If you think about it, it's not quality that matters, but relevance...

I was contemplating the issue of quality - as some people were complaining that "oh there's not so much quality content".

Now, if you analyze your daily pattern of browsing content, in most cases it won't involve high-quality criteria. You will not be browsing for the best novels, high-art, best documentaries, groundbreaking philosophies, etc etc. Instead, your browsing pattern criteria are based on relevance to your interests. 

People who want to flirt or socialize may use certain social media, people who want to discuss certain topics might gravitate towards certain forums, people who like certain news (IT, crypto, politics, economy, sports) may frequent certain websites etc etc.

So, what's important to the reader is that he has a system in place where he can read, publish or discuss relevant content. It is typically difficult for generic systems to compete with specialized platforms (take for example bitcoin subreddit vs bitcointalk.org) but the twist, in our case, is that the specialized platforms don't pay for content publishing while the "generic platform" (in our case steemit) does. 

The consequence of that is that the best posters are incentivized to participate in the more "generic" platform through monetary profit and thus allow the generic platform to exceed in quality the specialized one. This is probably a radical departure from what has been happening so far on the internet where specialized platforms always excelled. A "zerohedge", a "godlikeproductions" or a "bitcointalk" would always be better than a subreddit. But now it is possible to turn things upside down and allow generic platforms to excel - at least when a natural categorization of interests arises over time. 

An alternative scenario is that specialized platforms could integrate STEEM or STEEM-like functionality and offer the best of both worlds. 

Whatever the case, this is starting to smell like a ...revolution.... a paradigm shift.