This is great news. As I understand hivemind from your reference (I'm not that great with the technical stuff) this will address some of the issues I have been very frustrated by with steemit.

To further elaborate, I have noticed a decline in engagement on my posts and also others I follow who write quality creative material (I'm talking about poetry+fiction as they're what I write primarily). I thought long and hard about this, and I'm pretty sure that part of this drop in engagement is a reflection of a lot of people suspending their steemit activities due to the drop in price.

I've been on steemit 8 months now, writing almost daily and fully expected to have made more of an impact. There are so many issues which destroy the chances of success for new steemians of quality, and honestly, I think that if it doesn't change the platform will struggle to find mainstream adoption. The reason why I think this, based on steemit as it is now, is that there are so many barriers to organic growth. I read a fantastic post this morning by @guyfawkes4-20: The Heck is going on with Steem?, which mirrors my views on this in so many ways.

I curate for curie, and in my travels looking for posts, I've come across many instances of new talented steemians, on the verge of giving up because of the complexity of trying to navigate the maze of networking mechanisms it takes to find even moderate success. This - turn off - effect is magnified by bidbots, which return negative profit and also serve to populate the trending pages with a high % of utter shit. Sorry to swear but that's how it makes me feel. I stopped using bidbots many months ago and watched my blog suffer in the amount of comments people leave etc. At the end of the day why should people like me (and many others) who have been published in mainstream publications stick around when they have to spend there own profits, to be read in a section which is mainly populated by very low quality writing.

This is where I can see Hivemind really helping people who are truly bringing quality content to the platform in all different subjects/tags.

As @dedicatedguy said in his comment:

Everything that improves the steem ecosystem and features is good not only for this community, but for strengthening the idea behind steem itself, "reward users for the content they create and share with the community".

He's spot on, this is how I always viewed steemit, as a place that rewards quality content creation. Hopefully, hivemind will create sub communities which can operate outside of the cauldron of crap that the trending page has become. Communities where everyone who also have the drive and commitment to write/film/draw/create amazing content can go where they won't get that high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). Maybe also a place whales/dolphins, and also curators, can go where it doesn't take them hours and hours to sift through rubbish to find content that both interests them and is of high quality.

Lol, sorry this rant has gone on for so long. Thanks for writing this great post which explains this upcoming development so succinctly, cryptoctopus :-)