I never run out of things to write. In fact, I posted several times a day for more than a full year. However, now that nobody reads my fiction stories even though they take something like 3 hours to write.....I'm not feeling a lot of desire to put in effort without even being able to engage anyone over it.

I think your ideas here have merit, but I really would love to see a stronger desire in the community to read posts just for the sake of reading them. I think maybe stronger curation rewards are actually the answer. It doesn't make sense for everyone to upvote themselves and use bots. That is such a self-centered world..

We need to do something to make our world more altruistic.

Since that is not be standard Human Condition it makes sense to reward people for being altruistic and not reward them for being selfish. It's something that I hope we can work on in some of the future hard Forks.