@sabot, I agree that there is an obvious disconnect between quality and recognition. I see people busting to change this, bonding together as minnows, curating lost content and hidden gems, begging each other to read, to upvote quality. It's heartening but also saddening. From the article above:
the correlation between popular votes & engaging commentary and monetary rewards doesn’t currently exist on Steemit. It’s an arbritary system that inherently makes little sense.
I am even seeing a disturbing trend of articles crafted specifically to inspire a variety of angry responses. This way, the content is the comment section. Such an article is effortless to produce, if you can live with yourself, and the author can sit back and not participate, appearing to have merely expressed an opinion. Some of these trend and then people upvote them in anticipation of curation rewards. One understanding of "trolling" is that it makes provocative statements in a gleeful anticipation of the mayhem that will be caused. That trolling is regularly succeeding as "quality content" on Steemit should be extremely embarrassing.