Hi Coco,
we talked about this elsewhere, and yes, I agree with what you are saying. I am not in it for the money, and I have no use for those that are using strategy to make more money but lack content and, for the most part, are boring, if in fact they post anything at all of their own. I am talking about the strategy of curating (resteeming) at just the right time to piggyback on someones effort whithout putting anything of value of their own into it. It goes as far as resteeming stuff that is boring and irrelevant, but it is a 'whale', so resteeming it makes you money too! Then there is steem, steem, steem .... a good percentage of the posts here that make money are about steem, cryptocurrency and more steem. Its like being stuck in a mirror cabinet where it is hard to find the exit!

Talking about value: is my post of a video I cobbled together in 20 minutes and posted with just a sentence worth roughly half of my previous post that describes one of my key artworks in detail, with many illustrations, it's influences and history; a post I labored hard for one afternoon to put together and carefully editing and formatting - to earn what: 26 cents! So I made something like 4 cents an hour, lol

But as I had said often enough, it is not for the money, but for sharing stuff with others that can appreciate what you do. The thing is, the focus is on money, so who wants to "waste" their time checking posts where they cannot make any money from (resteeming) or get anything in return for upvoting (because I sometimes have no voting power - on occasion it is 1 cent, but mostly nada, so my votes account for nothing). So if you are in it for the money, you are not going to waste your time on my posts.

But as I observed, this is not much different in other social networks - but Steemit has the additional money factor that influences people - in other networks I had, similar to my post of a silly video here, often gotten more 'likes' for simply posting a utterly stupid meme, than for anything I had put much time and effort into it.

Your comparison to a Highschool popularity contest is right in many ways.

But I disagree with the subject you raised about deleting posts: "What if I change in 10 years?" - I said it before: even if deleted, nothing that has been posted on the internet completely disappears (it could have been copied and stored somewhere by someone else - I do this with videos for example that have a tendency to disappear from You Tube for a variety of reasons).
As long as you can edit your post, you can always replace the content with a photo of your cat 🐱- but after that, tough luck 💩

That said, I applaud those that create content that is valuable, innovative, interesting and shows effort. If such posts make hundreds, I am not jealous: I am happy for them, they deserve it and more! 💰

Also, a big 👍 for your filter suggestion about filtering original content. And as you observed, there are those that rarely (if ever) post anything of their own, but live off resteeming. And when you find something the posted after scrolling forever, it is out of date.

Talking about ART: if you go to the category, how much scrolling do you have to do to find something that has remotely something to do with art (but people use the tag because it is "popular") and if you find art under art, you still have to sift through it to find something you can actually relate to and is a good post. Maybe people would call me elitist for making such a comment. But seriously: we are not in kindergarten here where everyone gets a pat on the head and a gold star.

In summary, lets give it a chance. I am disgusted with Facebook (as anyone knows that reads my posts) and I was hoping to have a better experience here.

🤗 hugs