You'd be rich and earning a dollar by now if you converted those cents into Hive and powered up.

EDIT: Cents in reference to figurative currency where the amount of value you put into caring to give people sound advice.

they only want capital and thought this would be an easy way to get it

This.

establish social connections, build your social network, find those with similar interests and have honest discussions with them. Very few will do it. In truth, I think they do not want to be bloggers and have no interest in seeing social capital turn to actual capital

Can't be helped. When a platform advertises itself as a paid to earn blogging site, it attracts people to get paid to earn for their blogs, there should be a disclaimer something related to grounding their expectations.

People know the gist of benefits to hustle trying to get their name out there but they dislike the idea of allocating some hours building their audience daily and in the long term because that's too much work and then envy those that actually do commit doing their engagements on a daily basis because those that worked for their reputation are reaping social rewards built up over months of consistency.

They know the answer most of the time, they're just not willing to work to make it happen. This platform is a weird place to be, it borders between a social media and a platform for content monetization failing both functionalities yet somehow tries to put it together.

Facebook wouldn't get people to be stingy with their votes/emojis, and Youtube would get people to be more competitive with their content to grow their community, but on Hive, people are somewhere in between that zone and the soonest way to make peace with the platform is deciding whether one really wants to be creating content worth the social reward or just go free willy on whatever they want to share.