I suspect that present circumstances do actually necessitate Hive evolution towards natural societal valuations, or Hive will diseventuate. You're not wrong on any point you make above, but existential circumstances force the whales that have inherited the founders' position as the purpose of Hive either to effect a robust purpose for Hive, or it will be abandoned by people that need a functional mechanism to ensure survival.

It's literally an existential threat to humanity that we do not have functional society at present. Hive will evolve or die. You may be right it will not evolve, and I am continually faced with demonstrations of that refusal to evolve.

From my perspective, the problem with that is that the people in charge, no matter how much they argue they aren't really in charge, haven't inherited a system which is based around natural societal valuation. They have inherited an algorithm which attempts to define valuation and decide valuation which is unconnected to mechanics which allow individuals to demonstrate valuation.

As long as the purpose for what is a low rent social media platform is described as "existential," there might be an insufficient amount of self-awareness to actually build a product that people want to use and get value out of. Framing it in apocalyptic terms, particularly cast against what is on ironically being promoted as an actual apocalypse and certainly might be at local economic levels, just makes it all the more ludicrous.

You might could make a reasonable argument that the absence of a functional society/functional coherent community in the Steem/Hive ecosystem is an "existential threat" to Steem/Hive, but humanity not only has one functional society but hundreds, probably thousands. All of them work for local definitions of the term "work." Not all of them are aesthetic. Not all of them are equally effective. Not all of them are equally efficient. I don't like all of them. All of them work. All of them are functional.

Some of them have levels of dysfunctionality – but if we're going to hold it against societies we have to hold it against individuals doubly hard, and I don't think you're going to like where that goes.

Very shortly people will not have interest in wasting time on the internet, but will need censorship resistant communications. If folks don't need it, they won't bother with it, and if we don't need communications, Hive will die.

Then they won't be using Hive. Hive is not censorship resistant. It's just not. We've seen mechanically that it isn't, we've seen culturally that it isn't, we've seen technically that it isn't – it just isn't.

I don't have as apocalyptic a vision as you do. At least not for the greater Western world. Too much business, too much society, too much culture is dependent on high-speed, low friction communication. I don't think that people are going to be interested in transitioning back to an early 19th-century standard of living, at least when it comes to their individual experience. The Internet, good or ill, is going to be with us forever, and as long as there is a way to look at things, people will have an interest in wasting time on the Internet. Just like people had an interest in wasting time in libraries, wasting time reading books, wasting time reading newspapers, wasting time reading pamphlets, wasting time in coffee houses talking about politics they could never affect, wasting time doing all the things that humans have historically wasted time doing.

As I have said for years at this point, Steem/Hive needs to actually provide something of value to the user base. Not pay off the user base but give them a reason to make going to the platform and interacting with other people gratifying in and of itself. That is where the value actually lies.

Society doesn't need Hive. There are 10,000 other competitors out in the world and one of them will be equally as useful. Facebook and Twitter do the job for most people right now. Mastodon, for all the issues with their cultural milieu, does the job for their folks right now. Scuttlebutt, if you really want true decentralized, uncensorable communication, does the job right now. Arguably, all of those platforms do the job better than S/H right now. And if we're just looking at tokenized micro-payment reward systems, LBRY does the job better right now.

Normalcy bias is going to kill a lot of people. Hive can survive, but only if it surmounts the philosophical deficits that presently effect governance.

100,000 years plus of human societal evolution and there is no generalized consensus on "the philosophical deficits that presently effect governance". The guys behind Steem/Hive couldn't even successfully fend off a financial acquisition by a not particularly clever multimillionaire. I'm not sure that looking to them to solve the existential problems of humanity is thinking that's going to be profitable.

Hive just needs to be kind of useful and kind of interesting. Just the same as it ever was, just the same as everything has to be, and just enough. I know that phrasing things in an epic, titanic, over the top way makes people in cryptocommodity feel as though what they're doing is important. Sometimes what they're actually doing is important, though not in terms of calling off the apocalypse. If you want people to take you seriously you have to actually have a proportionate view of the world.

In that sense, it's too bad that COVID 19 dropped at the same time as Hive. It throws a very harsh light on a lot of the pretension that was previously just a silly affectation because, comparatively, it could be afforded. Now – not so much. Now if you want to sell an idea you actually have to stand in the towering, colossal shadow of a real potential economic collapse. It makes trite things look trite.

Hive can't even govern itself at this point. You only get to talk about existential threats to the governance of mankind when you can organize something more useful than a money sink.

Ratchet down the dialogue. Pull down the pretentiousness. Lay off the apocalyptic. Start somewhere you can actually achieve like "is this thing even fit for the purpose it was defined to fulfill?" Do that first and then we can talk about changing the world. We won't, but at least we could. Talk about it.