But it shouldn't get thousand of rewards.
"Subjective proof-of-work" is... subjective. That is at the core of Steemit protocole and value. Deal with it. The protocole never specify what type of content should or should not receive high payouts. We all know the rules from the start and what it means.
"Maybe" the mistake of Dan & Ned was to not find a way to select their happyfew whales based on their interests to please a specific niche of users... or maybe not.
Now, I personally have no problem with excessive rewards per se, or even gossip/girly content earning lots of rewards. How much people earn and with what type of content is not my business. If they found their audience good for them. If whales want to upvote them good for them. Their choice, not mine, not yours.
If one is not happy with that, well there is a simple solution (that will please everyone, and will please steem traders particularly): Buy steems, power up, and be a whale. Period. Invest money in Steemit and shape the quality of the content.
That being said, what annoyed me is not the crappy content, it is that a scammer wins. Nothing more. (He/She could have scam with high quality content, it doesn't change anything to the equation, content quality is not relevant here) And I suspect that there is a whale behind that.
That is so simple to game for a whale. Think about it: create fake account, upvote it, boom, the fake account earn few hundreds, which falls into the radar of other people and other whales. Rinse an repeat. With this process a 'dark' whale doesn't even need to cash out, just create fake account nurture it (and get the SBD). Then people who look after their curation reward will do the rest.
I'm not getting it. High quality content is the intended outcome.
This is not a scam! It is part of the advertised and intended value of SP that authors can vote up their own content. If an author thinks the material is good and will get a following, we want them to buy SP in order to vote it up and promote it (buying SD to used the "Promoted" feature is another option).
The system mechanism is supposed to (and does) ensure that self-promoted content earns only substandard rewards (and possibly none at all if the content is so bad/abusive as to be downvoted). In order to earn good rewards (i.e. sustain a good return-on-investment on the SP that you bought) it is necessary that others vote for it as well.
In the context, by high quality content I mean content that could have fit the taste of razvanelulmarin,
It is not what I intended to mean :( I'm not talking about self upvoting in that sense. Let me rephrase. I think that if a malicious whale wants to make easy cash without cashing out his whale account, he can simply create a secondary (minion) account with which he will start posting content. Then with his whale account he will upvote his minion account. It is a kind of "pump and dump scheme" adapted to blogging.
I understand what you are saying. The system is supposed to handle that. I think it is simplest to say that the system apparently worked in this case. People being vigilant, identifying plagiarism, and downvoting it is part of how it supposed to work.