Good thing you put the word "paying" in quotes because nobody needs to buy any tokens to be able to use the Steem or Hive. One gets a little free SP or HP delegated to them from account creation services to get one started. Earned tokens can be powered up.

The economies on both Hive and Steem are pyramids in the particular sense that for the tokens to have any value those who buy them must think they will be able to sell them to someone who comes later.

But there's one critical thing your comment ignores. Those who maintain the monetary value of the tokens are NOT by any degree of necessity those users who are incapable of earning them sufficiently. They're not the same people. If you never buy any HIVE and during the time you use Hive the price of HIVE goes down, you will not have lost any money whatsoever.

The token are values upheld by crypto speculators only a subset of whom are also users of the platforms. Our rewards are given value to mainly by altcoin speculators who believe that it is possible to profit from any altcoin going up in value faster than Bitcoin at some point, which makes it justifiable to stack up on the coins at other times.

Therefore, refusing to choose to use Hive as one's primary social medium instead of some corporate platform that pays its users nothing, is just plain stupid financially speaking (there are other reasons but that's beside the point I'm making here). Let's assume you love participating in online discussions and posting your photos online. Why would you do that on Quora and Instagram when you can do it on Hive? You don't have to invest a single cent in HIVE to benefit financially from rewards on Hive no matter how they fluctuate between the time you earn them and the time you sell them.

Here we are creating content and being rewarded by a system that imposes a kind of tax on gamblers who buy the tokens in hopes of selling them later for profit. The arrangement takes money from gamblers and gives it to people who create and post beautiful pictures, videos, audio content and texts containing interesting thoughts on the platform. Hell, anyone could start an initiative where they make money by walking old ladies across the street and posting evidence of said activity to Hive. Greedy speculators, most of whom are must by necessity always lose money, foot the bill.