It's natural that people follow and upvote folks they like. Obviously they like them for reasons, and usually that's because they agree on various matters. However, the financial incentive of curation rewards creates inducement to profiteer, and this is sometimes impossible to separate from organic social activity.
This is why only availing investors of one mechanism to create ROI from their investment, and that mechanism being curation rewards, is a bad thing. It makes it necessary for rational stakeholders to degrade curation to manage their stake.
The irrational impact on new users and engagement makes the negative impact of curation rewards even more apparent. @edicted has outlined how investors could be availed savings accounts that more rationally and predictably enable them to manage their stake, while enabling curation to return to it's proper role in social discourse. This would also make the discouragement of new users and less staked authors and engagement in comments unnecessary.
Curation rewards degrade actual curation, and fixing this problem would strongly improve the ability of Hive to grow and reward investors IMHO.
Also, I don't use Twatter either, and can't participate in an of the initiatives @theycallmedan has undertaken because of that.