Ideally, we would reward content proportional to the time that we spend "consuming" it. Aside from the masochistic lot of people out there, we naturally spend our time reading pieces or watching videos that we enjoy, would you not agree?
The "fairest" voting (reward) system, dare I say "objectively speaking", would base the distribution of rewards around the amount of attention that we give to x creator's content, relative to all other content creators, as this is a clear indicator of what brings the most value to the collective (content consumers/ curators).
I think it would be awesome if a token distribution system were built around this concept, paying out the same proportion of the reward pool to content consumers who simply spend a reasonable (determined by a majority/ consensus vote among active members of the community) amount of time, say 10 to 15 minutes a day, browsing through content that is saved to the blockchain (and I do realize that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to safeguard this from exploits), paying out the content creators proportionally to how much time is collectively spent viewing their content (perhaps with some type of multiplier in place for tags to certain categories of content that naturally take less time to "consume", such as photos).
I spend quite a bit of time watching a small handful of content creators on Twitch and I think it would be really cool to be able to reward them in a monetary fashion just by watching them, paying them literally with my time (spent consuming their content). An "attention payment system", if you will.
That said, I'm realist enough to not expect anything like that to be implemented into a fairly well established blockchain like Hive. The solution to how one should vote will apparently not be coded into the blockchain rules, so, unfortunately, we must rely on people's own decisions on this. If we all just voted based on what most grabs our attention I'm almost certain that this place would flourish, but this current reward system doesn't incentivize that type of approach, not even close.
What it incentivizes is anticipating what will receive the most weight in staked votes and trying to front-run them. Human greed is in the way of voting (rewarding) in the right way, the way that the hard workers who provide the collection of truly valuable content deserve.
While we can all agree that what is considered "good content" is a subjective perspective, I'm sure most would also agree that the content that brings the most collective joy to the pool of content consumers is most deserving of the highest rewards. That's what we should aim for, both as individuals and as a community.
Can/ will it be achieved in practice? Not likely. Not without the token distribution system incentivizing that type of behavior.