What ends up happening is the allure becomes too great. Word starts to spread. Even now, we have people commenting on posts that rank as Trending, many because I (and others) are giving out upvotes. It is a way for people to start pulling in some decent rewards.

Agreed!

This is where I think all the massive upvotes to the HBD Stabilizer posts / comments are a bit misguided. I mean, I get where those folks are coming from. However, I don't see much meaningful ecosystem-expanding activity emanating from the DHF. So, either start spending some of those DHF funds creatively, or do something better with those upvotes.

If each of those whale accounts focused a bit of their upvote power on intentionally 'over-rewarding' select, well-written posts and comments, and if they spread it around (as in, not 'over-rewarding' the same authors time and again), then news would spread. As long as they were intent on making sure that only high-quality posts and high-quality engagement received those rare but lofty rewards, enthusiasm would grow and people would 'spread the word' to their friends and family.

However, my fear is that some of the other HIVE whales would disapprove and begin to massively downvote those forward-thinking upvoters, thus negating any possible positive PR that might arise, and turning it negative.

The potential for massively-negative PR because of whale accounts hellbent on downvoting content they disagree with or view as 'over-rewarded' is huge. That is one of the reasons I created VYB as a downvote-free zone. Yes, more vigilance is required to combat plagiarism and spam and other forms of abuse (without the help of DVs), but we have an excellent anti-abuse team actively working on that and we are actively engaging the community in the moderation process (and will continue to expand the community involvement in that process).

Part of my vision for VYB is [1] to have a sleek on-boarding process, like Leo's twitter process (I cannot put words to how harrowing and discouraging it has been trying to onboard my students the past 3 semesters using HiveOnboard and Ecency, both of which have failed to deliver an even remotely desirable experience for my students) and [2] to create an environment that is equally inviting both to content-creators and investors (and also to genuine curators, like @onealfa, who is indeed a rare breed (and a bit rough around the edges, imho) -- a diamond in the rough).