Hey remlaps, thanks for the heads-up about this post of yours! Definitely a great discussion and some great replies, also. The two main points I agree on are:
There indeed needs to be a change to the Communities #hive tags. As an author who stopped writing before the whole Hive happening, it was a little confusing what was happening when I got back here. The suggestion by @steemchiller of adding in a "community" field on the json is something I really do like, and ahree with you that it needs to be unique. I'm sure Steemit is losing a significant amount of traffic due to SEO;
Also, I really loved your idea of adding a #tag following tool to your already existing extensions! This weekend has been a bit chaotic, but it's in my plans to test them out soon.
To add my opinion to the mix, I've been using Steemit as a decentralized journey as well as a long-term project in content creation. Specially recently, when Xwitter got in trouble with the Brazilian law and its access was blocked, I felt the value of decentralization in the platform where I create. Having said that, I think that communities in a way reinforce centralization. As pointed out really well in the post, authors receive a lot more incentives for posting within a community rather than in their own blog. Even though that increases the social interactions, it also decreases the overall quality of posts in the Steem Ecosystem, in my opinion. In my opinion, the decentralization of the platform should be taken advantage a lot more, rewarding authors for creating and adding value to relevant tags in order to improve the macro perspective of the Blockchain itself, instead of only prioritizing the micro perspective through communities only. I wish I had more energy and time to be more comprehensive and to be able to reflect on the topic further, but I hope my contribution for now helps :) cheers!