I completely agree. On the other side, I am curious how much monetary rewards pay into content discovery. Allow me to put things in other perspective:

What if paying people to produce content is the root of all the bad things related to content and interaction on this platform?

For example, there are a lot of platforms on which nobody gets payed. On these platforms, like stackoverflow or even medium or redit, people are not payed to produce and discover good content, but they still do. Here on the other side, a lot of people are more interested into self rewarding rather than finding the best piece of content and bringing it to the trending page.

I am curious whether or not paying people to produce content encourages manifestations of greed rather than altruism. I am not saying that this is a problem of how the blockchain is designed, but more of a social values.