I think if you do decent articles you will get votes

No, it won't be like that because the main whales on Hive, revoke rewards not only for spam and plagiarism but also because of personal whims of various people and for "politically incorrect content". Additionally, a person who gets on someone's bad side is blacklisted and downvoted automatically regardless of what they write and how hard they try. In turn, their reputation is destroyed and eventually their posts are hidden.

There lies the problem and that is why L2 Tokens are used against their intended purpose because people want to get any rewards for their publications. As long as downvotes exist for censorship and centralization of the network, this whole mess will not work because this system is used not only for censorship but also for centralization of power:

Here are my two articles that explain in more detail why what I am saying has a mathematical and practical basis. As you can see, despite the fact that they are polished, hand-written content and are certainly not "low effort" or spam, they have of course met the exact fate I am talking about above. In turn, an account with 60 reputation dropped to 2 because I decided to bring up a sensitive topic :

First is about why downvoting centralize power here and contradicts with web3 idea:

@khrom/why-downvotes-contradict-decentralization-a-mathematical-perspective

@khrom/the-downvote-economy-how-to-steal-the-value-of-someone-s-work-and-get-rich-off-their-efforts