As bad as what happened at Steemit was, it gave us all a great lesson. Hive withstood that attempted takeover and used the lessons of it to grow stronger. We are in a better place now because of it, so in a sense I suppose we should be thankful to Justin Sun.

I'd like to set up a witness eventually. I've been here for 5 and 1/2 years, I'd like to start giving back more. I think right now in my personal life I am not in a place where I can dedicate the space or time to that, but it is something I'd like to do in the future. Glad to hear it's getting easier and easier to set up!

Okay then aside from scalability and witnesses getting rekt, what if users just stopped using Hive?

This is certainly my biggest fear. And that we won't grow fast enough to replace them. Similar to how Japan is shrinking right now, with more people dying than being born. This is one reason I am really in favor of making the Hive sign-up procedure much easier than it currently is. You mention the sign-up fee. I think 3 Hive is a fine price, and as you mention many do it for free, but I still think it is just way to complicated for most people. The average grandma can sign up to FB in seconds. But on Hive... she won't even get past figuring out what all the keys are for.

I don't worry about people whining about being downvoted. That's a small minority. People being discouraged because they post great article after great article but never get more than a few cents is a little more concerning. I know many curation projects are trying to help this problem, and ideally these will grow more in the future. But it's the complexity of signing up and figuring out how to manage the keys that concerns me. Of course that seems simple to me and you, but to people unfamiliar with crypto it is very confusing.