There was a demand for open chat, private chat, and direct messaging; since day one. But what happened was many moved over to Discord. Once that gained popularity and was endorsed more and more, we noticed engagement on chain steadily decline. Some blame the lack of votes being placed on comments but that's only a small part of the picture. Can't vote for a comment if there isn't one to vote for.

At some point the trend needs to be reversed so more traffic remains, consistently enjoying the various features of Hive.