>But I wonder if the rewards are too conspicuous on many front ends for the reason you mentioned.

Yes, I think so. I was going to put it here, but I think it deserves a separate post. I think it would be interesting to even put the payout behind an extra click and use some other measure for "approval rating"

>Speaking of the quality of my content, there are millions of extremely prolific content creators of Quora, for instance, who put out quality answers all the time. I'm in a Facebook group for Finnish hobby photographers and many of them publish stuff as good as the best on Photography Lovers here.

Yes, and some might even earn on it but, they don't earn publicly. It creates a different dynamic in a culture that says "don't talk about earnings"