Thanks for sharing your experience with the experiment. I'm not an expert on trading either, so I had to pester some friends a bit to get a better understanding of what's going on.

We really need a way to add new participants to Hive that's as simple as any Web 2.0 social network. That's a pending issue, as far as I understand, but I think I saw somewhere that the Ecency frontend team was working on using the Metamask extension to create another way for new members to join, and I believe I also saw somewhere that they were trying to use even simpler mechanisms. I need more information to give a better answer.

The appeal of SocialFi should be what defines it: resistance to censorship and true ownership of the content created. I'm not denying that the token's value is attractive, but given how volatile the market is, the token's value could increase or decrease at any moment, so the idea of ​​farming the token as the sole incentive to participate seems misguided to me.

Image source.

As for the speculators, well, that's a problem in any market, whether it's the old stock exchange, cryptocurrencies, or the modern AI bubble. Anyway, we just have to wait and see if, once the bear market subsides and the speculative vultures leave, things will stabilize and we can move forward.