For the purpose of this article, I'm going to assume Steem works like its vision being people are incentivised to write quality articles, incentivised for finding and upvoting quality articles (curation) & spam are de-incentivied by downvotes/reduced visibility
What first attracted me to Steem is that if you like an article with a simple click you can give tangeable value that the author can take to the bank. You get warm fuzzies for supporting stuff that's important to you and the writer gets food".
Because of the limited amount of votes per day and the cost of making new accounts, you have an almost ungameable aggregation system based on what the people are willing to pay for.
Trending Topics, sorted by Payouts as of 18/8/17
What people are willing to pay for
What surprised me is Life came out on top! Not just on Payouts but on Posts too! It could just be that Life did well at some stage so people tagged everything Life but if not what does that mean? Do people not have a Life? (couldn't resist) Or is it like Westworld where people go to find out who they can become?
What dictates a posts value?
Value is largely individual but in general its the articles you remember a week later. That strange sentence you cant shake, that one bit of advice you read that filled in the gap between two thoughts. People can search their entire life's and never find it but when they do it can change their entire reality! Like goatcx and lemon party (don't google them)
How can I increase the value of my posts?
See my post (shameless plug): https://steemit.com/writing/@chatman/5-tips-to-writing-better-articles