I believe that there are many ways to make money here that are and will be detrimental to the success of steemit in the short and long term.
I don't think a platform built on plagiarism, copy/paste, and grey areas like posting torrents could be successful. If someone thinks it can be, I say go start one up! Good luck to you!
There have been a lot of innocent ideas such as sports betting, lotteries, voting schemes that on the surface look to benefit individuals and/or the platform. The problem is there are ways to exploit them. Several of these ideas come from well meaning and upstanding community members with good intentions.
What happens when someone else who isn't invested in the success of steemit copies their idea? Then another 10 or 20 do the same thing. In the case of lotteries and sports betting it turns into a vote buying and post spamming nightmare.
Both initiatives you mentioned seem fairly harmless but one has already upvoted plagiarized posts. It was fairly simple for them to buy some votes and get a few whale sized votes. The problem this creates is that with a high rep it takes more weight than groups like @steemcleaners have to effectively neutralize bad actors even with the support of the community without the help of other whales.
Like anything else this will escalate if there isn't a means put in place to counter it. The "bad" minnows will swarm to those initiatives in hopes of getting rich with little or no effort on their part.
Is that in the best long term interest of steemit?