RE: Feeling outdated on what's happening in the Blockchain world

Short form content, Waves, Snaps, and Inleo seem to be good alternative uses.

Hive, ultimately, is a database. There could be other uses for it that aren't visible on front ends. I think a good thing to do would be to connect IPFS somehow and pay for storage fees with HBD. The "drive" would be encrypted with Hive keys.

They were trying to get Hive to do smart contracts for a while, but that didn't seem to go anywhere.