Since my comment has got some significant upvotes, I figure I should flesh that out a bit. First and foremost (IMO) steem is a social media concept. The thing that fascinated me most about the place/blockchain when I first heard about it was the alternative paradigm. That is, instead of the usuals like Facebook/Medium/etc where YOU create content but THEY generate income from it, here you get rewarded for the content you create. First and foremost, I think that is and rightly should be the single most important identifying feature of the steem blockchain (via the various front ends). And in that regard, I think it is entirely appropriate that rewards at least in some ways reflect the quality of the content.
The other part of the platform here is the blockchain itself and the crypto aspects of it. I think these are valid points of distinction that deserve focus and warrant the attention of at least some part of the community to help prosper. But to hold that every person on the platform must put the specific interests of the blockchain itself first before any consideration to their own rewards, is too rigid a view IMO. And this idea that I've seen taking hold in comments around the place lately that there's something inherently bad about a member only focusing on a very narrow selection of other users, is kind of authoritarian in my opinion. I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, so I don't expect that we should necessarily be free to award an unlimited increasing amount of rewards to any one individual. But I don't see it as inherently bad, as some comments are getting close to expounding. I think it can be problematic in some circumstances, and that the first recourse to dealing with it should be a community awareness campaign to attempt to more fairly spread some of the wealth if warranted.
That's an interesting take.
Maybe it isn't quality. I've noticed that content range from insightful to BS but the ones that receive the most interactions are what's presented nicely.
I, for example, haven't been the best at presenting whatever I've written. This has made me slowly learn basic coding for formatting (Maybe it's less than basic) and making the content presentable.
Very superficial but humans have developed a need for beauty. Feed it.
No, quality is just as subjective as value. Yes, you can create external metrics for it, but someone created those metrics based on a system of values. Steem(it) is a social network. You get rewarded for the content you create if the community finds value in it. Steemit isn't like a job where you get paid for work. It's an entirely different system. The trick, like any creative endeavor, is to build up a community around your work that values similar things as you do.
Also, Medium pays writers who are part of it's Partner Program, which I am a part of. The problem with that model, in my view, is that the content that pays is behind a metered paywall, and they're not very transparent about how payouts work (at least when I first experimented with it). That's why I like Steem - the blockchain allows you to see what's going on under the hood, so to speak.
Quality being subjective doesn't change what I said in any way. Your argument could be used against @transistos approach of rewarding the subjective "what's best for the platform".
Maybe I misread your original post, which is what informed my reading of your follow-up, but it seems as if you think that posts should be rewarded based on their intrinsic value, as if the quality of a post can be measured objectively. But that doesn't make sense because quality is subjective, especially on the Internet. Posts don't really have a measurable intrinsic value; market value, on the other hand, is signaled by price. If you write something you feel is worth $1,000 USD because of the time and energy you put into it, but the community only rewards it with $50 USD worth of votes, then $50 USD is its market value on Steemit because that's what the community (including you) said it was worth. In that sense, the community decides what is best for itself, which is how the upvote system works. Intrinsic value =/= market value. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/011215/what-difference-between-intrinsic-value-and-current-market-value.asp By putting it on Steemit, you are basically submitting your work to a 'pay what you want' model where upvotes are weighted 'likes.' The fact that you think you didn't get rewarded for what you believe was the post's intrinsic value is on you. You could have sold it to a news site for a fixed price, or turned it into a Kindle book and sold it for x amount of dollars.
Transisto is saying that people should be voting on what's best for the broader platform as opposed to what individual posts you get value from reading. I disagree. Value or quality being subjective doesn't change the fact that transisto's statement is terribly absolute.
Okay, now I get where you're coming from. Your disagreement makes way more sense. Looks like we're on the same side in so far as we're opposing absolutism.
Absolutely agree!