewards, and only on posts that demonstrate the problem. They don't actually discourage spam and scams, that aren't dependent on author rewards and demonstrably don't care about flags.