Part of the issue here is that the toxic nature of some of the biggest coin holders here means that many people simply don't want to come here and potentially enrich them. Most people have seen the problems that this has caused on Facebook and Google powered sites, so definitely don't want to be a part of recreating that here. On the other hand, if they can be rewarded for investing the most rare and valuable of 'commodities', their time, then they will risk helping the Hive chain to grow. If, however, they are not going to be rewarded much - even while others are rewarded drastically more - then there is even less incentive for them to leave existing mega networks. The small audience here is in no part due to the greed of some of the biggest token holders and always has been. It's an ugly sight to behold, regardless of their justifications.

I fully understand that people might think the same of me to some extent when they see that my posts have been highly rewarded - but I see the situation differently. I could easily sell my articles to online sites for publication and get paid nicely for it - probably more than I would get on Hive. I could also go and develop social networks - as I have done previously - and also get paid well for it. I chose to help grow hive because I want to do something that is public, decentralised and that might genuinely help the whole of society to be empowered. This is my motive for being here. At this point, I can't really set aside much time in my day for writing posts on here as I have done if the rewards aren't available - because it just isn't an optimal use of my time. If the rewards totally dry up then I might still post here but would more likely go to wherever there is either a large audience or the rewards that help make it all practical.

I don't really think that the community should be stunting it's own distribution of rewards in order to prevent some people who are obviously acting in bad faith from disrupting everything. On the other hand, if that's what the community wants then it should be tried! I suspect you will just see people pumping out a high volume of posts with a low reward limit, however. "Here's my 30 part recipe for boiled eggs".