I have had this inkling for a while that hive isn't growing but I did not have the data to prove it. However, as an active user, I have noticed a decline in social and community activities. Fortunately, i came across some stats on hiveHub that also give me some insight into the matter.
At first, I wanted to link the hive downturn to the bear market. From the chart (above), you can see that at the end of the bear market in 2018 activities dropped significantly from over 10 million contents to less than 3 million in 2019. However, the same cannot be said about the 2022/2023 bear market.
Judging from the chart, market activities haven't really influenced (content) movements on hive significantly. There has been a steady trend for the past three years (2020,2021 & 2022) at the bull market's peak. So I am not expecting much to change.
WHY HASN'T HIVE BEEN ABLE TO REPLICATE 2018 SUCCESS?
2018 was the golden year of the hive blockchain. I joined the blockchain in May of that year and I can attest to the fact that the blockchain was a lot more active in that year. I can argue that the bear market chased many people away from crypto and hive space in 2018, but the recent bull market should have changed the narrative but it didn't.
Hive over the years has developed, solving most of its previous problems i.e limited sign-up options, scalability issues, steemit, etc however that hasn't impacted the onboarding and retention rate.
Now you might say: what has onboarding got to do with anything? Hive is developing (its technology) at an impressive rate. Well, there is the apparent case of poor adoption–most dapps are barely utilized, which stiffens innovation. Most dapps/communities do not have the required size (or users) to maintain operation. I wrote how steemit was able to solve this problem and you can see how that impacted 2019 activities.
Also, we cannot deny the impact of the hostile takeover on the chain. It not only split the community into two, but it has also made many investors weary of hive. Now we might argue that the blockchain doesn't need corporate money, but it has done great for a lot of crypto projects that aren't half as good as hive.
In addition, I can't say we are in better hands since we got rid of steemit. The same greed and nepotism still exist but it is more difficult to pinpoint since there is no central point to attack or blame.
Now, hive can decide to wait to be noticed by the masses whilst it builds in the shadows. The obvious disadvantage to that is that other blockchain copy and get the spotlight whilst we cry about being the first at everything.
I wrote a post yesterday on how we can get things back on track on the community level. I will also call for the scrapping of the reward pool because, in my opinion, it is doing very little for the blockchain. That inflation can be directed into something meaningful.
In conclusion, hive has been stagnant for the past 3 years (the charts show that). It is important for those who are buying and holding the token to think about the long-term implication of this said stagnation. It is impacting the growth of communities; a couple of old dapps are going under; the new dapps are struggling to gain traction. It is an emergency.
