Im not 100% sure if this is the same thing, but I'll share this...
I joined the chain in 2017. There were crazy payouts then (not to me). Many of the things getting big payouts seemed pretty sime or downright stupid. I didnt understand it. Then it just seemed to me to be a series of circle-upvoting. This was a big turn off to me and i mostly stepped away from the platform until 2019-20. The Steem to Hive drama helped reinvigorate my interest...I believe that drama helped the chan a lot...take a self look and reassess the goals. I agree...real, authentic interaction and voting is critical.
@arcange gave an awesome interview recently and spoke of Hives"s triple component; technical, financial, and social. The tech is the chain. The financial is the money component. And the social is our interactions. It's a 3 legged stool...each impacts the other.
Good points you have.
I never heard of his interview but I agree on the points made there. This tech is amazing and really does change lives. I'm just disillusioned on some parts of the tech especially the financial and social parts. If majority of the community wants to reward quality content, it would accept that many aren't really content creators and just content consumers who try out content creation or miss out on the reward opportunities.
And curators, while the word has been reduced to button clickers or automated bots, majority don't have the stake to make a difference in payout but rely on pooled delegations to make substantial vote values. You can hire a professional artist and they can sift through the art posts here but if they only have 50 hp the chances of their supported posts are slim getting to trending, even abyssmal if you saw the platform way back in 2017.
The downvote drama is also another thing the makes this chain entertaining. Like people can accept being told their content deserves money but they can't accept that some people can dislike them or their stuff and those have monetary consequences just as the opposite of what an upvote can do. It's ridiculous and it's a hazard to social interaction to mind the rewards because it may lead people to reduce their relationships to monetary consequences. Not all the time this happens but it happens especially when people take full advantage of their network.
I admit, I don't quite understand the downvote issue entirely. It does seem to generate a lot of passion. My thought has always been...just do your (my) thing, be real about it, and let things work out as they will. It'll most likely be okay.
Anyway, that interview is at https://peakd.com/hive-167922/@jongolson/hmpalavq if you're interested.
Your life will come easier when you don't mind the downvotes. Most that whine about it fall under the category of having their post found out plagiarized, penalized for spam, retaliation and genuine dislike. The latter two are just subjective monetary penalties, it's not frowned upon to reward stupid content but you're the villain for expressing disdain for content you don't disagree being rewarded. It's a complex issue and drama but the general rule I follow is don't enter into those latter two situations because you're only going to get burned (unless you're really asking for drama which some users actually do).
Thanks, will check it out some time.