As far as I can tell, they have made themselves victims of "the dilution problem" before they even are getting off the ground...

Weku was basically a copy of Steemit done by people thinking they could do better because of the hardfork issues. Bearshares then was a copy of Weku done by people who were pissed off that they couldn't run their scams. So you have a copy-of-a-copy.

It's like photocopies... every time you make another copy of a copy, the image sharpness dilutes. With social sites/groups, the dilution happens in the form of fewer features on one end (because the tech crews are generally smaller and smaller) and fewer users on the other end as the number of users willing to follow become fewer and fewer.

It may get up and running (Bearshares still is...) and will have a small dedicated core of 50-100 users who are amassing HUGE numbers of tokens... each of which will have a value of about $0.00000001. Blog for 3 months, and cash in your tokens for $0.17, have a nice day!

The fact that Hive worked as a spin-off still amazes me, but I'm guessing because we had such a high-profile defined common enemy, not just some disgruntled developers AND the public press in support, it worked.