I keep seeing the same complaint pop up: "Downvotes are killing Hive because they're taking away people's income." And I get why it feels that way - watching a $15 post get nuked to zero sucks. But I think this complaint misses what's actually happening, and honestly, it's pointing us in the wrong direction for fixing things.
Nobody is taking money from you when you get downvoted. I know that sounds pedantic, but hear me out - it matters.
Post rewards aren't income in the traditional sense. They're not someone paying you for your work. They're a slice of newly created tokens that get distributed based on stake-weighted voting. When you get upvoted, you're not receiving someone's money - you're getting a bigger share of the inflation pool. When you get downvoted, you're getting a smaller share. But that share was never yours to begin with.
Think about it this way: if I run a restaurant and customers don't show up, I don't make money. That's obvious. But on Hive, we've somehow convinced ourselves that the reward pool showing up every day is the same thing as customers walking through the door. It's not. The reward pool is just... there. It's like if a restaurant owner expected to make money whether anyone bought food or not, just because the kitchen exists.
The real problem isn't downvotes - it's that we're treating distributed inflation like a salary. You can't build a sustainable income around something that any large stakeholder can redirect at will. That's just not how functional creator economies work. On YouTube, if someone with a million subscribers doesn't like my videos, they can't prevent me from making money. My income comes from ads, sponsors, memberships - real economic relationships with my audience or third parties.
On Hive, almost nobody is doing that. We're all just fishing from the same inflation pool and wondering why the fish keep getting smaller.
I'm not saying downvotes feel good, or that they're always fair, or that some stakeholders don't abuse their power. But complaining that downvotes are "killing the price" is like blaming bad Yelp reviews for your restaurant failing when nobody wants to eat there in the first place. The fundamental issue isn't the reviews - it's that you don't have paying customers.
What we actually need is for creators to build real audiences willing to support them directly. Tips, subscriptions, donations - tokens that people bought or earned elsewhere and chose to give to you because they value what you make. That's income. That's sustainable. And crucially, that's something no whale can downvote away.
The tricky part is getting people to understand that those new tokens appearing in the reward pool aren't free money. They're diluting everyone else's tokens. If all we do is mint new tokens, distribute them, and immediately sell them... yeah, the price is going to tank. That's just basic economics. We need buying pressure to match the selling pressure, and buying pressure comes from people wanting to use the token for something - like supporting creators they care about.
Downvotes would be way less of a problem if we had that kind of economy. They'd become more like a reputation signal - "the community doesn't think this deserves rewards" - rather than feeling like someone stealing your paycheck. Because you'd actually have a paycheck from your audience, separate from the inflation lottery.
I wrote about this before in more detail, but the core point is: if Hive wants to compete for serious creators, we need to stop pretending inflation distribution is a monetization strategy. It's not. It never was. And the sooner we build actual creator-to-audience economic relationships, the sooner downvotes stop mattering so much.
Maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe there's a way to make the current system work that I'm not seeing. But I've been thinking about this a lot, and I can't figure out how you build a thriving creator platform when everyone's income depends on the goodwill of a handful of large stakeholders who can change their minds anytime.
What do you think? Is there something I'm missing about how post rewards could work as sustainable income? Or do we need to fundamentally rethink how creators make money on Hive?