Some Pessimistic Thoughts About the State of Hive

The Good

These are where I feel Hive excels or at least has had some level of success.

• Surviving as a project for over 7 years
• Surviving as a community for over 7 years
• A whole bunch of people who are really dedicated to the project. You might even say passionately committed to the project.
• There's a wide range of front ends and applications which continue to run successfully on the chain
• Fast and reliable transactions
• Having salvaged the broken HBD and turned it into a genuine, if illiquid stablecoin stationarycoin.
• HBD genuinely being used as money, and increasingly so, though still at a very small scale.
• Having a functional DAO which provides the resources to support the most important 'infrastructure' elements of the network, eg. Keychain, Core Developers, HBD stability etc.
• Avoiding governance capture of exchanges or other actors in the crypto space who are not especially aligned with our interests.

The Bad

These are the problems that seem to just continually persist for Hive. In some cases these issues have gotten worse since the fork away from Steem.

• Community struggles to collectively prioritize issues and focus on resolving the most pressing and/or persistent problems, ie. level of organization.
• Insularity of incentives - content is primarily directed inwards to the community, with no sense in pursuing outside traffic to raise awareness of Hive front ends.
• The wider crypto community appears to be entirely oblivious to Hive
• Outreach programs such as on Twitter appear to end up having Hivers just promoting Hive to eachother without attaining any meaningful outside reach.
• Inability to attract capital outside of the luck of having our tokens on UpBit (where people who know almost nothing about Hive continue to speculate, ever increasing the amount of Hive held on that exchange).
• Difficulty in innovating or improving on our tokenomics - we have no way to collect data on how well a change in the consensus rules will actually work, or if they have even worked in retrospect. We can only speculate on how tokenomics may change things for the chain, but even when a change is applied we have no way to know if it actually improved things or made them worse.
• User on boarding numbers extremely low - periods of high user growth were not sustained for long.
• User retention low. New user retention particularly bad and persistently low.
• User experience is still a long way off of web2
• Lack of trading volume or speculative interest in the core token puts us at risk of delisting, making us reliant on a small number of exchanges. It's also possible that exchanges will come to view Hive as a security in the future (rightly or wrongly).

Please feel free to comment on my inclusions, or add more positives or negatives that I may have missed.