In my opinion some of the main issues are:

1 the DFH. I believe it brings more harm than good, the way it is, and also drives the prices lower. Having people basically get funded to implement their ideas, setting up their own paychecks and adding close to zero value or way less than they got paid, only has the opposite results.

Due to that a lot of people are taking advantage of it and again due to that mostly nobody does anything to change it.

2 We don't really have well-coordinated efforts in every aspect. We decided that there will be no leadership and that we will keep "decentralized". Although i believe that at least we should have some form of representatives doing coordinating moves. Basically, we got like a "chaotic" situation where everyone does the initiatives that they want, due to the lack of coordination, most of these initiatives have smaller target groups and to add to that mostly no one knows what's really taken place.

To add to that, a lot of people don't even know about Hive, or know it and think it's a scam, following the logic ("how can i earn money investing 0$") or tried it, realise they need to spend some serious time to earn something decent or have people to interact with and leave. That's why we have so many people from third-world countries (1$-10$ for someone in Nigeria or the Philippines is way more than for someone from USA or EU), and people who are over 30 years old. (Gen Z won't bother with this kind of social media, they will focus on TikTok and Instagram)

All in all my opinion is that we need to think again about DHF should work and we also need to do some coordinated moves in every aspect to attract and retain people. The competition in web3 is crazy and i agree with you, it feels like we simply exist at the moment.