I've been around since the Steemit days back in 2018. I've seen the fork, the drama, the promises, and the cycles of hope and disappointment. So when I say this, I'm not saying it as someone passing through. I'm saying it as someone who keeps coming back because I genuinely want this place to work.

The fundamental problem with Hive is that there is little to no incentive for non-whales. It is really, genuinely difficult to grow here unless you've got deep pockets or you've been here long enough to have accumulated significant stake. The whole premise of posting, replying, and interacting to earn crypto sounds great on paper. In practice, this place has always been dominated by whales and the curation systems that orbit around them. If you're a newcomer with something interesting to say but no existing connections, good luck. You're shouting into the void.

I go through periods where I stop posting for months at a time. I stop building things for Hive. I walk away. And then something pulls me back. Maybe it's the tech, maybe it's the potential, maybe it's just stubbornness. I come back hoping that some of the longstanding problems have been addressed. They never are. The same issues I had in 2020 are the same issues I have in 2026.

If you go to the homepage of Hive right now and sort by trending, what do you see? I'll tell you what I see. Garbage. And I don't say that to disrespect the people who are actively trying, because some of you are putting in real effort and I see that. But I would say 80 to 90 percent of what shows up on trending every single time I look is either poorly written AI slop, poorly written human slop, or outright spam. And then mixed in with that, you get update posts from various projects (usually alternative UIs for Hive) that read like they were written in five minutes with zero thought given to presentation or clarity. These are supposed to be the flagship projects of the ecosystem and their communication looks amateur.

Here's a concrete example. This post for a music video with some commentary is currently sitting at $13 worth of upvotes: @harbiter/6e6c8cbd. I don't want to pile on the creator personally, but this is not a $13 post. It just isn't. And when you look at where those upvotes are coming from, the largest votes by weight are curation bots. That makes it worse, not better. It means the system itself is propping up low quality content through automated voting, which completely undermines the idea that Hive rewards good work. If bots are deciding what's valuable, then humans don't matter. And if humans don't matter, why would any human stick around?

The homepage is the front door. It's the first thing most people see when they arrive. And yes, maybe not everyone uses the main Hive UI. Maybe they go to PeakD or Ecency or whatever else has nicer styling. But I guarantee you the underlying content being surfaced isn't dramatically better, because the content problem isn't a UI problem. It's an incentive problem. No amount of CSS is going to fix the fact that Hive looks like a blockchain of spam and whales to anyone walking in off the street.

I would genuinely love to see Hive succeed. I love building for Hive. I love the idea of decentralised social media where creators own their content and aren't at the mercy of some algorithm controlled by a corporation.

That vision is worth fighting for.

But the people who care about this blockchain beyond just earning upvotes and farming crypto get buried. They don't get the curation bot votes. They don't get the whale votes. They write thoughtful posts that take hours and get rewarded with pocket change while low effort content floats to the top because the right bot picked it up. This is not a place that rewards high quality content. It's a place that rewards stake and connections.

And guess what happens to the people with the most potential? They leave. Because this place is a casino where only the whales who do not care about Hive reap the rewards and have enough stake to always win.

We seriously need to do something about this. The Hive of 2026 compared to the Hive of 2020 and 2021 feels desolate. Fewer real conversations, fewer passionate builders, fewer people who actually care about the long term health of this chain. The people who are still here and still trying deserve better than what this ecosystem currently offers. And the people who left? They left for a reason. Until we're honest about what those reasons are, nothing changes.