@slobberchops, I'm probably going to end up writing too much here, but who knows?

In some sense, Hive creates its own dilemmas in this arena. If the community — in a broad general sense — is going around pitching the idea that you can "get rewarded for creating content on Hive," you (global "you") set up expectations that the consequence of creating here is that you'll get rewards.

But what do "rewards" really mean, to people? For the vast majority, it likely means "I'm going to get something I can go buy a pizza or fish-n-chips with." Or pay their car insurance with. Or something. And so... they power down and sell the Hive. And buy pizza.

Hence, back in the day, I would always slam my head into the keyboard every time I saw someone advertise the community, using this shitshow as incentive for why people should join.

As far as I am concerned, that stuff is dumb and misguided as fnck not because it might not have been true at the time, but because of the psychological makeup of someone would chase that sort of claim.

Short version: If you tell the world you have a cow that gives the best milk on the planet, expect some milkers to show up! You're also going to get a huge share of milkers from developing nations where the sort of rewards you can gain on Hive materially helps underwrite an otherwise hardscrabble existence in their home countries.

And yes, I am someone who has powered down substantially twice, both times to help pay tax bills that would otherwise have made us homeless. But that's beside the point, here.

But the challenges faced by Hive are not unique to Hive. I started creating content for rewards in 1999, on epinions.com, the first (at least to my knowledge) site where user created content was rewarded via revenue sharing. There were loads of "milkers" then, as there have been on every one of the near 50-ish content creation sites with rewards I have been part of, since then. It's simply part of the nature of the beast. There is no "fix," unless we can fix human nature!"

In a sense, the "fix" is precisely what you're doing... voting with your influence in the way you believe best represents your vision for the community... and not supporting dodgy stuff.

Which means spending substantial time and effort manually checking and re-checking where your influence gets distributed. Even with my silly 7-cent vote, I still do that...

Frankly, I'm just really happy this place is still here, after eight years! And I'm really happy it at least resembles the "social blogging" genre that was popular around 2001-06.

Edited to add: In direct response to the title of your post: Neither. I'm here to practice my writing, and because I really enjoy the blogging format; I don't like X, TikTok and that whole show and I don't do videos. If personal financial hardship dictates, I will "milk the cow," but I'd rather not. In an ideal world, my HP would continue building, and my liquid rewards would become HBD savings. I don't live in an ideal world, alas...