There is way more to our blockchain than rewards. Unfortunately, the concept of how to treat finances in a mutually beneficial way that is healthy is lost upon society as a whole when our leaders act in a corrupt way as well as operating in a debt based society. Hive is weird as I have seen it be a perfect reflection of the for realz world. Currently, I am leaning on it to survive until I get some money in February and get to a community in Idaho where I can survive better outside of hive. Truly, each time I cash out hive it hurts mostly for tax reasons and I want to grow my stake. But I am also helping others, curating content content, creating content while still investing into our ecosystem. I feel that the rewards pool is community based and should be more DAO based in regards to downvotes and content reward moderation instead of by individual stake holders who really have no need to answer to anyone but also shouldn't be acting like a police force. But understanding Graphene tech and how that works there is justification to do so by the people who operate the system to help protect it in how they see fit. That is where the white paper leaves it up to interpretation on how exactly that should be handled. A DAO system like @nathanmars brought up is essential i feel to help our large stake holders from being isolated from community and give the community greater ability to form consensus on what content should be monitored for rewards pool mining and moderation. Otherwise we run the risk of forking again or losing potential investors into this system.
I feel content rewards is a key part of ownership. As it is it is hard to just cash out and leave with a 13 week power down. I can go on but rewards are only a small part of Hive and its more of a fallacy to think people only come here for money. I see too much well written blogs and content. Not to mention big names sharing their content and not even touching their liquid hive.
Have you heard of Pimp your post Thursdays or The terminal? These are great discord based communities on Hive that do a great job of making people feel like it is worth staying on hive while creating great content. I find most leave hive because they do not get recognized or see content downvoted aggressively that is anti-government and anti-centralization leaving many confused as to if it is decentralized and really pro-government. I know I came to steem in 2017 because of the concept of content ownership and to better support anti government content/anti plutocratic content. Turns out I found niche curating and helping others while developing blog writing skills. Also finding strong communities. Unless you are BTC maximalist one would think web 3.0 people would be anti-government and anti-plutocracy and coming to Hive for these reasons aside from blogging and owning content.
Well, after being in Steem/Hive, I can say in my own view that Hive needs to be forked off at some point and have a reset. Only some of the unfair stake was not carried over from Steem -> Hive, there still exists enough so that the top 20 are permanently in power.
The goal of a decentralized system should be to ensure that whales become less and less of a whale over time. I'm not sure how that's going to happen unless they sell. I am in favor of raising the inflation drastically so that their stake is watered down, and this can be more decentralized to the point of where it's super rare for someone to have even 0.01% of the total Hive.
The super majority of people only need 100 HP to make dozens of comments and a few posts per day. Anything more than that is essentially a waste, as the limitation of onboarding new people is liquid hive neeind to be bought for them. RC stuff helps solve that issue, but then RCs will be rented out and delegated to projects and make whales even more income when that starts to happen(this already happens on the EOS chain).