From my training, representing the world with terms like "fairness" goes nowhere. It doesn't allow for problem solving to happen because the problem is never identified in the first place.

What are you trying to achieve? Define your goal. To me, you are trying to reward content producers sufficiently so that they will use the platform (because it meets their needs and so on). If the setup I'm suggesting leads to more reward for content creators than currently, then it will be achieving the goal more so.