We have to siphon our feelings of what is "quality" and turn our attention to what draws viewership and influence. Appics, while hardly novel in innovation does bring a secondary market demand for Steem as well as offering "normies" an opportunity to participate.

I would much rather that we have a billion users posting selfies than 30k users posting essays which nobody outside of the steem echo chamber will care to read.

That said, I do not use appics and I agree that some filtering on Steemit.com - which has some what established itself as a "quality content" (really?) platform, would do a lot of good for users expecting the traditional steemit.com experience.