I agree that community morale plays a big part in Hive’s future valuation. Good thing you mention about the greater importance of unrestricted information over monetary incentive. As to the feeling that mainstream rhetoric is lazy and promotes specific propaganda, its comfortable to read a confirmation that I am not alone. In my offline world, most people I know see that the problem is not mainstream media, politics, and education, but those who think differently.
Reading your post about the down voters, since I haven’t seen much of such action, I am just wondering if it is really the quality of content they are concerned about. Junk and quality content, I think that’s normal in an organic social media platform like Hive, but with the voting system (if the posts are really voted down for concern about quality, and not due to conflict in opinion), soon the junk creators will lose the incentive to continue the practice and this will incentivize those who are dedicated to create quality content. In fact, that’s what I appreciate about Hive. Being banned in two social media platforms (the irony is that these platforms promote decentralized ideas) without knowing the reason why, I was happy to see that even a certain guy that seems to spam many posts here with his “brain terrorism” thing is still being allowed to post his comments. That to me is a good indication of Hive’s anti-censorious stance.
That's sad, yes - the majority of people are heavily conditioned to be extremely mediocre at best and to try to hold back human evolution. It's a terrifying situation and one which means that those with intent to thrive and even to survive must have strong wills and be open to relocating to be around those who respect real freedom.
Downvoting for measurable reasons, such as plagiarism and spam is a useful feature that promotes higher quality posts. However, people sometimes choose to go beyond these limits and try to make out that channels they disagree with are actually abusers or negatively oriented people. This is essentially what Web 2.0 sites have been doing as they censor the world, but on Hive it is more transparent and their attempts to cover it up are always poor. So we have a situation where certain entities seek to centralise and dominate a decentralised network under a variety of poorly reasoned excuses. This does not incentivise quality content as intelligent, free thinkers will leave. This simply motivates the mediocrity that was already highlighted.
Hive will not remove your account and that is a major bonus, but you can be excluded from the main features of Hive that set it apart, so this is an important area to find balance in.