Hive has been around only for a little while when you look back at the history of it. You really can't count the days of steemit IMO as the blockchain went through some major upgrades compared to steem when the hard fork took place and the year after.
There's a bit of competition out there today as web3 and what people feel the next phase of web3 are might be different from hives and your own. That's perfectly fine as there's no real solid definition as to what it is or what's required.
Platforms like Diamond and Primal which please feel free to follow me on there and let me know in the comments so I can drop you one back. This could be a great area to promote hive is we get more boots on the ground and value!
Since then there's been core development and relatively small changes. At least to me there's been a kind of lack in developer tools and ways to attract more developers to the blockchain to build applications on top of it. However that being said there are still some very great options on hive through a few development teams.
For example InLeo has done a good job in brining short form content to hive which has prided itself as the "social" blockchain and so it should since that's primarily what it has been founded on over the years. A place to interact, share content and be rewarded for it.
The biggest downplays on that however is the constant negative pressure with no focus as all in terms of brining revenue in from those social integrations like a normal web2 social platform would do.
I get it people think ads suck, they are annoying and they get in the way. But they also pay the bills and bring in the revenue you need in order to pay people out or in the case of web2 support the company with profits. One of the biggest things web3, blockchain and crypto needs to get over is that ads have no place here.
Ads have a HUGE place here and instead of stuff the pockets of the greedy higher ups it now is decentralized to every user on the chain. That's where the transition and the power comes from.
So the question remains can hive still compete?
The answer to that is yes. This mainly comes down to some visions of a few of the layer two tokens. In particular InLeo is one of the only front ends that took on the tasks to open hive up from just a blogging platform. But we also have VIMM streaming, 3speak for video and lots of games to go with it all such as Splinterlands
However hive or at least the 2nd layer tokens need to start to find a way to bring revenue in in which they are paying out. For example there's no reason why 3 speak shouldn't be running some form of ads. Even a minor banner ad on the side or bottom of videos would at least be something and could then be tied to the smart contract to use that ad revenue to pay creators.
This is currently the biggest disconnect of web3 and why it hasn't caught on much at all yet. The fact that your content doesn't earn anything after a 7 day window on hive or unless someone buys and then gives you money on a social network. The backbone of it all for success would be ad revenue that is then tied to the token and given out to stake holders and content creators of the platform. InLeo has started to do this however so far in my opinon have greatly failed to still deliver on it. There's no real UI update or UX update that lets you know what you're earning and so far I haven't seen a single payout. To me if InLeo simply focused on this and got it running already we would be leaps and bounds ahead of web3 adoption than where we currently are so lets hope Q1 for InLeo brings results and not more and more broken promises and delays like their 3 year track record so far.
Hive has massive potential but we just need people to build it and build it in a way that makes sense and compounds value and rewards that to its users. We will get there but it really needs to start happening this year if we want to get traction before someone else does it.
Hive also needs to figure out what it wants to be. Right now it's more of a token earned with emissions but no way of replacing it besides general growth of the user base. If more users come on, earn rewards and stick around then that means less tokens overall, more demand and thus a price increase. It also needs to figure out how to correctly get layer 2 tokens on its chain and then perhaps rely on them for rewarding content and remove that reward system from hive. (Something I don't see happening or being a positive move) So where does the value for hive come from?