The monetary aspect of Steem makes the difference between blogging platform and casual anything-goes-social media more explicit, and at the same time the people who invented the proof of work concept didn't understand communication and entertainment at all. I think it is simply a design error. On a blog or on Medium you would never see anyone just posting a meme without doing a bit of writing craft to make it work in the context.

Using the term work in proof-of-work does kick the ball onto the blogging half of the football field where people actually work for their Steem, but Ned and Dan obviously was aiming at something like Facebook. As there are no other ways of communicating than writing blogposts (or go elsewhere like Discord) the platform is simply too primitive to take care of what it should. Maybe a shitpost option could be added so the auto voters stop voting on silly things... It would take some redesign in any case.