You may have done a good job making the onboarding process attractive however the UI & UX still far from main stream social media platforms.
There's too much drama here and the Trending page doesn't appeal to the masses. Highly paid Hive-centric or dev-centric posts is giving negative impression to content creators: arts, lifestyle, fashion, & photo have the biggest followers in social media which is under appreciated in this platform.
I just hate to see good project like yours go to waste because of the unresolved core issues in this platform.
I hope you have the patience to maintain this project until the core issues are resolved.
RE: Open Standard for a HIVE Account Referral System