and some downvotes followed for the Hive rewards
I'm not surprised by that and I believe that it's not too bad that some people think about protecting the reward pool because it could really lead to abuse, like 50$ for a blurred image lol. However, we shouldn't consider all short content as garbage. I see some nice snaps or threads that generate a lot of interaction and I think it should be acceptable that such posts generate some income.
I agree things should be more nuanced. We should avoid black & white categorizations (as in valuable or garbage), there's a lot of room in between.