"Hive does need a marketing arm and people running the marketing arm."

I disagree. Hive (actually Steem at the time) grew fastest in 2017, and organic word of mouth by users on the platform built on folks finding our content via searching for granny's sausage recipes, or blockchain, or whatever, was what drove that growth. This is why the flaggotry defunding content creators that are posting about raising ducks, or grandma's electrolysis tribulations, is completely bass ackwards. If those creators got much in the way of rewards they'd brag us up like Chad's GF. We have a marketing department comprised of every author's posts. From photography, travel, gardening, and the broad plethora of mundane and general interest posts that would turn up in searches on topics non-users ran (back when search wasn't simply a list of paid advertisers on Goolag, and was the result of scraping the net for query responses), our content was, and remains, our marketing department. The market for new users isn't searching for Hive development info, or posts touting Hive. When our content turns up in searches for homeschooling, crafting, gardening or whatever they search for, that is how the platform is marketed, when such searchers see those posts getting compensated. That's why more than 1m folks came here and climbed the learning curve after April 2017.

The real problem was never marketing. The real problem with growth here has always been user retention. Unrestrained taxation easily blows users off the platform. Every Hive user can tax any content to the limit of their stake, because that's exactly what DV's are. >1m organic users were driven from the platform via DV's flatlining their rewards between 2017 and 2020 by whales disapproving of posters that made newbie mistakes and taxing the creators 100% of their rewards forever, and the only way to end the taxation was to 1) beg them to stop, and 2) perform whatever penitence they demanded while the penitent was ridiculed and derided, such as publishing a post a day for a year while declining rewards. All of that ridiculing and demanding was done on Discord where we don't see it and it isn't on the blockchain (which is why I refuse to use Discord. Sting exists and isn't used for such purposes because it eliminates that obfuscation). Lots of folks came here and published just like they did on other platforms (but flaggots suppressed posting to multiple platforms undertaken by ambitious bloggers, who if they had gotten more rewards here, would have ceased bothering with lesser platforms. Flagging them was the absolute opposite of the right thing to do to market Hive), but instead of being paid for their posts about mom's Sunday dinners, they were taxed 100% of their rewards, offended, insulted, and driven away.

There isn't a social media platform with user retention as abysmal as ours (or Steem's, our progenitor), and unrestrained taxation for things other than spam, scams, and constant, repeated, actual plagiarism is why. Flagging an offending post with an explanation is fine. Flagging an account into dust forever, which continues today, if the creator doesn't grovel before the oligarchical overlords and submit to their overweening demands, is platform suicide. We don't need a marketing department, plan, or any effort at all to market Hive. Our content and compensation does that. We just need rational code that keeps malevolent whales from flagging everyone and their mother off the platform by taxing their rewards to zero forever for any opinion that isn't 100% Hive development or pandering, reposting their old content to keep it evergreen, or myriad other sins the Lords of Hive disdain. While we have been eradicating our marketing department via punitive 100% taxation of content, social media has become the largest sector of global markets.

There's no way doing the exact opposite of rational platform building during the boom of social media is stupidity, or even insanity. This is a deliberate, well executed effort to keep the platform from growing (Hive had to be really bad to be worse for bloggers than Fakebook or Twatter), from presenting an attractive investment to outside money, because Hive is a pure plutocracy, and we see what attracting the attention of investing sharks does to the tiny whales in our itsy bitsy pond when we look at what happened to Steem. That's the inevitable fate of plutocracy: the richest investor(s) eventually own it and govern it as they please. That's Hive today, and they only keep that pipeline to themselves by discouraging IRL investors from outstaking them and seizing control of the witnesses. All it takes is more money than our puny whales have in staked Hive.

Laying waste to the Founder's stake that has become the DHF is the end game, sucking all the cash on hand out of the platform and sending token value to zero before abandoning it like Golos before it. Looks like Valueplan is an integral part of that end game to me. It's like Bain Capital's rescue plans for it's investment vehicles and KKR's business model. Sell off the tooling, real property, and assets. Take the cash and move on when your controlling interest no longer has substantial value.

The entire capitalization of Hive is lunch money for substantial capital IRL. Sun Yuchen picked up Steem and he's a very minor shark in the global market, the bottom of the billionaire barrel. Musk paid ~$44B for Twatter, and Hive is orders of magnitude smaller, easy pickings for Warren Buffet, who's sitting on hundreds of $B's in cash hunting opportunities right now. The only thing keeping outside investors from doing to Hive what Sun Yuchen did to Steem is it's atrocious metrics as an investment vehicle, which is the result solely of the unrestrained taxation inflicted on content creators by the oligarchy currently ruling our pocket plutocracy.

"The rest are small enough under $5,000."

Just like corruption in any government, enough nibbling by ducks makes a big bite at the end of the month, and only minor efforts at obscuring accounting enables quid pro quos and kickbacks to be overly tedious for inquiring accountants to uncover. There's simply no real accounting for DHF expenditures, and that's basically a neon sign blaring 'Kickbacks' 24/7. The athletes in SWC, the rally car drivers, the tireless presenters at fora, these folks aren't the problem, they aren't bringing in investors, but they're not the reason funds are hemorrhaging out of DHF. The real problem is the substantially staked voters that approved Valueplan and other DHF proposals without any requirement of nominal accounting, because that is how they're looting the DHF. There's a couple dozen whales, and their stake outvotes the rest of Hive. The Hive oligarchs that put Valueplan over the return proposal knew what they were doing, and now we are slowly grasping what they were doing thanks to @hecatonquirox and @atlashv96 sacrificing their financial salvation in the economic hellhole that is Venezuela because they are morally incapable of tolerating that corruption.

The oligarchy are mining the DHF, and when it's mined out, they're off to the next opportunity, leaving Hive a withered husk. Until Hive isn't a plutocracy, we can't do a damn thing about it.

Thanks!