At the moment it's kind of a hard sell to convince people to join (and participate) in your community if you have no real rewards to offer.
However, right now the process for asking for delegations leaves much to be desired. In fact, it is my belief that the lack of streamlining for the delegation process (i.e., the fact that there is no way to 'apply' for a delegation - or if there is it's obscure) is one of the bigger problems on the platform.
No matter how tirelessly the large stake holders work, they are usually one person (or a small team). The amount that they can curate, moderate, and participate in discussion is limited (on top of the fact that many of them also do dev work of various sorts).
To the extent that they do participate in discussions, it's usually limited to infrastructure issues and the like - you know, important stuff.
But a lot of the nerds and hobbyists are in a bit of a bad position at the moment. There's very little incentive to write about most niche topics if there is a strong niche bias.
This is exactly the case on Hive, with many/most posts being self-referential within the platform. But that doesn't make Hive more visible.
We need HP (via delegation) to be more widely spread between a more diverse assortment of niche topics. And there needs to be a systematic way for large stakeholders to relatively quickly analyze each request and make assessments about which to prioritize and by how much.
To that end, I submit that one of the large stakeholders should create a "Hive Delegation" community, in which community owners should be allowed to state their case for receiving delegation for their community.
The rules would be simple:
1.) Spamming of requests would be forbidden. You may write one proposal a month.
2.) Delegators may choose who they want to support and who not. NOTHING IS GUARANTEED.
3.) In case of abuse, people may also state their case for why delegation should be removed.
This would make things much, much easier for both the delegators and the community generally.