It seems to me that hiding rewards wouldn't solve the problem. You still have reputation, which is largely tied to length of time on the platform and the "quality" of one's posts. Most people would assume that if you've been on the platform long enough to have a reputation of 75, then you're likely a whale.

Not a bad point, but in the real world, nobody has any idea what a 68, a 3, or a 78 reputation on HIve means. Seeing a $200 figure on a post is something anyone can understand.

Then there's the short-cut path where a user can just load an account with a lot of Hive and they're suddenly a whale. Heck, a person can join the whale club just for commenting on other people's posts and upvoting posts without ever creating posts themselves.

That's my point, sure you can do that, but if it's hidden, nobody is aware of it. You can give yourself $75 upvotes and if it's hidden, nobody will see it.

I think the fact that there's no clear cut path to success is a positive. That means new users can't just show up, follow someone else's pattern, and find success publishing and promoting mediocre content.

But that isn't the path to success on other social media, if you upload a bunch of mediocre content on Youtube you will not get anywhere. Whereas on Hive the exact opposite is true. If I had $20,000 right now and I spent it all on Hive. I guarantee you that I could post about the lint you find in your tumble dryer and I would make bank, because people want my vote and they want the juicy rewards from my posts, because with my $500 upvote they are always worth bucks.

Plus, the monetary rewards are not the only benefit.

The money is what keeps 99% of people here, without the money Hive is a very poor substitute for social media.

Some people may come here for the freedom to create without threat of censorship, which they won't get at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube.

Sure they do, but that alone will not keep Hive going, have a look at Abh's Engagement League, you can count Hive's daily users in the hundreds, that is not very good at all and if Hive is going to grow and survive it has to evolve and grow with its users.

When was the last time you showed Hive to a friend that did not know what it was? What was their reaction? Did they agree with you that it's amazing, or did they go a bit silent? Crucially, did they create an account and are they posting and doing well?

The reward system is intrinsically linked to those answers.

P.S. We used to show views on posts when Hive was still Steemit and guess what? They stopped showing the views; why? Because it became to embarrasing to see a post with 12,000 views but only $0.98 rewards. The thinking was it would confuse people so they got rid of it, but in reality it exposed a deep flaw with the system, so instead of fix the flaw, they hid it.

Cg