There is currently a Whale's actifit post that has no pictures and 34 words and has $36 of rewards on it. Seriously.
Again, after almost 4 years here I respectfully suggest that autovotes and curation trails are the problem.
If we were attempting to have this conversation two years ago, the blame would have been placed on Vote buying services.
The situation on Hive is that the rich get richer and ever more powerful. It's Proof of Stake and whether we like it or not, that's how it is. We can choose to be here, or not.
The richest and most powerful control the content. Not much different to the system that blockchain technology and crypto aimed to overcome.
The other problem for people like myself who are primarily readers (customers) is that we don't have and never will have huge stakes because we don't produce content (of any note!) so again, we are at the mercy of the whales to see what's placed before our eyes or spend hours trawling through total dross to find something that catches our eye.
The whole platform has pushed away more serious content and turned into a never-ending stream of bubblegum posts. If this is organic, then so be it, that's a decentralised community working well, but the real reason is that content is driven by reward and so we come back to the fact once more, content visibility is driven by the biggest stakeholders.
If we allowed vote-buying, people could pay to have eyes on their work which would hopefully encourage more serious and thought-provoking posts of high quality and along with that, engagement.
Alternatively, stop rewarding in Hive and make tokenised communities responsible for rewarding the content within that community. That should be an easy task and allow the Hive reward pool to be channelled into development and perhaps into the exchanges to provide token liquidity.
I think it should be called Proof of Whale.
I agree that the bubblebum posts are being pushed up, while maybe 1 or 2 posts about decentralization will make it to the top few hundred posts. Hive seems to slowly be turning into a Twitter knockoff where people earn money for boring and uninteresting posts about their food or travel blogs.