I think Steem should be thought of as a game more than a mechanism of deciding what each piece of content is worth.

Some of the reasons to upvote are they're a known author and you think you can get good curation rewards or they have SP and you hope maybe they'll vote you back or you just want to support them in general so you'd support any post.

And it's all rational and what you should expect people will do, and it won't correlate too perfectly with how "good" the piece of content was. So it just shouldn't be thought of as a way to gauge how good content is.

What's important is whether the rules and incentives in play generally encourage good behavior and what you want in a social media platform, and at least make it more advantageous to create good content rather than bad content.

Getting big bucks for a simple post is nothing new anyways. PewDiePie can put up a cat vid and make a bunch. But we recognize that it's within the context of the following he's built and that YouTube isn't necessarily gauging what each piece of content brings to the world.