It's not the feeling that they're getting something out of browsing social media, they are actually getting something out of it. People are checking social media all day long because that's where the latest news is breaking, as well as the most up to date opinions and jokes.

People who post a lot might be addicted to the dopamine rush of likes or whatever, but the vast majority of social media users are people browsing, not posting. They browse because they get something out of it... and people post because that's where the eyeballs are.

Fundamentally that's the problem with Hive... until there are some creators posting content exclusively to Hive that the general public is interested in, the content will always be better on the centralized sites.

There's no problem with seeing Hive as a means to make money at all... the problem I see is that if people ONLY post what they think will get upvotes then it becomes a silo very quickly... especially when a lot of upvoted content is misinformation.