Thank you for your thoughtful comment Steve! You are a hard core Hivean who lives and breathes the Hive way. I'm working on a blog post titled something along the lines of "Orcas work together" I got the idea from a BBC documentary on how Orca's work as groups to hunt in the wild. The analogy here being Orcas on HIVE should work as a unit to reduce the influence of whales and help identify (and incentivize) good quality content, and valuable community members that foster Hive culture. I expect to join the ranks sometime around Q4 2024.
I agree that there's great content here. For example this 4 year old piece which explains inflation on HIVE. Under-rewarded? I think so. Is that the reason she left HIVE? I couldn't say.
Plenty of good posts don't get the rewards they deserve whilst others get auto-votes regardless of the quality. That is a fact of life here, but not a reason to give up hope. At least peakd gives you the option to check for more recent posts by that person so they could still get something if they stay active. A lot of my early posts made nothing, but I was having fun anyway.
I manage to keep my enthusiasm up, but I get that it can feel like a slog for others. We each have to do what we can to improve that.