I've largely stayed out of this debate publicly because it is so blatantly one-sided, in favor of the whales, but here's my take:

Hive was hardforked from Steem. Justin Sun tried to take over entirely, and so he was forced out through the fork. For some reason, unbeknownst to anyone, NO ONE IN CHARGE THOUGHT TO SEE IF THERE WERE FURTHER PROBLEMS NEEDING ADDRESSING.

So here we are, years later, Hive is bleeding users. The whales will do nothing to stop it, regardless of how that affects the public's knowledge of the apps to begin with.

The whales and Hive Watchers are directly responsible for all these problems. To deny that is to deny reality. Money ALWAYS corrupts, there are no exceptions. Hive is run by an oligarchy of disconnected people who do not care about what happens. That's what you get when you allow an oligarchy to have power.

Hive is not web3. That term needs to be completely abandoned. It's merely a buzzword used in hype marketing. Hive is Web 2.5. Hive should STRIVE to improve, but without any support from the whales, that's never going to happen. Hive has zero attention in the mainstream Crypto Twitter-sphere. Considering Twitter is all that's left for promoting blockchain, that's really bad, and unless it is addressed, Hive will continue to bleed users and become a dead chain just like Steem.

Hive's loyal users have given their all, for what? A measly little amount of incentive?

It's all a bad joke at this point. I have several friends who were Hive OGs, who came over after the hard-fork, and because of the Hive-watchers and their abusive down-voting, they were completely cut off from the ability to earn anything for all their effort.

If the people at the top actually cared, they'd address this. But they won't, we all know they won't because power leads to complacency and arrogance. The $HIVE token has a liquidity problem outside of Hive. No one wants it, and Binance remains one of the few places to buy some. HBD is not used outside of Hive, it has no utility outside of Hive. Without cross-chain utility, Hive will not survive the coming storm, period.

You cannot segregate people based on the way the Hive-watchers treat minnows. There's no point in posting anything if your work is going to get shadow-banned or worse, your reputation score (social credit score on Hive) gets smashed to 0 or negative, like Lahsee.