You're literally nitpicking about some random low hanging fruit like "what steem was created for", what you gonna send me to its whitepaper after almost 7 years as proof? Who gives a shit what ned the ninjamining scammer and gullible dan wanted and pushed early on and the "amazing" people influencers like dollarvigilante brought here, they've returned close to no fucking value to the platform. If they had, posts about these subjects would be flooded with engagement, new users coming in daily and it rightfully taking a big part of the reward pool. I'd be a fucking moron to try and counter that if that was the case, but alas it's not, so you must be the moron.
Gotta give credit to dtv that at least he's trying this time around, have noticed some few accounts being created for free through ocdb reference to him, although most just inactive.
If there aren't enough posts of enough users in your curation scope who may in one way or another bring some value to Hive or retain some attention then curate something outside of that scope or don't curate at all, or stop complaining over a adjustive downvotes if you want to keep upvoting people you think bring value to the ecosystem but someone else doesn't. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this way, if you want I can bring this up in a poll to see what the rest of the community thinks about it.
If these influencers don't want downvotes then prove to us that your content is sought after ON hive, not whatever is happening outside of it. They've had years and probably months of trending time to prove that people here consume the content yet have miserably failed. Am I lying about that? If you don't agree with my downvotes then upvote them higher and take the curation penalty to continue rewarding these influencers you put your hopes in and I'll back off once they show signs of wanting to bring some value to the ecosystem rather than just taking from it, until then literally any regular user is just as valuable if not more.
If you think that the underlying philosophy behind the entire system that you use every day is irrelevant, then we are approaching the situation from such a different view that there probably is no point talking here.
It's clear that layer 1 Hive's community at present has been shaped such that it is not suited to the mindset or intentions that created it originally - as occurs with most great inventions - they are watered down and exploited over time. I may return once layer 2 is more evolved.