Once a user has 'won' that vote there's no need to improve their content
I completely agree to that. If someone who has decent auto votes on them can even grab a 30$ vote on their post if it was just a cat photo without any content on it. This needs to change. People should start voting good contents and not because they like the authors. This is my humble opinion. And the below part of your post contradicts with my thought.
Don't reward 'good content' - reward good Hivers
I'm not sure I understood it right. So, lets say someone is posting a neat article for like 1000 words and he is pretty new and not popular and he hardly gets 30 cents on his posts almost every day. There is another good Hiver who is popular and whatever he writes, he gets 20$ minimum solid. Here, are you saying the first guy deserves no vote and our votes should go only to the second guy?
If we are going to vote people who are good Hivers (I'm sorry, I don't understand whom exactly you call as good Hivers), how will the new guys who just started and writes quality content will get motivation?
I think what I mean is on Hive (and before Steem) we have really gotten used to the term 'good content' and reward that. Of course good content should be rewarded! Don't get me wrong. But I think sometimes a simple post from a good Hiver could get a lower but still significant vote from time to time too. Especially autovotes (as they don't read the posts anyway) could put 1$ votes on people that are trying hard to make something on Hive, like growing communities. Sometimes those posts are not 'great reads' but they are worth something in other ways. That's what I mean by 'reward good Hivers' - and I don't mean that we don't need to reward good content, just that we don't need to 'exclusively' reward good content.
Hope it makes sense now :-) Thanks for discussing!
Yes, it makes a lot of sense now. Thanks for clarifying. 😀