That's pretty much how I saw it in the beginning, as well. I was tired of hosting sites just shutting down and losing hundreds of hours of work because it just vanished overnight.
People do respond to rewards... sad as it may seem, "money talks." Even if someone just ends up with a few Hive cents, it's still an incentive. And it turns out to be more than someone with low HP upvoting comments with 20%. There's only a couple of thousand accounts with enough HP to "afford" to regularly reward comments in a meaningful way... so this is a good alternative.