Not to be unduly cynical, but you're beating the same from that several other of us have been giving a good whack for about the same amount of time. Content other than crypto-focused cultism doesn't get as much focus for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that almost all of the promotion done for the platform focuses on the crypto-aspect to the detriment of every other descriptor about the platform.
It's still being primarily pitched as "get paid for your content" in front of an audience that is primarily cryptocultists. Which would be fine if the only intent and architecture was focused on getting and holding that audience, but the rest of us were drawn into the idea of a censorship-resistant, distributed-access content platform which, incidentally, happened to involve a crypto-micropayment system. Unfortunately for us, that's not what the devs and the controlling interests really want. Nor have they ever wanted that.
For good or ill, we are the rats in the walls. We're the ones who are using the platform in a way which the Powers That Be had no interest in ever facilitating. If we found a niche here, it was by accident and despite the design rather than because of it.
It's a hard world, but that's the truth.
The culture which has been promoted has a very specific flavor – and it's not about creators. It's never been about creators. When we have flourished it was because weeds grow in the cracks.
At least the underlying mechanisms of Communities provide a way to widen those cracks and provide a mechanism by which we can self promote. But the platform will never promote us. In fact, we should probably be happy about that given what we have observed about how good they are at promoting everything else; read: not at all.
Even the @PeakD guys, who are probably the most respectable and hardest working developers of any of the digital apps on this blockchain, have only succeeded in giving us a social media platform which has equal features to something designed in the early 2010s – and it looks like it. I might be overly generous even in that assessment. The interest and focus are just not there.
It's promoted as a core use of your stake.
Look at every discussion of downvoting that has happened in the last four years. It has been defended, repeatedly, aggressively, as a perfectly valid use of active stake in order to diminish the returns for content which a stakeholder believes is "over rewarded." That is one of the most aggressively put forward defenses of the entire mechanism. Now, that usually covered over by some handwaving which involves "downvoting spam" and "policing bad content on the blockchain," but ultimately in operation it comes down to "downvoting things I don't like." That's not to diminish the work of spam fighting on the platform; not at all. It is to point out the inherent drawbacks and obvious mechanism for exploitation that has been promoted as a positive within the platform.
In that sense, calling out the people who have been most aggressive in pushing for and implementing mechanisms which they themselves have declared to be a net positive and hoping that the content being promoted is likely to shift to subcultures and communities which they have no interest in – that's wasting breath. That's time you're never going to get back.
The best we can hope for – the literal best – is that the platform itself, the mechanism by which we engage with the storage side of things, gets better in general. Expecting a distributed proof of stake system where stake is concentrated in the same way that all resources are distributed in all systems to behave in a way that's different is wasted expectation. The thing is what the thing is.
Any of us as creators can take our work and go anywhere else. We can go to LBRY, we can put our content on IPFS and build our own websites, we can hold our content personally and distribute it through whatever the hot social media platform of the hour is; we have choices. Our promotion isn't dependent on the platform, because our promotion involves putting the content that we create in front of people who are likely to want it, wherever they might be. URLs make that easy.
The people I'm mildly concerned for are the cryptocultists who have gone all in, personally and financially, on the idea that Steem or Hive are the place to carry on conversations and interactions in a free and open way. By nature, they are an insular, in fight-prone bunch to like to stab each other as much as they like to help each other up. The results are not going to look pretty. They never look pretty.
The best we can hope for is to not be collateral.
RE: Hive vs Steemit vs anything else ...one of you better figure out how to matter