Not addressing what is specifically on the trending page (not something I often look at to be honest), but in a free market, value is not determined by effort but by demand. It's about how much someone likes your product (post), not how much work you put into it. In theory putting more work into a post makes a higher quality, more "in demand" product (on average) but that is far from always the case. Of course this gets skewed somewhat by autovoting and the fact that votes are almost free.
However, suggesting that everyone put a cap on their rewards isn't going to work. Most people just won't do that. Not unless a way can be found to incentivize that in a positive way. Besides, you might put a ton of work into creating high quality posts that get little reward and then one day make a lower effort post (I don't mean spam or complete shitpost...just a shorter lower effort post) that makes a lot...hardly seems fair to limit yourself at that point does it?
Downvotes are the mechanism that are supposed to be used to adjust rewards when they are too high. The problem is that in their current iteration they don't function well enough to do that. A downvote often leads to revenge downvotes because it is taken personally. Alternatively, some whale may make a relatively small downvote in an effort to adjust rewards but if hundreds or thousands are following that downvote then that is impossible. Your post will go to 0 if downvoted instead of being moderately adjusted. We need a better way to adjust rewards as a community when they are seen as too high but I don't have an answer as to how at the moment.
This is the 2nd comment stating "people take it personally". It is personal. Smaller posters here use those rewards for real world purchases/bill/life. To be at the mercy of certain downvoters who may not agree with the stance/facts/views/opinions of the poster is an ugly place to be and will not lead to any growth.
I personally feel that some large whales involved in development and the crypto space overall are disconnected from who their customers could be.
Someone spending hours of "free time" a day putting out content about something they are passionate about in hopes of translating it into a small living is going to take it personally when someone with thousands of dollars sitting on a blockchain downvotes their work into the 7th circle of Hell just because they can.
My point being that if downvotes are used appropriately, then they should not be taken personally. It's not unreasonable, for example, to see a post that took 30 seconds to write and yet has hundreds in rewards and downvote it for disagreement with rewards. It's different if a whale is downvoting just because they disagree with you or you get stuck in a downvoting trail that always zeroes your post. I agree it's an imperfect system. Nobody except perhaps for other whales will typically dare to downvote a post of another whale for instance. I'm not sure what the solution is. But I don't think getting rid of the general mechanism is the right thing to do. Upvotes and Downvotes are critical to Hive but both have to be used reasonably.
I agree, the small posters here don't really get anything. They can try joining a community, but the long time favorite posters who have been here for years get the lions share of upvotes.
Generally speaking, the longer you are here, the more you are able to learn. That's because you collect followers over time, not all at once. With each post you are exposed to new potential upvoters. So yes, the more time you have been here the more you will earn but that does not require that you have been here from the beginning.
Which is why most new people on here make an account and quit pretty quickly. Their posts can't get upvotes and they can't get seen. This place also became more of a mess when they introduced communities, now I have half of the people posting stuff in #informationwar tag and the other half posting in Informationwar community. I have to go to two places now to make sure I see all of those posts, whereas before it was 1 place.
It's unfortunate that people expect fast, easy money. It's like sticking up a web page selling stuff and expecting to start making a lot in sales right away. That doesn't happen without a lot of work up front. You might use marketing and SEO in addition to providing a product that people want. On hive, you have to use persistence, participation and networking...in addition to making posts people want to read.
Communities have their advantages that I think outweigh the disadvantages. Personally, I don't find it to be a big deal to look at a tag and a community. I'm usually looking at multiple communities and tags anyway.
I think it is one of the tools that is good, to allow people to limit their rewards on the post. I get that people don't like limiting themselves(bacteria eat and eat and eat until nothing is left, we are mostly bacteria). Some people might not have known about this function and will now use it. I didn't know about it for awhile either, no one talks about it.
The problem isn't that there are high quality posts that get little reward, they are getting little reward because of subjective upvoters and not objective upvoters. If most people put limits on their posts of say 20 USD or 30 USD, those subjective upvoters would be wasting their upvote on voting more than that, so it spread it around more. That's one way of ensuring someone doesn't get 180 USD on a photo challenge that took them 1 minute to post, or some "cooking recipe" with 120 USD with no comments.
I think it is a good tool to have, I just think its usage will be somewhat limited. Perhaps it would make sense in the future to partially base how much a post is worth on factors other than purely votes. Some possibilities include number of comments, number of comments receiving upvotes, number of views, etc. I think the primary factor should be votes but this could be modified up or down on a percentage basis based on some of these other things. or maybe some mechanism that limited vote values on some scale...i.e. the first 100 votes are worth 100% of their normal value, the next 100 are worth 75%, etc. These are just a few random ideas and there are lots of possibilities. I think the situation will gradually improve over time.
There's no such thing as an "objective" upvoter, at least not in terms of the value of the content. The value of any piece of content to any given person is purely subjective. If people are worried more about whether or not their vote earns them (or someone else) more money than whether or not they like the post, I think that is counterproductive. People should be upvoting what they like if we want a consensus of the best content in trending/hot. If people really don't like your content, it shouldn't be getting upvotes just because it is there, regardless of how much work was put into it.
I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to blockchain enforced daily or per post limits but i think these would have to be limited only at the extremes. I also think having to provide a reason for a downvote might be beneficial though I'm not sure exactly how that would look.