Competition is a great motivator and when there is competition it tends to improve both teams.
Many people seem to be failing to notice that Steem is trading well above where it was when the Tron/Justin rumors hit crypto. There are a lot of reasons for that but one of them is just plain attention. As the battle broke out a lot of people started talking about the project, people who had become bored and barely participated woke up. Many people started talking about preferences.
We were trading at about .11 or .12 USD with one token when this all broke out. Now both tokens are well above that price. The battle got people's attention both on and off the platform and many people were saying our name.
No one wants to hear it, but so far this split has been a win, both sides are currently winning.
Each side should also size up the competition and decide what strengths to work on in order to keep the competition going.
One easy win for the Steem side is the ability to curate content and create distribution. On the Hive side we know many of the stakeholder view rewarding content as divesting their interests in the platform.
I don't think there are any such concerns on the Steem side now, so we need to make rewards rain on people. The more people have a meaningful vote the better.
This is why I love the efforts by SteemIt Inc to empower curators. I'm not worried about whether or not they upvote my favorite content, because the first phase should be trying to create as many people of diverse backgrounds and interest with a meaningful vote. We do this by distributing the the stake with our votes. Also, we should encourage people to self upvote once a day as a means of encouraging holding.
If we have 100k users with a meaningful vote, we can't help but to grow. People will come and all types of content will be rewarded.. Funny, Quality and yes, sometimes a complete shit show.
STEEM's Strengths:
Ability to distribute stake to users
Ability to focus on the community, because we don't have a lot of development activity right now.
Resources for promotion
Right now we should be competing to the end-users our ability to comfortably reward and engage with the community will only grow as those who are committed to trying to take down Steem on their way out continue their powerdowns.
For now Hive is going to win in the battle of idealism and also development, but I've always thought the path to success was a great distribution of people who can give a meaningful vote and gaining end users.
Hive's Strengths:
Development, organization and PR
I've been really busy, so my engagement levels are down, but I really hope to see more engagement, more votes and a welcoming committee,
Let's do this... Two platforms with their own set of strengths and ideals is a double win for everyone.
Get out there and vote to keep our user base, many of whom don't care about blockchain and centralization, they just want to earn a bit on their content.
End-users equal investors and price.
Steem and Hive are stronger together.