Of course we can find positive ways -- which is why I distrust people who propose punitive, terroristic measures -- it is a failure of imagination indulged in too often by privileged people who think they are not going to get hurt in the doing. And, YES, it will lead to dictatorship if enacted across the chain because that is always what happens when a group of people decides they have the right to determine punishment and reward -- life or death -- over a whole community of human beings. The devil and mankind, in Scripture, committed the same sin: they wanted to be like God, determining good and evil, punishment and reward, life or death. All dictatorships tend to function exactly the same way ... which is why some of us know to get loud and nip things in the bud. The Hive big-time powers that be know that for the sake of the chain's reputation as decentralized and free, they cannot afford that kind of thing ... and so do I. There is a method to my madness!
Now, about positive things: we have Distriator and SpendHBD as marvelous models of how to help people deal with their lives while also driving good for Hive itself. So, if we want to have people hold their HP, how would we use the same creative thinking? There are things that can be done on a coding/witness level:
Increase the interest a bit on HP, since we have already brought the interest down on HBD to 15 percent from 20 percent. Even five percent interest on HP would be an improvement.
We could have communities offer a community HP pool -- this is kind of what Snaps does as we vote on the little heart and Comment Rewarder distributes portions of that back to users who engage. This would allow communities to build a more powerful community vote for its members, and would incentivize users to power up and delegate more and help each other get more rewards overall. The problem with this is that you can have a good number of users who will have over-delegated compared with the size of their vote and governance ability -- but what we also will have created is an environment in which holding HP and powering up Hive directly helps a community prosper.
I'm sure there are going to be even better ideas once we buckle down as a community to generate them ...