Did you come up with some more thoughts or insights since you wrote the above text?
I've been here since 2017 and the really exceptional content I find actually tends to be on posts that point to content taking place outside of Hive. Authors and books that are not found in the usual search engines, for example, or are very difficult to find. The idea of earning money with your own content has made all content mediocre in my opinion. The fact with all platforms on the Internet is that mediocrity is rewarded. The second fact is that people find reading tiring and the habit of reacting to headlines and snippets of text is widespread. In my view, these are impulse reactions.
Individuals like to think of themselves as exceptional and are mistaken in their self-assessment of the quality of their content. "There is nothing new under the sun", yet people generally always post exactly what is nothing new, hence the expected. The expected, however, is the dissemination of ideas that are already thin in the first step. The wider you spread these thin ideas like butter on bread, the thinner they become. The paradox is that the more superficial attention they receive, the more important they appear to be.
The same thing happens in the film industry. Once outstanding, and therefore successful, scripts are copied and each new copy loses quality and the only thing that hypes such poor content are the budgets of people who are actually completely uninterested in the matter.
In order to be highly interested in something, you need people who are really into it and are well trained and experienced in their profession.
I agree to the extent that getting voted and collecting the rewards is basically a hindrance in wanting to become excellent or an expert. It's too easy. I don't mean that it's easy to get high payouts. Rather, I mean that it's too easy to build loyalty with people you basically don't know. Anyone can easily become a flatterer, all they have to do is say what someone else likes.
It's a "wanting to please culture" that has more and more difficulty recognising what real criticism means. The well-meaning critic who criticises another is always interested in seeing the other person develop, grow beyond what they can already do, but can become even better at. Flattery and unconditional confirmation is the death of improving skills. Though it's a booster for posting.
Concentrating on the voting button allows direct communication to slip through the lack of commentary, for example, and the unwillingness to really engage with an individual challenger in a sporting manner. How many challengers can you actually handle per day? Communication via the wallet, for example, has fallen by the wayside (including me too). At the beginning of my time here, I directly tipped a lot more often or slipped a few tokens to someone else. If one wants, one can reward others via your wallet, for example to give more than just cents via a vote.
There was a time when I bought art with HBD and the artist agreed to send me a work of art by mail. The fact that Hive has not become a place where matter is still seen as a trade commodity is a question I ask myself. .... I don't know, maybe I got blind and lazy, myself.