Awesome question. I have given it thought over the years I've been here, considering the abysmal user retention the ragequitters almost ubiquitously ascribe to flags. Flags aren't the opposite of upvotes. The opposite of an upvote is no vote. If posts were instead Toyota pickup trucks, an upvote would be comparable to buying one, and the opposite of that is not buying one. The equivalent of a flag would be a tax. Decreasing the income of Toyota for making and selling the truck, which is what downvotes do to content on Hive. In fact, DV's allow anyone to tax production to the limit of their stake, and Ford, Chevy, and American motors would have never let Toyota profit one satoshi if they had that kind of power to tax.

DV's are taxes. Taxation is theft, so they need to go. Additionally, I've spoken extensively with the most prolific flaggots on the platform, and they assure me DV's do very little to discourage actual spam and scams. They are probably more effective against plagiarism, because the purpose of plagiarism on Hive is to get rewards for better posts than the plagiarist is capable of, but neither scams nor spam care much about rewards for their posts. They profit from the scam, or have some other reason to be spamming.

What flags do, as they are employed by the most industrious of flaggots, is drive posters that have made some error, such as not properly attributing a pic they use in a post, or whose opinions on matters flaggots disapprove, off the platform. Since 2017 Hive has shed ~1M users whom, if they bother to say, say they were driven off by their rewards being zeroed out on every post and comment. Of course that brings up the fact that driving people off the platform is a form of censorship, just as is double tapping someone in the back of the head. It shuts them up permanently, at least on this platform. Also, it's the ultimate antimarketing strategy, because all of them thereafter bitterly complain about Hive to anyone that will listen. It's just bad business all around for Hive.

It's good for whales though, because they centralize stake by reducing the number of accounts with stake, and whales extract >90% of the inflation from the rewards pool, so DV's, that return rewards to the pool, then almost all end up in the wallets of whales. The most important thing driving people from the platform with flags does, though, is prevent Hive from growing and attracting rapine investors that could spend the entire market cap of Hive on lunch for a few hundred of their most obsequious minions on Fiji without batting an eyelash. In our little pond the whales look huge to us, but they are basically plebs to actual billionaires, as Sun Yuchen proved.

They don't want another Sun to shine them on again. They want to maintain their total control of the witnesses which their bare majority of stake has since 2016 (except for when Ned sold the Founder's Stake to Sun Yuchen and the witnesses were elected at his sole option) because the witnesses choose what code runs, and that determines who gets the inflation from the rewards pool, and whales like it going to them best, which is what they make happen when they control the witnesses.

I'd also get rid of curation rewards, because they create a financial incentive to curate that has not a damn thing to do with content quality, so replaces actual curative intent with seeking financial gain, and that produces the absolute mess Trending is. Curation rewards aren't necessary at all to incentivize people to upvote content they like, as dozens of other platforms have all kinds of upvotes being cast without any financial emolument of the voter. That would restore post and author qualities as the reason people upvote posts and comments, and improve the library of content that is what attracts consumers to come here.

I'd replace it with HBD savings, because that enables investors to bank a predictable return for their investment in Hive without deranging curation, and HBD isn't voting stock, so that would also reduce the plutocratic control of Hive governance, which is the next thing I'd do. IRL the world is ruled by money, and that's observably a terrible, awful way to run things. Stake weight determining whom governs produce war, genocide, plandemics, and corporations saying that people have no right to water, as Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said when he was CEO of Nestle before he become interim Chairman of the WEF some while back. People with the most money want everything to be monetized and sold to the highest bidder, because they can outbid everyone else, and this deprecates human rights like flags have BPCVoter's Hive account.

Something like requiring a minimum stake before you can vote for witnesses is a good idea, because n00bs without much stake are typically short of understanding how Hive works and what witnesses do, and why they should choose one over another. However I wouldn't enable voting all your stake for each witness 30 times. Some other metric needs to weight votes, or simply have straight 1a1v (one account one vote) - but that requires excluding socks and bots, which Ned never actually got around to achieving through the use of oracles. I reckon we should discuss what metric would be best, or how to implement oracles that exclude bots and socks from voting witnesses.

Given the way the crypto markets have been subjugated to surveillance, I'd implement the anonymity that Monero and such privacy coins employ to prevent creepy stalkers from being all up in their financial affairs. That's one of the original purposes of cryptocurrency that has become all but impossible today, and is something we need more than ever with Palantir and the WEF taking over the world.

The DHF is about the worst managed development fund I can imagine, and I'd just burn the whole thing, which would transfer that financial value to the stakeholders according to their stake. With less Hive and HBD in existence, our stake would increase in value commensurately. If we want to fund development we can spend our stake to do so, rather than facilitating the festering fraud the proposal system does today.

Those are the main things I'd do and why I'd do them if I was the god of Hive. The lure of censorship proof social media is far more valuable to the market than some tokens (unless you're a whale that could care less about speech or social media because you just want money. Something that neglects, however, is that social media has become the biggest financial sector in the global market in ~10 years, and were Hive run properly, it could capture all the society using media without getting paid for it, and being censored and banned when they do). This is only becoming more important globally as governments increasingly jail people for calling politicians fat or being opposed to crimes against humanity pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors corrupt government to profit from. Ending the practice that currently drives people off Hive every day, flagging away every satoshi of rewards for every comment and post indefinitely, is how to end that censorship, and that is an existentially valuable feature Hive is failing to provide.

Thanks!