RE: My version of Steem is NOT content based, It is Contribution based.
That is, instead of the usuals like Facebook/Medium/etc where YOU create content but THEY generate income from it, here you get rewarded for the content you create. First and foremost, I think that is and rightly should be the single most important identifying feature of the steem blockchain (via the various front ends). And in that regard, I think it is entirely appropriate that rewards at least in some ways reflect the quality of the content.
No, quality is just as subjective as value. Yes, you can create external metrics for it, but someone created those metrics based on a system of values. Steem(it) is a social network. You get rewarded for the content you create if the community finds value in it. Steemit isn't like a job where you get paid for work. It's an entirely different system. The trick, like any creative endeavor, is to build up a community around your work that values similar things as you do.
Also, Medium pays writers who are part of it's Partner Program, which I am a part of. The problem with that model, in my view, is that the content that pays is behind a metered paywall, and they're not very transparent about how payouts work (at least when I first experimented with it). That's why I like Steem - the blockchain allows you to see what's going on under the hood, so to speak.
Quality being subjective doesn't change what I said in any way. Your argument could be used against @transistos approach of rewarding the subjective "what's best for the platform".
Maybe I misread your original post, which is what informed my reading of your follow-up, but it seems as if you think that posts should be rewarded based on their intrinsic value, as if the quality of a post can be measured objectively. But that doesn't make sense because quality is subjective, especially on the Internet. Posts don't really have a measurable intrinsic value; market value, on the other hand, is signaled by price. If you write something you feel is worth $1,000 USD because of the time and energy you put into it, but the community only rewards it with $50 USD worth of votes, then $50 USD is its market value on Steemit because that's what the community (including you) said it was worth. In that sense, the community decides what is best for itself, which is how the upvote system works. Intrinsic value =/= market value. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/011215/what-difference-between-intrinsic-value-and-current-market-value.asp By putting it on Steemit, you are basically submitting your work to a 'pay what you want' model where upvotes are weighted 'likes.' The fact that you think you didn't get rewarded for what you believe was the post's intrinsic value is on you. You could have sold it to a news site for a fixed price, or turned it into a Kindle book and sold it for x amount of dollars.
Transisto is saying that people should be voting on what's best for the broader platform as opposed to what individual posts you get value from reading. I disagree. Value or quality being subjective doesn't change the fact that transisto's statement is terribly absolute.
Okay, now I get where you're coming from. Your disagreement makes way more sense. Looks like we're on the same side in so far as we're opposing absolutism.