Very interesting data. And I agree with the quoted line here from your post. Thing is, yes, the possibility of receiving the reward DOES induce the author to produce better content, but if the category that the overall group is getting awarded from is low-level content to begin with, they'll just produce more of it. The idea should be to expand the content as you progress as a platform.

However, as the mentioned studies have shown, if we apply a more analytical approach to this issue, we see that in general, the possibility of receiving rewards induces authors to produce higher quality content.