Anyway, the conversations from that post got me talking with a few people from different parts of the world which gave me some insight into what a complex issue this is, particularly along ethical lines. It's ironic that the people who would benefit the most from Hive increasing in value are the very ones who end up having to withdraw from the ecosystem regularly. Many certainly try as much as possible to keep Hive staked when they can to contribute back to others on Hive where they can, but they are in tight situations where they might suddenly need to power down. If there was something positive they could do to increase Hive's value they would certainly jump on it.
What's really needed here are solutions that anyone can apply to increase Hive's value. At the moment the only solution generally given is that people need to buy Hive and the amount of people who can afford to take that risk are a small fraction of the people on here and they are mostly the ones in developed countries. I looked at the idea of converting Hive to HBD and the method that takes 3 days burns the Hive to create HBD. It seems like a good way to reduce the availability of Hive, but it increases the availability of HBD instead (which would need to be balanced out to maintain the peg) and it works both ways anyway. Perhaps something desirable could be created that requires Hive to purchase it and the Hive used is then burned; rather like Splinterlands does for DEC. I don't have the imagination to think what, unfortunately.
The problem I see with using something like KE to decide who the curation projects will vote or not vote is that I don't really think it will make that much impact if there is still not much reason to buy Hive. It will just change how they curate a bit and cause the usual bickering about the ethics of it, but then it will be business as usual when it comes to the Hive price. We'll continue creating Hive in the pool each day and distributing it, just to slightly different people, perhaps.
If it's any consolation the curation projects don't actually give huge votes out in comparison to some whales. Ocd has metrics in place to decide who they curate, so for example someone just dropping a post and not interacting will not be a candidate. I try to carry these principles over to what I curate at curangel as well. The team at ocd are fantastic at working together to weed out abuse and farming as well.
I think Holoz0r makes a good point about the social aspect of hive being important. If it was just about monetary value then we may as well just be a stand alone alt coin. While I'm in a developed country I don't have the spare fiat to invest in Hive, but I also don't have the incentive to take from Hive, because it has too little value to help me out much. So I decided early on that my focus would be the social side and building HP to be able to actually have some form of vote impact where it could help out. I now also play around with my liquid Hive either literally on Splinterlands or by dabbling on Hive Engine.
We have a world of people on here so there are always going to be a wide range of reasons to be here and a wide range of circumstances behind them. We can't expect everyone to come to the same stances as us and I certainly wouldn't want to try and force that when the concept behind this was always decentralisation. As others have already said, KE doesn't really say much about a user it just gives a snapshot of their current give/take status. It's an interesting tool that could be useful as part of an overview, however.
RE: Hive Ecosystem | Data on Curation Groups & KE Ratios!