Just came across this. You used the ecency tag but not an @ mention, so it never reached our notifications.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Our posting activity is mostly web2 marketing: renewing old content and guides with new ones, describing features, plus community guides and education for newcomers. It is not a funding strategy. Posting rewards do not cover Ecency costs even if we posted 3-5 times per day. The entire author and curation pool across all of Hive is only around $3k/day at current price, so there is nothing there to live on.

I think the better question is: does the project bring more value than it costs to keep it running?

On your other theories. Steem is funded by a private company budget and everyone knows it is not a decentralized network anymore. That part is checkable in one call: @steemit, @misterdelegation and @steem all proxy to @dev365, which holds close to 20% of all vesting shares and votes the entire witness set. So the stake did get used.

Worth checking one more thing. Steem prints the same inflation Hive does. Identical content and vesting percentages and its sps_fund_percent is 1000, the same 10% DAO share Hive has. @steem.dao is sitting on 2.5M SBD. They are not avoiding the cost, they are only parking it.

The natural experiment already ran anyway. Steem's node and frontend ecosystem shrank rather than being replaced by volunteers.