I'm sure I don't fit the typical Hive user profile in the sense that I came here having already invested 18 years in blogging on various venues (since 1998-ish) and "Hive 1.0" basically represented a sort of return to the kind of "social blogging" that existed — and thrived — prior to MySpace and Facebook.
People sometimes think of blogging as being "very niche" but it's much broader when you add in the social component... my personal favorite blog site was Xanga (1993-2013), which had about 30 million users at its peak. Just imagine Hive with 30 million users...
The original appeal here was actually the so-called "immutability of the blockchain," meaning that I saw it as a place where I might not suddenly wake up one morning and all my content would be GONE or hidden behind some financial hostage paywall.
Do I care about the rewards? I care about the idea that as I continue to create content, I am slowly building something akin to an "ownership stake" in the platform that I am using. I wish I had more time to spend here, but I enjoy the content and engagement, to the extent that I get it... and would likely still be contributing even if Hive were $0.01 per token (god forbid!).
The drawback to a lack of time is that what little time I do have tends to be concentrated around my follow feed... there was a time when I would spend an hour or two regularly, just "lurking" the new posts feed, looking for something interesting from new users or new-to-me users.