The only way to encourage rewards for high-quality content is to find it and upvote. There's definitely a rewards bias towards "how to make a ton of cash with steemit" and what you've pointed out above BUT I think that a lot of this stems from people (and bots... don't forget the bots) upvoting what will likely trend. And that is based on what is trending at the moment. It's kind of self serving.

The best way to change this is to find good content. Comment, upvote and create interest. The follow button might help. Unfortunately this trend may be what happens when you get instant financial reward for social media content - people become more self-serving and the content suffers. But I don't think that will be the case in the long run.

So I'm spending the time upvoting what I think is good material - it's thankless at the moment but if enough people do it, we will see change.