DV's are taxation. Bloggers are all delivering a product to the market. Upvotes are buying what they're selling. DV's tax their sales. The opposite of an upvote is no vote. No vote is no sale, the opposite of a sale.

Hive enables any stakeholder to tax any of their competitors to the limit of their stake. Imagine if Ford could tax Toyota's every sale 100%. How long would Toyota continue to manufacture products for sale? If everybody could tax any sale to the limit of their stake, as is possible on Hive, no one would sell any products, and we'd be living in the Stone age.

Because of unlimited taxation 99.99% of users that onboarded and overcame the learning curve to blog on Hive have left the platform, and with a bad taste in their mouth that they spew on anyone that they can hold down long enough to listen to them complain about censorship and being robbed of their rewards. They're not wrong. Taxation is theft.

As long as Hive allows unlimited taxation of anyone's rewards on a whim Hive will continue to lose 99.99% of people that join, and maintain the absolute worst user retention of any social media platform in the history of the world.

And the ~36 whales that maintain a bare majority of stake will continue to completely rule the pure plutocracy Hive is by controlling the consensus witnesses and determining what code runs, which they today choose to enable them to capture >90% of the inflation issued from the rewards pool.

That is the real reason for unlimited taxation on Hive - to enable the ~36 whales to maintain their lock on governance by preventing broader distribution of stake that would diminish their bare majority.

The honest answers to your questions are:

1. it doesn't matter. What matters is the IRL effects of DV's.

2. the market decides the value of content.

A free market isn't taxed, because taxation is theft and free markets do not suffer theft. Insofar as there is theft the market is not free, but coerced.

Thanks!