Why do people have a desire to poke a stick into a working mechanism in order to see what happens? HBD holders are passive investors and lowering the interest rate will cause them to leave the platform. If someone thinks that they will run to buy Hive, then this is a mistake.
Personally, I'm going to generate yield/interest in whichever project offers a combination of the best returns, safety and ethics - which at the moment is HBD for me (out of the options I know about). So yes, if the interest rate drops significantly I will sell my HBD quickly and move on - as there are other options that are more attractive and HP is too volatile for me to rely on long term.
It's expected that the APR can change, but I agree that this is not the right time or amount to do it.
From what I understand, the huge stablecoins such as Tether survive by charging fees, issuing loans and making investments. They leverage their presence on exchanges, do marketing and had epic growth in the last couple of years (don't believe the CMC graph, 2022 was a real year. lol).
HBD doesn't have the positioning of Tether and can't compete with it due to that and it's relatively low size (and less stable peg). The main use for HBD at present is for Hive related features/services and it having a very attractive APR is actually an interesting onboarding tool if used correctly. However, key sales points are only as useful as the marketing done to promote them. You can have the best thing in the world and no-one will buy it if they don't know about it or don't understand it well enough.
I am consistently saddened by the lack of understanding of marketing among many of the decisions makers on Hive - I get the impression that they haven't studied the basics. As @edicted pointed out in his post on this topic, the top 20 witnesses ideally need to be at least knowledgeable in many fields and this includes marketing. If they aren't, then for that reason alone the community needs to have regular meetings to maximise knowledge transfer and to optimise decision making. This should be common sense. Pretty much all successful organisations have something like this.
Offering a great APR should not be seen as something to stop because 'people don't believe it'.. lol. It's a major selling point and tackles people's most basic survival pain points in life. If people just assume it's a scam then that is evidence of a dire need for better educational and promotional strategy/materials and not evidence of a need to destroy the selling point.
