Making money based on article quality regardless of how many followers you have is best suited for sites like medium.com they include the number of likes and reading time of each viewer into their revenue model. The downside is that a) it requires readers to pay $5 per month to reward the author, b) private paid articles can be seen by free users at a limit of 3 articles per author. Steemit just requires any reader to sign up and like an article in order to reward the author, so in this perspective you are likely to get more reward, but whether this reward outweighs medium's reward is hard to tell.