There's no perfect system, but Hive seems better than other options I've seen. Part of the issue with rewards distribution is that it is just such a small community of maybe a few thousand active users. The whales dominate when it comes to deciding who earns. If there were ever millions of users then the whales would have less influence. Of course most people are just trying to earn whatever they can, but there is some great content here. I follow musicians and artists who I really enjoy and all the votes I give them add up to more than I have given to others via schemes like Patreon. Of course I have a fairly large stake, but if someone could bring in a few thousand fans who each buy a stake then they could be getting a few bucks and the fans would earn too from curation. It would be a different place with far more users, but then it needs that to be really viable. For now it's just a small club.
I do accept that my earnings are pretty good really, but I am not against seeing others doing better. I can keep earning from curation anyway and I will try to curate well.
As a development platform Hive has advantages in speed, free transactions and lack of restrictions on how you can use it. It may just need more features to make more things possible.
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.