It is an excellent answer/explanation @acidyo, and what I mostly want to add here is that it takes us back to the same issue that was always circling the drain on Steem: Is this seen as a content creation venue or just as a money dispenser?
Further to that... for the future growth and success of the entire Hive ecosystem, I think we need to be very careful in terms of how we describe Hive to potential new people. As I have said (about 6.5 million times!) as long as the primary sales pitch is "come to Hive to make money" the people who will be attracted to that will really not care very much about the content they create... they are purely going to focus on optimizing their rewards. And so, that particular snake will continue to eat its own tail.
So then the only way to change things is to start focusing on community and content creation. But there are a lot of people already embedded here who won't agree that's a good idea.
I have recently started creating posts that are entirely for "external" consumption, and it's interesting to see just how many page views some of them are getting. Now, whether that translates into new signups remains to be seen... but at least we have some tools now, like Hiveonboard, and such.
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear by now that we don't want to make the same mistakes as we did on steem in the first couple years, same thing regarding these conspiracy posts trending constantly. No offense and while we are an immutable platform we also focused on such and anarcho content too much in the beginning and too much of one thing is never good, especially not for a decentralized platform. So yes, while I agree that money shouldn't be the focus it is sad that so many here today and in charge of a lot of influence of the reward pool focus mainly on the ROI of stake instead of the value and outreach of it.
It's sad that those actively giving up on rewards because they want what is best for the platform have others riding on their backs indirectly taking their hive rewards and at the same time not helping.
What is your proposal to do next? Have the feeling the witnesses are acting the same as before on Steem. We had a little more alive HIVE at the beginning; Loved the first few days, maybe week or two or so when no auto voting system was connected to HIVE yet. I do think most poeple - in general - are good actors, but when the number of 'bad' actors are increasing, good actors become 'bad' actors as well. Thats what we've seen on Steem, and that is what we see on HIVE as well. I put 'bad' in quotes, since, what is bad? Imho, focus on money is bad for HIVE. Autovoting is bad for HIVE. For reasons as given in the posts and comments, like yours. I start wondering more and more if a social network with monetary rewards will ever became a success. A success in terms of money distribution to good content (long and short form) rather than to 'good' authors. One reason not mentioned why autovoting is bad: Any new user creating good content, not getting on autovoters, will leave as quickly as they came. Maybe they dont leave because they dont get rewards, but they for sure leave because the same users with good or bad content get 10 to 100 times more rewards. We are more than 4 yrs down to road and to me it feels like we hardly learned anything.