I think that Hive should consider its niche.
Hive isn't in competition with the big social media sites, like twitter. The rewards pool isn't large enough to be a consideration for celebrities, nor influencers. They can monetise their followings to a much greater extent on twitter / instagram / youtube etc. And mass adoption on such sites follows celebrities.
Hive instead tends to compete with long-form content on blogs / Medium etc. But even here committed bloggers have greater potential for earning by setting up their own site.
So, for me at least, the premise of "come to Hive to earn money for quality content" doesn't hold water. Mainstream content producers can earn much more elsewhere. Better long-form content will always be elsewhere.
What Hive does very well is build communities. It's more like reddit, or even discord, in that respect. For me, that should be the focus.
As such, I think that requiring "quality content" actually reduces the attractiveness of Hive. Most people out there are more likely to "comment" than "post" and requiring longer-form quality content raises the bar to a high level which people are unwilling to make. And since the majority of content rewards are reserved for posts, this turns away the majority of potential users.
If the niche is to be more like reddit and the goal is mass adoption, then the focus should be on growing communities and rewarding content that generates discussion and engagement. I would think it's worth an experiment where communities focus on short-form posts (with a specific tag) and curation guilds drive rewards to those communities that are growing and to those accounts that generate discussion within those communities.
There is so much intel and info in this comment I don't know where to start, so I'll start shilly to then, depending on your response, I will continue on.
Have you seen this?
https://leofinance.io/communities/hive-124452
Each community has its own threads section. The backend work was a pain in the ass, but the frontend now shows community discussions in the form of Threads.
Yes, I think this is the right direction. Although it still feels like a competitor for twitter rather than reddit / discord.
The latter tend to have communities as the driving force. Then the threads (community discussions) would be one tool that the community can use, along with their own token for rewards etc.
Thinking along the lines of discord, I think it could be easier to sign up communities who bring users with them than sign up users individually.
But the offering for the community needs to be strong. All the tools you need to run a web3 style community but simple user experience.
This probably means native tokens and NFTs, rather than relying on hive-engine.
It may even be cleaner as a fork of hive entirely, to separate from the long-form approach, although these things are very hard to get off the ground.