Yes, very true, but first you got to get their attention away from all your competition, offering them zero to penny upvotes isn't going to hit it. You throw in the lack of engagement to even generate those pennies, people rather engage on a free active blog than give two shits about the pennies. I live in an area surrounded by college kids, not only do you have to compete against your competition, you have to compete with their time, and since most come from good families, drive nice cars, what you have to offer to them is zilch to get them to focus on writing on Hive. You make the rules of engagement, have to post and be actively engaged on your blog page, they then get a few friends to sign up to engage with them. At the end of the year, if your lucky, despite not being the winner of the contest, a few may continue on.
Now, on the other side of the spectrum, not so intellectually strung, and what proves to work really well on here, offer a contest for the hottest college babes out there. Not only will they get all their guy friends to sign up to vote for them, you'll have everyone on here drooling and voting for them. Get Snapie to swing into action, sending out notifications on their blog they got noticed by Snapie, or some crazy creative thing like that, have Snapie give them an upvote, and mention they could earn more upvotes by using Snapie. Have Snapie create contest directly focused toward fun and easy things that don't take much time out of a busy college kids life, like mention Snapie's looking for the ugliest dog on the planet, earn XX amount of Hive if your dog comes out being voted the ugliest. Just easy, outlandish stuff like that. Hell, meno went for upvoting some girl who had shit falling out of her closet, so shit like that works, fun and entertaining shit. Get crazy with it, have snapie do a "do you have short shorts" contest to the song, flashy crazy stuff like that. For guys do a we're looking for the most souped up car contest. The more short interest you can expose Hive to will likely lead to growth from those who happen to notice that writers with a lot of intellectual stimuli, make good money posting, but first you have to get their attention, offering up penny upvotes isn't going to do it.