If long-form blog posts are in fact highly-valued (and you're not the only whale who has mentioned this), why are so many of the trending posts not those types of posts? And the ones that are - why are they such a relatively poor quality?
I guess quality is the in the eye of the beholder and I'm not sure what posts you are talking about. There are always exceptions (makeup lesson -- which happened exactly once), but mostly what I see recurring there are @dollarvigilante, @charlieshrem, @heiditravels, @dantheman, @sterlinluxan, @barrycooper, etc. I consider their quality all fine (maybe you disagree?), but most people are never going to be them, write like them, or have their following