Even when HIVE should stay and/or focus on being a social chain powering different forms of social networks, the HIVE distribution to content on the base layer focusses many users on earning HIVE instead of second-layer tokens linked to new social network initiatives. I think that prevents other tokens to become successful, or at least, makes it more difficult. Added to that, plenty of HIVE is distributed in auto voting manner, or blindly manual voting. Both are kinda not how proof-of-brain should work.

However, I do very much like the distribution of HIVE to whomever, large or small players. So maybe we shall not remove the distribution of HIVE to whomever, but implement a mechanism to distribute HIVE to those contributing to the HIVE eco-system. One of the ideas I have is to establish a kinda distributed governance system which decides on HIVE distributions to users based on all sorts of criteria, not posts or comments though. Such a governance system shall be very active, reviewing on high frequency who should get some of the HIVE we mint every single day. Criteria should be dynamically determined by the community. Those who decide how to distribute should be elected constantly. Many different decision-makers, in independent groups, should be established. How to implement such a governance system, I didn't really detail yet. Somehow I like the set-up of EdenOS, a multi-layer election system with randomness included and the need for re-elections every couple of months. Other governance systems can be thought of as well, of course. But the trick is, those elected should be easily removed when they do 'wrong', whatever we decide is wrong. Added to all of that, we need the proper tools to support such a governance system. I suppose we shall experiment hell out all this before moving into such a new system 😉

When we removed content awarding on the base layer, I believe 2nd layer social tokens get more chances. Plus we reduce the fights over how HIVE is currently distributed. The aforementioned big blind manual votes, the auto votes to lazy authors and all that. And it also helps to position HIVE chain as a true general-purpose chain since the content-rewarding aspects aren't part of the base layer anymore.