I totally agree with your vision on Hive. And I also agree that this tool CAN be misused in a way that goes totally against these principles. However, that is the fault of the people abusing it, not of the tool. The tool allows for finetuning in such a way that is not abuse at all, and helps you support your social network on Hive at those times your timeschedule, or different timezones make it difficult to do so.
As for reading content, I 100% wholeheartedly agree! I put effort in my photography, in checking out things like for this post, in writing the content, in everything, and getting no reads and 100 upvotes doesn't give me the same fullfillment that 100 reads on 1 upvote would (well, that might be a pretty bad example, as that would mean very low appreciation of my content ;-) But you get my drift, right? Right?? ;-) ).
However, since recently you can see the nr of views a post had in a specific frontend. More often than not, you see posts with like 25 views on Ecency, 25 on Peakd, and let's say 50 more on all other frontends combined (which I think is a real overestimation), yet they have +1000 upvotes.
Same goes for comments, periodically, 50% of the comments I receive are just copy/pastes of the same thing ("great post", "thanks for sharing") or are completely unrelated to the post itself, where it is obvious that only the first 2 or 3 sentences were read, and a comment was formulated.
In those cases, I prefer an auto-upvote. The end-result is the same, but it costs me less time to weed through the spam (I think we can call some of those comments spam).
I see the problem, absolutely!
I see it needs a solution! Absolutely!
I see that this tool CAN be used to create more of this problem, but the tool is not the problem :-)
And yup, I've spend many of nights already thinking over possible solutions to the Hive problems we have...
BTW, while we're at the subject (well... kinda ;-) ), if you would consider voting for my Hive Witness (and Engine Witness...) @botlord, that would be appreciated! ;-)
!WEIRD
!DOOK
!MMB
!INEEDSLEEP
!BBH
!LOLZ