I don't think Hive is dying. People are still building, and people are still posting. A part of Hive does seem to be dying, though...

The profitability.

For people like me, who just come here to have a social media space that's free from the overlord's algorithms, Hive is better than ever.

For people coming here thinking they can make a living just doing social media posts, Hive is worse than ever.

Personally, I think that's for the best. There isn't one creator on Hive, and there are less than a handful on the internet, who deserve a livable income for what they post. Most people who earn well on the internet do so because of who they know, not because their content is valuable. This is true not just on Hive, but everywhere.

It looks to me like it's even true for you.

I see $.30 worth of rewards on this post already, and if we're being honest, this is a post that has no value at all. You're simply adding your opinion to an already very large pile of similar opinions. What objective value does that have? I don't mean that as any kind of insult, but rather to point out that the value of anything we do here is largely subjective.

There are hundreds of people here who are more passionate about the idea than the token price. Maybe the people running nodes now will do it altruistically, maybe not. I think there is a pretty good chance that if the whales all withdraw tomorrow, someone is going to take their place. There are already dozens of people running low-ranked witnesses for no reward.

I've seen a LOT of people on Hive claiming that Hive is dying, not because it's actually dying, but because they think they aren't getting rewarded enough. I'll happily agree that the whales get rewards that they don't earn or deserve, but that means that whales should be rewarded less, NOT that everyone else should also get rewards they don't deserve.

Of course, the whales aren't going to reward themselves less. If the people complaining about it became whales tomorrow, they wouldn't reward themselves less either. This isn't a problem with Hive, it's a problem with people. We constantly sort ourselves into systems with a few elites at the top, some castaways at the bottom, and the vast majority of people somewhere in between just trying to live their life without getting too drawn in to the problems at the top or the bottom.

It looked to me like that exact same sorting pattern was repeating on Blurt. It'll happen to the next spin-off as well. This isn't a problem people can code their way out of, moving out of this behavior is going to require people to evolve.

Hell, if Hive gets that close to death, I'll probably set up a node myself.