the photography example that you gave is a example of somewhat good work of recommending algorithm. But i bet you had that youtube experiences where after 40-50 minutes you are watching something and you have no idea how you got there.

i will give you an example of my father. he recently got into the rabbit hole of facebook and youtube. and especially in facebook (i think he uses it more than youtube) he joined few "harmless" groups and all of a sudden he is recommended all kind of crazy things. groups about immigrants (almost all fake as i started fact checking them to show him how he is manipulated. old photos, fake news, manipulated narrative...), 5G covid things and all kind of craziness. And i know for sure that he was not searching for it, it was all recommended. And it is in lenguage that facebook corp. does not care about nor understands.

On the rewards thing. I am here almost 3 years now, and i felt the thing you are mentioning, but also i seen a lot of people on youtube and instagram that i thought to myself why the fuck are those people up there and so popular.
Also Jarvie mentioned a lot of times (as he sees the analytics on peakd), if you would see how much you get in rewards for the views that your posts get, you would not believe it (as there is no place on the internet that you would get that :) )
And as someone that used a lot of social networks a lot of them pretty consistently (maybe not long enough) i know how hard is to get any traction, not to mention any money from it.

then he goes somewhere else.

i would be really happy if some of those people at least came back to share where that somewhere else is where they earn more :D

all jokes a side, i do think some people are overreworded and some yes for sure there are people that have some quality and are skipped, but hive is still small enough so relationships have a big impact on the mechanics. because i will scroll through some communities but i will always give a bigger vote to someone that i have some kind of relationship even if (for example) his photo is not that great as someones that i never even exchanged a comment.

This is longer than my post :D