I'm starting a lot of the comment replies with a bit of copy pasta now as apology; I was initially attempting to reply to every comment from oldest to newest, but I've given up on that now to try to make sure that all negative or mixed comments are directly responded to since they're the only feedback mechanism someone who isn't making a supporting vote has.

I agree with most of what you say about us being really deeply shaped by the context of the wider market right now, because unfortunately our Hive baby has proven thus far it will always move down with the tides, but doesn't always rocket up with the swells. There's a lot to analyze and unpack with that, but the biggest reasons are that we don't buy attention (this has ALWAYS been the way to get ahead), we don't pivot with trending metas while also not always actively aligning our messaging of what we DO do to any current meta, and that we aren't able to directly participate in EVM/SVM defi (which is bad overall from a truth bomb perspective, but good in that we're not part of the horrific casino culture that's managed to both torch all worldwide goodwill for projects and suck up most of the incoming liquidity). It's much more than that, but these things are enough.

I don't mind people being heavily, openly critical at all (though some are just being shitty and there's a lot of really pervasive whisper campaigning, those aren't the people here saying it with their whole chest) because let's face it, we have years of the DHF behind us setting loose or very runaway standards without actual standards, there have been so many projects that have dumped and disappeared, and there are still a lot of really split opinions on how people should even be able to use funding. Human blockchain has a LOT of nuance to add on to permissionless, trustless software execution, and we're right in the shit now.

To borrow from other replies (sorry):

"Recognition" per se is secondary here, and I think this is probably at the absolute heart of a lot of the really knee jerk concerns which are pretty justified. Instead of spending years and the last... four? annual updates discussing at length on and off chain what the best approach would be to creating a way to push this work into full time and create standards for things that don't quantify with MAU/DAU/PRICE targets, it should have just been "Do you want me to throw aside all other work and use and funds allocated to focus on Hive full time for the next 2 full years, Y/N?"

The vast majority of that feedback for years basically has been "salaries are impossible, do the work, get paid for it after, then define more work." Now we're here, and people are rightly concerned— it's becoming obvious it's less about how the pay is defined, and more about the perception that every proposal ever made just gets bigger so more people can sit on their heels (and the proletariat.) What I do with the funds in public and what comes next as I define and execute the exponentially growing pile of tasks to support dapps and "the brand" of Hive matters a lot, and we simply won't get there, back or forwards pay, without people being brutally critical of me and me creating new standards. It absolutely sucks to follow the advice/desires of consensus, actual needs of the chain, and a lot of the less visible tasking and have it actually be shaped by the collective actions of previous proposals into "the face of extraction," but come the next few months and stretching into the extended timeline, it's mine to change.

The real takeaway is that if the proposal weren't for backpay, but for an amount going forward, it would have the exact same reactions. If I'm super careful, do Hive full time, and work through the four pillars of task categories I lay out in the post and a lot of the sub-work under them, record hours and create summaries and things like knowledge posts and transcript on my account as burn posts while working on the other invisible stuff (bd/exchanges), and then only take out enough to cover the roof over my head and a bit of food, I think I can stretch this amount for about two years. This is, again, brutal, but the point is not to make Hive pay me more than my corpo job. This is about saying, "does Hive want me to try to fill even more gaps for the next few years and step away from the corpo job?" Then at least I can create the baseline for standards which don't already exist while not losing my home. The easy path is to step away from the ecosystem, take one of the job offers available, make a lot of money that doesn't have longevity or doesn't support what's here and what's been motivating us all for so long. That's the big risk and the big swing. We all think this tech will go up, and be worth more.

No one is begrudging the safe path, and there are a ton of people on the chain who are making this decision day to day. I have the responsibility of doing that in public, because there is no app that will make a revenue to pay me, foundation to set a salary, no future token or game or revenue model that can take off other than the main value of Hive itself, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that we are missing a lot of stuff the VC/foundation chains can pay for. I don't think I can move the price of Hive myself. What I DO think I can do is tackle a LOT more than what I already am full time to fill in a ton of our gaps, set a lot of new tasks in motion, and support the needs of core and builders and users in a way that lets them all do their parts more effectively. In every other iteration of some form of belief or work organization structure, someone pays for this type of thing and hires someone to do it, but here that's just not how it is. So, I have to a) keep doing stuff that I've always been doing, which is realistically saving us a ton of money via exchanges and BD and devrel/integrations etc. that isn't just ✨GoInG tO hIvEfEsT✨ as a lot of people want to paint it b) listen to and define what dapps and users need, identify what we're missing among our competitive cohort trying to pull opportunities out of the worst market that's ever existed into self starting, self appointed tasks and c) try to create new standards, tracking, and reporting over the course of the next few years. Just being good at what I've done for more than half a decade isn't enough, but it is the proof of invested stake that I have to back up a minimal amount to try this next bit to push DHF culture/expectations forward.

Should have taken the blank cheque proposals that were written for me previously and ran, tbh. I could have built like, three houses by now! (I kid, this is an awful snarky joke, but we have to laugh at least a little.)