Steem Basic Income is delivered through upvotes specifically so that regular value-adding activity is required. It's not about passive stake and vote-swapping.

In fact the core mechanic works more like a parallel account-level curation stream. Accounts are initially sponsored for support, and the sponsor is also enrolled (50/50 curation reward). External blacklists (@steemcleaners and @buildawhale) are followed for quality control, along with abuse reporting within our own Discord.

A brief review comparing accounts sponsored into Steem Basic Income with accounts that had similar characteristics but were not enrolled finds that retention and activity rates are substantially higher for accounts enrolled into Steem Basic Income. (@paulag did such a review for us some time ago, but it could be easily replicated now).

A sampling of mention history shows that many accounts have identified Steem Basic Income as being the primary motivation for their continued activity through the difficult periods Steem has been passing through.

While the primary metric being used to evaluate Delegation applications for Steemit is account creation, shouldn't account retention be considered just as important? Retention of actual active users is critical to Steem's survival, and Steem Basic Income provides a massive amount of value to the Steem blockchain via improved retention of existing accounts.