Fiat is not the primary reason I do work for my neighbors. I spent hours on my knees today in the mud double digging and stripping weeds from the garden of a little old lady without pay. I primarily do work for my neighbors so that they prosper, and they have goodwill for me. If I need something folks I have served from my heart are unlikely to leave me in need. But, I cannot always work without pay. I have to have gas to get my truck to jobsites, to get materials for jobs I do, and all the things I do I don't ask somebody to cover because they're minor things. Not getting paid for any jobs, even though getting paid isn't my primary reason for working, will have a dramatic effect on my ability to do work.

There are people here who's primary goal is earning tokens. There are other people, like me, for whom earning tokens isn't my primary interest. Because there are both, and many other, motivations for using Hive, rising and falling prices does have a dramatic effect on the userbase. It also has dramatic effects for reasons unrelated to personal income for many here. @geneeverett has pointed out the collapse of Hive's token price is a red flag that causes him to lose confidence in the sustainability of the platform. That also affects me similarly. There are other reasons than personal finance that Hive token price affects Hive users.

I cannot agree that the token not being the primary lure will preclude dramatic effect on the userbase when prices rise and fall for the above reasons, and more I spared you my excessive verbosity besides.

"The design of that platform is to get people to engage, to like, repost and comment."

After Musk acquired Twatter, I tried it again. When I upvoted and reposted Twits' tweets, I got throttled. There is a political agenda that affected you and I differently. The more you posted and engaged, the more you were encouraged to post and engage. The more I posted and engaged, the harder I was throttled until my account was suspended, and I gave up in disgust.

Your experience is not ubiquitous. Other experiences may not be apparent to you, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

The earning of rewards on posts is dependent on people upvoting those posts with their VP. If there was no VP, there would be no rewards for posts, and the fundamental value proposition that Steem introduced in 2016, that social media platforms that profited richly from people using those platforms to post and engage one another could be replaced with Steem that enabled the creators of social media posts to earn by being paid by their audiences, rather than advertising making platform owners rich, and paying the creators of the content that made them rich nothing. While that was largely a deception, because the ~36 whales that have maintained governance of the platform since they minded their whale stakes in 2016 capture >90% of the inflation from the rewards pool, leaving the rest of us competing for the remaining <5%, many people are intent on receiving rewards, some even almost exclusively intent on those rewards - such as the ~36 whales that govern the platform.

I do not stop engaging when I do not receive tokens for that engagement. I am not primarily here for tokens. But there would be no here for me to engage with were there no tokens rewarding engagement, so I do care about the price rising and falling, because it brings people here, or chases them away from here. There are thousands of accounts I lament the loss of that have left for one reason or another since I encountered them here. I don't lament the loss of their tokens, but the loss of their acuity, insight, and wisdom, acerbic wit, and knowledge they shared here while they were here. I bet you can name a few, at least, who have departed you would prefer to be able to interact with here.