Friend voting is how all social media works so thinking that Hive would be any different is pretty naive. With Hive being so relatively small compared to other platforms like Instagram and TikTok it's not surprising that Hive is more community based. People support those that support them and/or those that bring community benefit to Hive. There are a lot of accounts that bring no benefit at all, they produce shit content so they don't attract new users and they cash out every penny they earn so they don't help with the inflationary aspect of Hive. Individuals like that only pad the numbers relating to Hive stats.
Let them complain.
When I had some urgent bills to pay and no other way of doing so, I cashed out too. But I hope that over my time here and before I added enough value that it was ok.
That's my main point, that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and the "I got mine" rugged individuality is fine when there is a truly functioning market, but if we continue on the path we are on I think the "commons" is going to be so toxic there is no coming back from it.
I have seen content here that is as good or better than on sites like Medium or LinkedIn that get no rewards, no comments, and the authors leave. That is a real shame to me, and is why I created my WordPress plugin so those people can at least easily get rewarded OFF of Hive, but that shouldn't even be necessary IMO.
Nothing wrong with cashing out and taking gains, my point was only that some accounts only do that. There are different ways of bringing value to the platform but if they aren't producing good content to attract others, aren't engaging meaningfully and aren't holding anything in their account to help with inflation then I would say that they aren't bringing any value. This does NOT seem to be the case with you.
Regarding good content creators that didn't do well, it's hard to know the circumstances of such cases but I'd say that "good contentent" is subjective and building a following takes a lot of time on any platform so people need to be willing to slug it out for a time. some have unrealistic expectations when they start, thinking that they are going to have a massive following after only being on the platform a few weeks or months and that they will earn a lot on every single post. I think it took me almost a year before I made anything over $2.00 when I started and then it was up and down on each post for a long time afterwards. If a person were to join a new platform like TikTok and start fresh without pulling a following from other accounts they have, how long would it take that person to get 10-30k followers to start making money on the site? It's a similar situation if we consider the relative size of each platform. A person can't join a new site and expect to earn huge in the first year or two (though there are cases where that happens I'm sure).
On the friend part, see my comment below