The rule about earnings should be that ultimately they are yours and you are able to do with them whatever you want. However, those with no intentions to contribute aside from content (unless they are upvoted by individual whales who like what they bring) should kind of be cut off from being able to just extract value. The only way that the model is going to work is if it's a 2-way street where users give and you get. With the shift from bid bots (which also were bad) to curation projects, Hive kind of got screwed up in a way as there is no real incentive to power up since most curators also only really care about what they can earn and stick to just upvoting the same list of people who bring content that looks ok.

It remains the eternal issue of this post2earn model as 90%+ of the content would never be there if it wasn't for the potential earnings.