This is real life. Everything is real life unless you're imagining it or dreaming it.

Is Hive different from many other systems? Yes! Differentiation is important. Is everything about Hive great or perfect? Certainly not. We do the best we can with what we have and also work to improve it.

In any case, you can think of it as somewhat like a business where the shareholders vote on how the business is run (usually indirectly, by hiring a board or manager, but on some occasions directly). Those with a larger share of the business have more votes. That's not completely new, but applying it to a dynamic content rewarding environment is new (or at least was new when Steem invented it)