While the rewards on Hive are inevitably to decrease, I do think the recent cut in the HF fucked over the community without initially realising that would be the case. A desperate bid to cut inflation actually just reduced the rewards dramatically which discouraged our already dwindling numbers. And lower prices naturally only exacerbated things.
But yeah most communities are quite dead now. Very few are actually 'alive' in the sense that they have more than 100 active posters. Even Photography Lovers is dying off and photography has always been one of the main subjects on Hive. Next up is travel. Though that has somehow managed to stay relatively propped up.
Unfortunately what remains are auto votes and people upvoting just their friends. The real curation is gone and clearly people aren't wanting to put in effort to make 25 cents per post. And to no surprise, few people are willing to buy Hive even at these prices because if the front-ends look empty, and there's a 13 week window to unstake, there's a good chance money will be lost if our daily trade volume doesn't pick up. Not saying this is the case, but multiple signs point to total platform death. The chain can be functional, but what good is it if there are no wide range of communities or people to post?
Anyone that stumbles across Hive right now will likely look at it the way a niche forum from 2008 looks today.
RE: The bottleneck is getting narrower.