What is tricky about Hive is that it is simultaneously an alleged free market and employer on top of perhaps several other things as well.
The goal should be that of supply and demand to let people upvote posts as a way of rewarding what they want, that is what we might call a free market or at least an attempt towards that end result of a free-market.
What is strange in some ways is that the money we use to upvote is generally provided by the omnipotent rewards pool which I want to call the employer. Of course, the pool may not be an entity as such but it is still a system which cryptocurrencies are distributed and redistributed and everything.
Other blockchains or social networks may be better, some might argue, that is if you simply tip or donate in order to reward content we like. So, combining upvoting with a centralized pool is cool some might say and yet still a liability or a potential weakness depending on how such a bilateral blockchain can be exploited, etc, and don't get me started on downvotes (flagging) which makes it perhaps a trilateral party, we don't have time to talk about downvoting, the logic behind it, even tho I've written many posts on that subject alone.
One suggestion might be to let downvotes affect a reputation number but not to be confused with the REP score of a person, I just mean downvotes probably shouldn't be used to offset upvotes. Instead, they should simply include a downvote total next to the upvote total.
But I said I wasn't going to talk about downvotes because I can talk about it all day. I instead just wanted to share these other thoughts that came to my mind, that the relationship upvoting has with the rewards pool is somewhat odd and I'm not trying to say I have all the answers here. I might have said it before that a better system might include at least more than one rewards-pool in that there has to be a way to decentralize the pool or perhaps I'm wrong about that.
I want to believe that Hive Blog is at least a little better than Steemit which was taken over by Tron Overlord Justin Sun. Hive is still my favorite blockchain. I still copy and paste my daily posts to Steemit and to a few others.
I get the arguments people make regarding how downvoting is supposed to theoretically discourage and eventually perhaps like slow down spam, scams, plagiarism, low-quality content, theft, boring articles, hate-speech, etc, etc. By the way, I don't believe in hate speech. I'm playing Devil's advocate.
I could probably talk all day regarding trying to come up with rebuttals to the downvote arguments. I've made my arguments in the past but I'm trying to come up with better ones. So, for now, I'll stop writing. I should probably write some more articles relating to all of these topics as soon as I can.