I'm sure there's many on here who don't really think too much about the rewards when they're posting, either cause they've been on hive long enough to get jaded to the whole upvote system or they've been through a lot of other things on chain and price wise.
I do some times care about them, because they aid me in wanting to fund and create certain things. At the same time I wouldn't think about abusing the autovotes I get cause that'd just be quite low of a thing to do. For instance by using AI to help me generate posts or to just go on a tanget about the same thing over and over. I.e. making it "farmy". I think that if I were to do that, one thing I'd focus on is to post daily once as the way my autovotes work is that on the second post they usually become much smaller.
I do sometimes find the time and want to post more though, while at the same time some times I can go for days without posting and it kind of is in the back of my head like "you could've earned some hive today if you've spent an hour posting". It's still not worth it in terms of pushing yourself to post, though.
I realize I may sound a bit like a douchebag saying that at current times with the economy being all shit, most wouldn't even question it being in a similar position and make the most of it. At the same time it has felt a bit like if I'm not posting, those rewards end up going somewhere anyway and I'm not sure if that's a better alternative currently when instead I could use them to further fund different things or delegate to more deserving curators, etc.
Most of that reasoning is that as a curator we don't have a lot of new authors coming up, and that's kind of the thing we've focused with OCD for most of the time.
There's often however when I post something and also reject any rewards, especially when I don't put much effort into that post, which is kinda cool that we can do it and have plenty of places we can forfeit the rewards so it's put to good use. I don't see a lot of people doing that however which is the reason I'm asking this.
Maybe most people just believe/know that hive is going to do better eventually? Or they just can't be bothered to set beneficiaries. I do however wonder how many would still post even if there's no rewards to be had at all.
I'm not asking this in a negative way. I know there's many who love writing and have integrated with the community and built relationships with others in many different ways. Also of course the immutability is quite cool, being able to go read posts/comments from a decade ago that you've written, knowing they'll always be there. There's something quite powerful in that. I've joked that if only blockchain existed in year 0 we would know what was actually said back then rather than a book that's been rewritten countless times over the years. This is kind of day 0 of actual immutability. Even with the internet it's going to be hard to prove that a post/comment 20 years ago said what people say it does from screenshots/old databases as things can be edited/altered/faked which has become a lot more apparent with AI and how it helps you do things. They won't however be able to fake content in actual blocks, unless you're still on Steem I guess.
This post got longer than I expected, lol. Sending some of the author rewards to @commentrewarder.