>The fact that they can operate freely here puts other people off.

Yet, communities are owned and can segment experience. I find it crazy that people want to police the entire internet, even though they only spend time in a fragment of it themselves. 

>It is not necessarily about how hard you work on your posts as you only make dollars if big accounts give you votes. 

Over time though, it really, really, really does matter. If an account isn't consistently producing what the audience wants, it is unlikely they will consistently get support. 

>but you do tend to see the same names on trending.

While a lot of those names will disappear over time, what will happen is that the ones that are often there will be those who contribute. Currently, we are still very narrowly focused, but those that are there are actually contributors - it is just that creators don't count developers as creators :) I actually think that if you look at some of the creatives that are there, they are the most active and engaged, plus they put out better than average content that people enjoy. 

> Is that what will excite a new user? Or do they want to see art, photography, music or just good writing?


Potentially. Content is everywhere, content that gives people support to invest and possibly earn might actually be more valuable for new users on Hive. This can change over time, but currently YouTube, Instagram, DeviantArt or Medium (or whatever else) is full of content... what sets Hive apart is the economic capabilities owned by the community itself. 

>The issues there may be that they have to build an audience and they may be making more elsewhere.

Yes, until...

> It may be better to get those with a few hundred or thousand followers who struggle to make anything on other platforms. 

The real value of the other platforms isn't in the stars, it is in who the stars attract - the "wannabe" stars. They build up the accounts by mimicking others and the platform leverages their network and drives the value to themselves and distributes a little to the stars to encourage them to attract more wannabes. The system is rigged.