Witness vote expiry went into effect last HF btw, a year after that should see a big change.

Okay so you're saying they're not convinced by the rewards but are using 3speak for immutability, then don't shower them with rewards until they start putting in some work by bringing value to Hive. It's similar to deals people make, say dlive paying pewdiepie millions to stream on their platform, the sole reason was to bring them his following. It's not rocket science that influencers should bring their following to a platform that's generating them revenue, some of these have made no attempts nor even updated their links. He's not even posting on Steemit yet linking there. I've left him a comment, hopefully he sees it and if he even makes an effort to bring his followers to Hive by just linking to it, which is the least one could ask aside from making Hive specific videos or giving shoutout to it in them, then I'd most likely wouldn't downvote regardless of controversial content or not. If the people who brought them here really value their content they can make up for the difference in downvotes with tips or recurring payments.

I don't disagree with you on information being free, I've been someone who's been interested and subscribed to r/conspiracy for a decade+. I just feel most of these content creators are fake, jump on the next trend and talk out of their asses most of the time, maybe even copying things others say so they have some "content" to create to ride the gravy train of all those people who also don't believe in covid or are mad trump didn't win. There's plenty of conspiracies about covid that don't encourage people to be absolute dickheads to others who are attempting to stay as safe from it or keep others around them as they can, whether masks work properly or not.