The lack of a decentralized, second layer smart contract system has put strain on the base layer token to serve multiple roles across the Hive ecosystem and the result is what we see today. Specifically, the only thing that everyone can consistently agree should be rewarded is long form blog and video content. Since the average content creator isn't interested in that, they come and go. Since the average person isn't here, there isn't much of a reason for the influencers to be here either if they are still getting paid with web 2 platforms and so the cycle continues.

Once we can get a healthy layer 2 system, that will ease up things a bit by giving communities the flexibility to run things the way they want to run it. Content might still get downvoted on the base layer, but the content creator might not care about that or even see that if it isn't visible on that communities front end. As long as the creator has enough resource credits, that's all they might care about. That opens up short form content, which is what most people want.

We have been waiting a long time, but I think we are much closer to having a scalable version than we were a few years ago. With VSC being released this month and the multi-signature improvements that the Hive developers are working on putting into one of the next hard forks, I think we are close. I am optimistic that we are close to exponential takeoff, even though right now it seems epically slow.