People like myself sound like a broken record, but trying to attract people to Hive with the "you can get paid to blog" spiel is asinine.
I tend to agree with you because it doesn't seem to work very well. Still, getting something for what is basically a hobby is much better than nothing. The thing is that you don't have to invest financially at all to make gains. That is very important and what separates Hive from potentially being a multi-level marketing scheme. The piper is being paid by the speculators most of whom are not users at all.
It seems that the 80-90 cents that the median post gets here is too little to compensate for the relative lack of interesting content and engagement. But once the content and engagement reach a certain level together with better discovery, we might attract more people who show up for the content and engagement alone.
Those who find no value in Hive are probably contributing no value. Garbage in, garbage out.
Well put!