A couple of months back, 
I started to write a response, got distracted, then resumed but by then it got rather too long and too late, so decided to turn it into a free-standing post, instead. Then I got busy with "other things," but after revisiting it in my drafts folder this past weekend, I decided the questions were actually worthy of being revisited... especially after having had a chance to percolate in my head for a while.
Pay attention!
This post is on the long side — particularly for a "cat blog post" — but I'm going to deviate from the usual content we share here, and I'm NOT going to put a TL;DR summary here... either you're interested, or you're not. If you must scan, I have bolded key points.
But I will include lots of cat photos, for the visually oriented and easily distracted!
To encourage some engagement, I am also setting 20% of this posts rewards to be distributed by 
Our own "longcat!"
Section 1: Things I Really LIKE About Hive
Perhaps what I like most about Hive is the sense of community we have here. Still, after all these years. We talk a lot about there being "less engagement than ever," but at the same time there is very much a sense of community here.
One of the buzz-phrases that circulated for a while (it may even have been 
Another thing I really like about Hive is that the level of engagement tends to be more intelligent and courteous than on the majority of legacy social media sites. You just don't see a lot of people "SPAM-flaming" each other here. It was one of the things that originally made this a very attractive venue for the fledgling Curator Cat blog.
While me may have occasional "downvote battles," the overall tone and quality of discussion on Hive stands head and shoulders above the incendiary insult battles I encounter elsewhere.
I also really like that we have communities here, centered around hobbies, activities, interests and even points of view and perspectives. To me, it is a good reflection of how most people actually use the web. If you think about it very few people are simply "online" or "on Facebook," they are doing these things with a specific goal in mind that suits their needs and interests... most often that is a community or interest or hobby group.
I really like that we own our content here. And I say that as someone who has repeatedly been "locked out" from some of my content by the sudden appearance of a paywall — particularly on photography sites.
I like that Hive isn't age or politics segregated like many venues are... you pretty much see all ages and viewpoints represented here, and you see them interacting with each other... and that's really a big plus.
This this might be a slightly odd one, but I really like "whales who participate" in the daily community. As opposed to whales who just set up a witness node, or write some code but are otherwise invisible... other than to occasionally be part of downvote battles (more on that in the "dislike" area) or to support some initiative in the DHF.
Section 2: Things I Don’t Like About Hive
I make this statement independently of what I might think about flagging/downvoting, but perhaps the thing I like the least about this place is when personal vendettas and differences of opinion between large Hive stakeholders ends up with individuals who had no connection whatsoever to the original argument inadvertently becoming "collateral damage."
You know, as in Ed Bob Whale and Jim Bob Whale are in a feud, and Ed Bob actively downvotes anything Jim Bob has upvoted. If I were a bar owner, I'd be grabbing both of you by the scruffs of your necks and saying ”take this shit OUTSIDE, rather than spilling beer and broken glass on all the OTHER patrons!”
I can already hear a few pipe up with the boilerplate "Your rewards aren't YOURS until the 7-day period runs out" and while that it technically true it's also irrelevant in the context of some relative newcomer inadvertently being caught in the crossfire.
Stated a little differently: It's not about the money, it's about the toxic psychology of the situation.
Thankfully it's not a frequent occurrence anymore, but it does leave everybody with a sour taste in their mouth, particularly the collateral damage individuals who often end up leaving the platform altogether.
After 7+ years, one of the things I don't like about Hive is the relatively frequent duplication of dApps/features. Whereas I appreciate that it's part of the freedom of this decentralized environment, I don't much care for the endless replication of pretty much the same features by different projects/initiatives. all in the guise of "being better" than the previous iteration.
We don't really need 47 variations of the blockchain version of Twitter/X, particularly not when they each start to become proprietary about only rewarding content that is on their particular platform. What you end up with is not the benefits of decentralization but the drawback of decentralization which I would characterize as fragmentation, where each group becomes incrementally too insignificant to make any kind of broader impact... both inside the Hive sandbox, as well as outside.
Another thing I don't care about on Hive is the many ”launch it and leave it” type projects we have seen come and go, over the years.
Community, project and business building is difficult and requires you to be present and grinding it out over the long run, if you hope to reach any level of success. Simply creating something — good as it might be — and throwing it out there and then thinking it's going to succeed all on its own is not only folly, it's extremely annoying!
It also leaves a lot of corners of the community looking like a ghost town... which is not a good way to make a good impression on potential newcomers.
Which brings me to the realization that I don't like the way people get almost RELIGIOUS about decentralization. Decentralization is a fine idea, but it doesn't mean we should throw all the beneficial tenets of centralized structures out the window! These might include such things as cohesiveness, and standardization of the user experience and even economies of scale, particularly as it relates to publicity.
We don't need to reinvent the proverbial wheel, all the time! Round (centralized) wheels work perfectly well, and we should use them!
Finally, I don't care for the excessive emphasis on promoting Hive as a place to "earn rewards."
Don't get me wrong, I love that we get rewarded for creating content, and I love that monetizing content here isn't limited to just "popular people."
On the other hand, it just doesn't track that we go out in the world and emphasize "earning rewards" and then turn around and "power down shame" those same people for actually wanting to take out and use their rewards!
Perhaps the better approach would be to follow the pitch that people own their content with Hive as an opportunity to "build stake in the venue where their content is published."
Section 3: Things I Believe Would/Could Make Hive Better
After more than seven years of doing this — and occasionally dabbling in the idea of bringing other cat lovers and bloggers onto Hive — perhaps the biggest thing that Hive is lacking (particularly as far as old timers being able to help newcomers is concerned) is an adequate and functioning messaging system.
Private messages are pretty much a core part of every significant social media system. After all, we are trying to be social here, right? And yet? We can't chat directly with each other. And don't start the whole "But Discord..." thing. Needing a separate app to effectively use an app is basically 1990s blogging!
Having a good and solid message system would allow Hive's active "recruiters" to talk to the people they have brought onboard on a regular basis, to encourage them, to answer questions, to give guidance and so forth.
Such a message system would also be of great benefit to people who start and run communities, as a means to communicating directly with their members, and encouraging them to actively post and be actively part of the community.
And just to reiterate, "just use Discord" is not an adequate answer because only about 2% of the broader population is nerdy enough to be willing to futz with multiple applications to use ONE application. Nuff said!
While I am not a blockchain developer, I believe the "bare bones infrastructure" for creating such a system already is in place.
Let us consider the possibility of a small modification to "short content" apps as we already have them on Hive whether that be 
The primary modification would be to limit a thread "container" to communication between two (or more, specified) individuals. As with everything else in the Hive ecosystem the "cost" to use it would be resource credits, and to prevent anybody from gaming/abusing it with upvotes between two close friends, these person-to-person threads would have the permanent setting of 100 percent of the rewards being burned AKA sent to 
The other thing Hive really needs is a "centralized" PR department.
I'm not talking about marketing and advertising here — there are already lots of different initiatives going in that direction to bring Individual users directly onto the platform — I'm talking about a group of people, possibly elected through a similar process as witnesses... potentially being compensated by the DHF... whose sole purpose is to put Hive "in the news."
No, it's not the same thing as "Valueplan." If we need a comparable, it would be closest to some aspects of 
That is to say, they are to function as liaisons who send press releases on every single new development/update that happens on Hive to all crypto related (and even mainstream financial) news sources, blogs, vlogs and podcasts, also serving as "authorized contact points" between Hive and both centralized and decentralized exchanges, staying on top of managing and updating Hive's summary pages on CoinGecko, Coinmarketcap and anywhere else Hive has a presence.
The purpose is not to advertise Hive, the purpose is to put the name "Hive" in as many places as possible so people read about Hive without being "sold" Hive.
There's a good reason why pretty much all organizations of any size have dedicated PR departments!
Hive would also benefit from improved content discovery.
This might be accomplished by having a number (100? 250? 500?) what we might call "fixed" tags that start to auto fill for maybe the first 2-3 tags on any given post, designed purely to categorize that post.
Remaining tags would be "open" for people to add, as they see fit.
Some form of AI might be used to limit abuse by those thinking it's clever to use a "popular" tag for visibility, even if it is utterly irrelevant.
Such tags could be used to help people actually find subject matter they are interested in, and might help build more of a base of content consumers, as opposed to just content creators.
So, Therefore...
I realize that I am approaching 2,000 words here, so I'd best wrap this up while the going is good!
If this is your first time visiting 
Why cats? Because they are one of the most popular things on the Internet, and provide a nice counterpoint to techy blockchain and crypto content!
Thanks for coming to visit... and DO please leave your comments/feedback below!
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Love Cats? Get Involved in Hive's Cat Communities!
If you're a cat lover and often/sometimes post pictures or other content that includes your feline friends, why not become an active part of Hive's growing Cat Communities?
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There are a number of other feline communities listed on Hive, but I am not sharing them for now as they have not had any activity (by their Admins OR users) since the Steem/Hive fork. Updates as they become available!
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