I have to agree with @eonwarped. It's not an unusual issue (I wouldn't even call it a problem) that people are just into cheap glitter and simple diversion. Cat and dog videos plus travel and cooking stuff are nr1 on youtube and so they are here.
What must never be underestimated when it comes to "lazy" users is that they might have a very different mindset and idea of what to do and what to think about. As in real life you have to create an institutionalized habit first if you want to reach something and the tool set for that is called marketing. If you apply that and don't make too many mistakes, you will end up with a stable and satisfied niche that is doing things "actively". Overall, a normal value for the share of users (or employees or people in a club who are system relevant) is 10%, the rest is "just there". At the end, you have to reach these 10% and get them into your niche.
My approach to positive select quality would be recursive reputation. At the end it is always the integrity of a single user that decides if something is quite likely quality or true, which would be the reputation part. And the more other users refer to output of that one user, the better the content must be, which would be the recursive element.
Practically it would mean that if you write a post, you have to attach it to another post. That can be your own or somebody elses, but the latter is incentivized. The user who wrote the referred content gets a part of the money that goes to the post plus it gets highlighted a bit more, because there is one more post attached to it. On the other hand, the attached post gets highlighted a bit more too and this depending on the size and quality of the post it is attached to. Of course, you can change the post your content is attached to if you see that as necessary (but not in a spammy way)
That would result in content cascades in which the single content creators control each other and give an indication about whether other content can be trusted or not.
I don't know if it would work and it surely has plenty of pitfalls that needed to be worked out. But in my mind that creates the very environment needed to separate the BS from the rest.
That's an interesting idea and by itself given a clean slate I think it may work pretty well. On the current blockchain I feel that many new users would simply attach their posts to popular users regardless of the quality of their content. The popular users could simply form a ring (point to each other) and thus that small group is elevated by everyone else.
That is not to say that this is a bad idea. This may also work better in smaller communities and sub-communities as a means of organizing information and providing structure within the group. Rather than sort the information via a list, you essentially have a reputation tree / network that could be used to find related content more effectively than the disaster of a system that the current applications use.
Yes, you got it as I had thought it. The issue of attaching content to the most popular could be fixed with reward and visibility for more than one level of the tree: The more steps to the first post there are the more a post is highlighted and in return the more attachments your own post has (no matter on what subsequent level) the more you get out. Ideally,that would lead to an equilibrium in which first-posters try to get users to reply to them or reply to their repliers and repliers try to find the ideal position in the top while still getting enough highlighted.
yeah, this is really something that needs to be fixed here on Steemit as well. The search bar doesn't work at all for me. I have go via google site: if I want to find something here. The lack of love they have put into steemit is astonishing.
PS: your q-filter works. I found 2 interesting posts with it:)