If we wasn't having the bad actors of hive stabbing established Hive businesses and people in the back we would be much better off.
For all the talk of original content it seems like holozing just wants to plagiarize a trademarked product.
Although the project financing individual is bleeding money trying to promote it and replace splinterlands while making one of the biggest Cardinal mistakes in business. Nobody likes rip off and stealing... Especially when it's extremely poorly done.
So personally I think that we might now be looking at the situation where even though we have this great history, our marketing is crap. Yep that's right no matter who we on board, if we can't retain them it's a double loss.
So we're wasting all this money on onboarding individuals. And then we're also wasting all this money because we have toxic members who are bullying and abusing their powers and running off all the new members....
The more unique a thing is, the more interesting it is and the more likely it is to have commercial success and the less likely it is to have legal problems. Real innovation is always preferable to copying others, that's a given. Part of the strength of actual freedom of expression is that anyone can copy anyone at any time - or not, it's up to them... The market decides on what works and what they want to reward. I personally don't want to really reward people who openly copy others without adding anything that I value of their own to the mix.
I have come to accept that the problem of disagreements and abuses on the network are diluted by having more people involved and by having governance decentralised more than it currently is. That's not to say that a bigger network won't have the same problems in a different form, but more users and more investment means more diversity of views and more chance for people to be supported by community and stake that actually values them and resonates with their output.
Perhaps some are (even sub consciously) stuck on the idea that they need to limit the size of the community in order to 'protect their investment', which actually seems to translate in some cases to 'preventing competition'. In any case, improving the system is needed and we only get there through experimenting, discussing and creating.
This is what we need to work towards. At the moment one whale can nuke almost anything but if we had a few million users with medium stakes then voting would be a lot more reflective of community ideals.
A post might get 10 medium downvotes but 5000 medium upvotes and have a fair reflection of it's true value. As opposes to now where it might have hundreds of tiny upvotes from users but one large vote cancels all rewards and turn off that individual.
The same goes for witnesses and community votes.
Yes and as the community/network becomes more alluring to power users, there will be a wider variety of whales engaging too.. Though there is no guarantee that this will help any sub-group out in particular. Ultimately, as you say, a larger number of smaller users participating in curation and becoming active to cause balance will certainly help.
I suspect there may be a language barrier to this at present too, with English speaking accounts having a different experience to other language speaking accounts.