Hi Max, I am also being heavily downvoted on Hive atm. One key point is that you are mistaken when you say that the money is created from thin air and doesn't cost anyone anything. When the reward tokens are created it has an inflationary effect on the Hive token which devalues it for everyone. So technically, everyone who holds Hive is 'paying' for the reward payouts and this therefore means that whales 'pay' for it more than others. Now, they should be aware of this when they invest and know that they are buying in to a system where this happens - but it seems that some of them are happy to use their position to 'protect their investment' by downvoting in unreasonable ways. We are in process of taking steps to resolve this.