Hive does several things well. Not all the things Hive does well are beneficial to Hive users. One thing Hive does well is concentrate governance in the ~36 whales that stepped up and mined Steem tokens in 2016, after the shenanigans Dan and Ned used to enable them to mine the Founder's stake that Ned later sold to Sun Yuchen that enabled him to completely centralize governance of the platform. On Hive this Founder's stake was converted to the DHF, that is slowly being mined by Blocktrades, Smooth, and the governing plutocracy because as user retention continues to fail, that is where the majority of money can be extracted from the platform.

It also facilitates censorship of dissent and functionally banning accounts by eradicating 100% of author rewards through incessant flagging of every post and comment by targeted accounts, storage of raw data on the blockchain, and the aforementioned feeless, 3 second transactions, and development by independent coders, although that can be suppressed just as easily as dissent. The open source code enables forking by anyone with the chops, and this has been done more than once, including to create Hive. None of these forks has eliminated the problematic plutocratic winner take all governance and DV's without introducing new and equally troubling problems.

Now that KYC for internet access, or even to fire up a computer, is being implemented across the world, the window of time in which a true free speech user owned platform could conquer social media, and thus the world, appears to be closing, and I fear Hive has run it's course. I sure hope I'm wrong, but no one has even argued that isn't happening, much less convinced me. Hive cannot offer free speech riding on a network infrastructure that forces biometric ID on everyone using it. Free speech is the fundamental value prospect Hive could have offered, but has failed to provide, and now the opportunity has all but been eliminated by mandatory biometric KYC to use the global network hardware owned by our would be masters.