Was reading 
You know what would be cool? More airdrops.
I did a few wave of airdrops for STEM. Many do an initial one and that's it, and leave it to distribution from there. In my opinion, most of them are very lopsided initially and creates a very unfair starting point that allows certain people to snowball rapidly. When I did my airdrop, I had a cap and then future airdrops were based on performance in the community.
But acid, why should I buy up my own token I spent 500 hive to create when I can just give myself x% of the starting supply, silly.
Heheh, if only it was 500 Hive. It's more like 6,000-10,000 depending on what options you choose (i.e. NFT, Proposals, LP Pool).
While I mostly agree most of the Hive Engine tokens are shit, there are a lot of reasons for that. A big reason is Hive goes up in price and Hive Engine tokens go down in price to reflect that, Hive goes down in price and Hive Engine tokens don't really go up in price. They just keep going down and don't recover as there is no buy pressure.
I suspect this is mostly due to the fact most Hive Engine tokens are dumped and most don't keep them. They are considered "extra rewards on my post" and not much more than that. This creates endless sell pressure driving the price down.
With STEM I am aggressively burning tokens to burn as much as 100% or more of the weekly inflation. I have a few ways I do this, the main reason behind it is we just don't have enough people for a STEM community to thrive, so I don't want to just inflate tokens for no reason. STEM is already the lowest inflation out of all tribes, and with the burn there is almost no inflation at all. Without a large stable userbase, it doesn't really matter, no one cares and thus nothing happens. Solid tokenomics mean nothing without demand and users.
A major reason Hive Engine tokens are the way they are is the small user base on Hive. Leo did really well because everything Leo does is on topic of Leo, LP pools, wrapped tokens, it's all Leo topics. No one in a Science/Tech community gives a damn about LP pools, wrapped tokens, so it's far harder to make those type of services take off.
The reason a lot of tokens likely don't have more value is because it's virtually impossible to justify. Leo spent something like $20K USD to build their front end, and far more for all their "add-on" services that really only fit in a Finance themed commyunity. For STEMGeeks outside of the initial sale of miners, it loses money monthly, there is no absolutely no revenue stream. None of these communities have enough views to make ad revenue work.
I don't see anyone buying NFTs through Tribes (aka Outposts) as much as aggroed say they are going to get rich doing so.
I can't see proposals paying off either, there isn't much to vote on that a simple post can't handle.
Most LP Diesel pools have no volume except for splinterlands ones. So unless you dig out of your pocket and bribe people to put into it, there isn't much going on here except the cost to set it up.
For my community STEM, I can't justify dumping a ton of money into it when no one is really using it. The entire market cap right now is $20K, what am I going to do when there is no revenue stream and just a handful of users using it. I'd put the tokenomics of STEM against any token out there on Hive Engine, but again it doesn't matter without users.
I can go on and on, there are really so many reasons for this, but the most critical is the size of the userbase and a lot (if not most) just sell off the rewards immediately.
To be honest, I dump most Hive Engine tokens automatically and only hold the ones I care about (or most honestly in the sunk cost fallacy department). I lost tens of thousands of dollars from what I did buy that I know I will never remotely come close to make up. Every day I say I should just dump it, but the market can't handle it and the price is so low already.