This isn't Facebook - primarily because everything here is public and for the whole world to see for all eternity - but this isn't strictly some "quality content" platform, either. This is what its users make of it.

To me this feels pretty much like any blogging platform with money. I've used Blogspot for blogging for fun with friends for years. We'd write posts and comment on each other's posts to entertain each other. The company that ran the platform sold advertising space and pocketed the profits. There is nothing wrong with getting paid for writing the sort of mediocre posts and comments people on social medias write. You see the value in having a social network doing that is not primarily in the stellar content they produce but in the attention paid by those people collectively. That is worth something. Not much per person but something anyway. The users of other social medias see none of the financial value whereas here they get paid in proportion to their popularity. The market cap of Facebook is about $400 billion and the number of users is around two billion. That translates into the average user being worth about $200 at most. It's not much different here. But even if you made, let's say, only a couple of hundred per year by posting here and not some other social media or blogging platform, it would still be the smart thing to do.

Also, without the masses coming on board, powering up and supporting content any "quality content" producer will remain at the mercy of the whim of a few individuals.