I like to play devils advocate and half way agree with a lot of ideas people have with Hive. Lots of great ideas btw being thrown around. I thought it would be nice to put my straight forward, non devil advocateish suggestions down on what I think we should do. If I had to press a magic button (notice I said had, because I never voluntarily would without community support) these are the changes I would make to Hive.
I'm in no way implying these ideas will be easy to code, nor am I demanding them be in the next HF. I am simply suggesting what I would do if push came to shove.
In no particular order.
I like what LEO did, flat curation with an extended window for curators that rewards equally to all of those that vote inside it. Whether that be 1 day or a week if I had to choose I would go with 1 day, this way fresh content is always filtered through. But it's very close to a week, as I believe making the curation as good for manual curators as possible. Now, auto voters are at a disadvantage as curators have no real-time constraints and can curate at their own pace. Auto voters will always have the issue of under/over a rewarding post and risking missed opportunities by voting great post too little and be penalized for over rewarding posts that are of low quality. There is nothing more embarrassing for a curator to auto vote a post that says "deleted post."
Remove the reward curve that hurts post under a certain amount. I believe micro tipping is a massive use case for Hive and we should encourage not detour people from using this.
Change the number of votes from 10 to 5. 10 votes a day is a lot, and I think the majority of people, esp whales, would like the ability to vote less but for more. I say esp whales but smaller accounts would like this also, can give more powerful votes when atm their vote may seem tiny. I am not even against doing this down to 3 votes, I've heard people talk about this and I agree 10 votes is a bit much and I think starting at 5 is a good start.
For those who do not wish to curate they can "opt-out" losing their ability to vote on a post in exchange, they receive a set amount of inflation for staking. They receive the inflation only if they cast 5 or more witness votes. To determine the amount earned, it will be 25% less than what would be rec via curation under a flat curation ruleset. This will be with the idea they voted inside the appropriate time window. So let's say 10% is earned via curation by voting within the first time window, we can say that staking who opt out will receive 7.5% in staking rewards. This incentives people to curate that want to because they can earn more, yet allows those that don't want to participate a path out that does not severely dilute their stake. This would scale down alongside author/curation rewards, meaning the decreasing inflation on Hive would also affect stakers.
SMTs, layer 1 balance layer 2 handles everything else. Make the SMT as dumb as possible on layer 1 IE, as basic with as few features as possible, and add everything else on layer 2 for easy customization, etc. This allocates maximum protect for account balances and I believe is the best way forward.
Lite accounts. With SMTs + Lite accounts, people can create instant accounts, send people the native hive token without them needing a full hive account. We have "guest accounts" on several frontends on Hive, (not yet a standard solution, but we are working towards an open-source standard) and with light accounts, this enables airdrops, token transfers, etc while things like comments can remain off-chain until the user gets a full-fledged hive account.
5% burn to get unstake instantly. Add this as a one-time opt-in/out feature so those that rather error on the side of caution can. Build white label withdrawal addresses alongside a 2fa system to better protect those that want the ability to instantly power down.
This is a bit to chew on but I think we are really close to what is Hive true potential. And again, these are just ideas I'm putting out there.