Seeing thousands of people feeling their way around in the dark, trying to figure out what works, failing miserably, then writing an endless stream of "Hive is broken!" posts (like they did on Steem for several years), is far more appealing than watching even one asshole step up to another and say something like, "You're not acting properly here," and combining that with a flurry of downvotes.

Spent years here basically advocating for the rebranding of "curation rewards". Ditch the entire curation concept. Votes trickling in come from supportive consumers rather than curators attempting to micromanage an entire social network. Those are consumer rewards. Take the "responsibility" off the shoulders of "stakeholders" and put it in the hands of the consumer. Sure, large stakeholders can still flex with votes, pushing content "up", making them more of a promoter than a curator. Everything as is still ties together but now the flow feels far more natural. It's IMPOSSIBLE for a large mass of consumers to "screw up" when it comes to deciding what's good or bad, high or low quality.

You mentioned attracting the next generation. Even people my age don't know wtf a "curator" is. Sounds more like job than Average Joe enjoying some leisure time. Everyone understands the concept of "consumer rewards" straight out of the box and being rewarded for sitting on your ass. That next generation is not a content creator. They're all on these sites consuming the content and engaging nonstop. It's not the content that makes something go viral. It's the millions of viewers doing that. An entire generation.

Some folks like to throw around derogatory terms like "content police" acting like anything that can be seen as "negative" on Hive is somehow wrong and should not exist.

I wonder how they'd handle a far more realistic scenario where tens of thousands of consumers are downvoting the living the shit out of someone for weeks on end, like they do elsewhere online, when people fuck up bad.

Scale it up. Is Hive still broken? If thousands of fans are piling on one content creator with supportive upvotes and all she's doing is acting like an NPC in front of a camera (meaning the content is very confusing and borderline shit to most outsiders), is Hive "broken?" People think that woman acting like an NPC on stream is crazy, but her actions alone caused $7000 per day to flow into that platform and eventually her pocket, all of which coming directly from the pocket of the consumer.

Maybe the people are broken, but the stakeholders (that includes content creators and consumers) are all making bank, so who cares.

I personally wouldn't place blame on some sort of initial template or standards placed on the people in the early days. All that does is make it incredibly easy for a content creator to go against the flow, and stick out like a sore thumb. Rules like that are meant to be broken. But again, it's all in the delivery.