Would people be able to get upvotes or Hive rewards using this forum?

Yes that is precisely

I hate to shit on your idea, and I apologize for doing so, but to me this sounds like an absolute nightmare.

It won't be a place where actual discussion happens it will be a place where people post 1000 memes, pictures and phrases a day and vote themselves up with their 100s of alt-accounts or friends.

As soon as something becomes monetized it becomes a tool for an individual to receive rewards not to engage with naturally and enjoy. The reason that reddit and discord work so well and are so successful has a lot to do with the fact that they are not monetized. People use them because they love them not because they are rewarded for doing so. It comes down to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and the psychology of how human behavior changes according to those concepts. People won't use it for its intended purpose of communication and facilitating discussion, they will use it for the rewards. This is why so many of the other reward based social media platforms have failed in the past.

get rewards without being "Writers", plus if you find a really cool/interesting/funny/breaking news link and share it you would get rewarded instead of downvotes due to plagiarism :)

This entirely goes against one of the foundations of Hive and an underlying philosophy of the platform - i.e. "Proof of Brain." It suggests that people should be rewarded for copy and pasting, not for creativity, or effort... but for nothing really.

Why should people be rewarded for that?

Overall I think that a tipping feature would be cool, but I don't see any benefit to Hive by adding a voting reward feature. In that case, to me, it just sounds like a perfect tool for abuse. It sounds like Steemit on steroids to me.

My question is why does this site need a voting/reward feature? and if you don't think that people would use the site if they weren't rewarded for doing so, then I think that says everything - no?

Again, sorry to be a dick and shit upon your idea but I am very skeptical about the rewards feature.