I do agree with you generally, and often specifically.
"Does it need financial incentive to keep the party going?"
The problem of centralization financializing the content of posters neglecting to share that financial return with the content creators was the basis for the creation of the chain we are on. It is an ENORMOUS opportunity to replace Web2 with Hive.
Hive needs to provide that financial incentive. Grandma seems to continue posting cat pics without it, but making it available to creators here will bring them here, because everyone likes money. I learned that from 'Idiocracy'. You like money. I like money. Everyone likes money. That's Hive's secret weapon to conquer the social media financial sector that has grown to become the largest financial sector in global markets in the last ten years - while this chain has failed to capitalize on that. We can do better. I hope we do.
The interesting thing is that Hive isn't earning any of these financial returns you're talking about. Social media financial return comes from collecting data and serving targeted ads to people. The value doesn't come from the cat video: it comes from the people paying attention to the cat video. Subtle details like this matter going forward. LEO tried to implement ad-revenue sharing and it was a complete disaster because the platform is small and there was no money to share in the first place. And also ads are annoying and crypto users are abnormally frugal on aggregate.
Lot's of things to unpack here... like how do we outsource some of this stuff to layer 2 but continue to reward it. How do we implement revenue-sharing when revenue-sharing is an inherently centralized business model?
That's my point. Hive isn't Web2 centralization milking content creators like the other platforms I named.
Hive doesn't need to share in the revenue from people sharing content, because Hive isn't a business. The community can upvote posts and enable the content to earn, while the inflation model enables funding the witnesses that make it all possible.
But, you know this.