It doesn't really work like that. We're not paying for interaction, or even quality posts, although they are the mechanism by which we are distributing resources. We're paying it forward and providing an opportunity for an economy where everyone has a basic income, sometimes called a universal basic income. Two of the founders of what eventually became Hive, previously Steem, one of whom moved on to explore these ideas elsewhere, and one who is still with us, account name blocktrades, were/are ardent proponents of decentralisation and alternative economies.

The HIVE that is available everyday to share out, is not your HIVE or my HIVE, (although the amount each of us is able to distribute is dependent on our HIVE POWER). It is a bounty (an additional bounty) to pay forward and share between us, so that everyone has the opportunity of a basic income. It is more appropriate to think about it as abundance, unlike legacy economies that are predicated (falsely, some might argue) on scarcity. The mechanism that was used to share out the bounty was blogging - because it was already familiar and it was a way to get this new cryptocurrency into as many hands as possible.

We have the potential for utopia, but of course, it's a long journey and many missteps and misunderstandings and interpreting this new technology, which allows us to do so many things we couldn't do before like lending resources (delegating) to help community initiatives fund their work at no risk, within the context of legacy economies which misses the point!

It does require a collective view to understand this, rather than a transactional view of I pay you and you pay me. We might choose to do that with other aspects of our resources, but upvoting and downvoting, imperfect as it is, is about sharing out the bounty among the community.