The disconnect here is that you seem to think some big whales are making a ton of money from posts here. That's really not the case. Whales aren't whales because of author rewards. It's because they believe in the potential of the coin to appreciate in value. To do that, we need to create new uses cases for Hive. If whales were so focused on making money from posts, you'd see them all posting 10 times a day. Instead most whales I talk to are mainly interested in improving the platform, making it more enticing, bringing in more apps developers, etc. That's how whales aim to make money here.