I would agree that it is not always the 'best' posts that make the most. The trending page tends to feature the same few people all the time. Some can guarantee to make $50+ on every post for whatever reasons. They may be 'OGs' with lots of connections or be doing work that is seen as good for Hive such as development or marketing. I benefit somewhat from this as I have got to know a lot of people and am on some curation trails.
If you look at the views (on peakd) and/or comments on some of the top posts you may surmise that not many are actually seeing them. It seems rare for a post to get over 1000 views. I heard about some old ones that did recently, but I assume that is because they got linked from some popular forum/reddit/whatever. It did not result in more comments, so those seeing them did not have Hive accounts.
The big curation accounts have massive influence and that may not be a good thing. One reason I want to see a lot more users is that it would spread the votes more. My voting is mostly manual. I delegate to some smaller curation account and have limited automatic voting. I want to target where my votes go.
We have some talented artists and musicians on Hive, but some just get the odd dollar for their efforts. If we want to get more interest in those areas then it may help if they got more support. They are likely to spread the word. The fact is that few will read a 2000 word blog post that may be 'worthy' as it's about the economics of Hive, but people may play a fun song to their friends.
Opinions vary on what has value. Elsewhere online a meme can get millions of views, but they you can argue over who created it. I do not think it's good for Hive if a short post that is popular and earns a few dollars from general support then gets downvoted for being 'low value'. We need to beware of abuse, but Hive needs to be a friendly place where people do not feel scared to post. I have heard plenty say it is hostile even if it may not appear so to some of us.
See also this thread https://ecency.com/ocd/@anomadsoul/the-horrendous-failure-of-curating-quality-content#@trostparadox/re-acidyo-rytxtp
It's not as simple as some people think and the current system mostly works. Those who have an issue with it tend to make a lot of noise. The fact that we can give less DVs than upvotes each day limits the damage.
You can actually give 10 more Dv's a day than upvotes, so this is an incorrect statement.
You can give ten full upvotes per day and recover your voting power over 24 hours. You can only give about two downvotes in the same time. I think that is what this means. There is an account that downvotes me all the time, but their DV mana is down at 1%, so there is no real damage.
The vote weights work identically either way, but you get 10 free dv's before it starts to use your default RCs, so this is incorrect.
DVs use up mana 4x quicker than upvotes according to that FAQ. Please let us know where you get your information.
I didn't know that about the DV mana pool, but I perceive the definition in the FAQ for DVs to only apply to the separate DV mana pool, so I was off on 10 extra DVs as it's +2.5 DVs over UVs. Once your reserve Dv mana is used up, Dvs and UVs on your shared Voting mana pool are equal, so you still potentially get more DVs than UVs.
I didn't know that about the DV mana pool, but I perceive the definition in the FAQ for DVs to only apply to the separate DV mana pool, so I was off on 10 extra DVs as it's +2.5 DVs over UVs. Once your reserve Dv mana is used up, Dvs and UVs on your shared Voting mana pool are equal, so you still potentially get more DVs than UVs.