It's a complicated cycle. When we have no interesting content to be easily found - we rather spend our upvotes somewhere else. If people see Steem as a platform which works better with bought votes than quality content, we will not attract quality content creators.

I'm not seeing any issues with people treating Steemit like a random blogging site or Facebook, posting selfies and such. However the issue is that they are doing it for money (otherwise they usually would use more fluently working sites) and when they don't get any large upvotes with their pointless material, they just leave. Or buy some upvotes.

Steemit has too many flaws compared to other services it would be attractive without the rewards.