I believe there is a fundamental problem with steem in this regard. Once someone writes an article they only have about 12 hours to capture the votes which allocate steem to their account. Then the article can only be found by searches. From my experience, old articles rarely if ever increase in votes or page views. This forces writers to follow trends of the moment. Quality writing may take days but if someone posts at the wrong time their masterpiece will be lost in steemland forever.
Another issue is the whales who have control over the steempower and usually vote on cryptocurrency topics. Few of these big steempower holders are analyzing creative writing and appreciating talent. Just look at trending and hot to get an idea. An author could publish a best seller on here in a series of articles and be lucky to get more than a few hundred steem dollars. Subsequent viewers will come from internet searches and will not have a steem account so they can't vote. There must be a better way to categorize posts while eliminating the garbage. I realize garbage is a matter of opinion but is 12 to 24 hours of scrolling down the list really enough time to gauge the value of an article?
Thanks for the post. I hope this issue is brought up more on steemit.