Hive is ruined by the downvote cartels. Nothing of any controversial importance will ever get seen here. Any halfway intelligent controversial creator will quickly realize this and move on to a better platform.
It would be trivial for any intelligence agency, with a very small budget to completely dominate the views and rewards here. I wonder if the current situation is just pure ignorance or a deliberate scheme.
Such an agency would simply mask themselves by providing some service like "curation for the little guy" or even leading development. In this way they accumulate ignorant delegation and multiple witness spots. In addition they recruit endless "creators" like photographers in Vietnam and Thailand, artists, travelers, whatever, doesn't matter. of which there are 100's if not 1000's of accounts and they will always make great rewards. Nobody notices this of course, and couldn't do anything about it even if they did. In exchange these account add to the pile of delegations and vote proxies to maintain these witness positions. A nice trade off for both parties. It would not be about making money here, it would be about controlling what is popular.
Anyone posting real journalism about anything important is squashed immediately and these people leave the platform.
Personally i don't use hive at all. the trending pages are all garbage non-sense waste of time. i can get much better garbage on facebook and reddit. That is the way it will be until things change regarding downvotes and witness governance voting.
It's hard for there to be many changes here. Oftentimes repeated content mills do the best here. Somewhat of the same thing applies to YouTube as well in some respects.