Creating quality content costs time, mostly. That amateur content-creators can see some immediate pay-out, albeit small and only within a seven-day window, is great. Sorting through all that content and reading it takes time, too. What's novel about steemit is that readers are paid to create comments (meta-content), themselves, and are incentivized to actively help decide the value of what's added to the social network. Hopefully as the steemit community becomes more savvy and discerning (and bots are squashed), we'll see more curation of truly awesome content.