Sorry for being so late in replying.

The thing is, Hivewatchers has no direct mandate from everyone who publishes a work here on Hive, for example, or elsewhere (though it can never be a whole book if you're blogging, no?). Any work I publish on Hive can always be copied by someone else and used for themselves. I never write under my texts that I claim copyright on them. In principle, I'm personally not necessarily concerned with seeing a profit of a solely financial nature primarily. I would even be happy if some of my texts were taken up and distributed. I'm concerned with the distribution of the content as content, it pleases me in a way if I knew that they were worthy of someone else making them their own. Of course, if the person themselves is merely in it for the money but doesn't care what's written, that might not be ideal, but I'm not a principled person per se - it could be that if I don't like someone personally and they use my writing, that I would appeal to that person.

But I have never seen someone been reprimanded by HW for copying and publishing my texts.

Payouts are only important to me because they increase the chance of being seen. Receiving a high payout without comments minimizes the fun for me.

The reward pool is plundered, it invites abuse, which I think all of us who post here regularly do in a way. Downvoting some and others not for the same thing is just not the way to go, is what I think. So I opt for no downvotings at all. But this is a never ending debate here.