I agree with you and don't think the issue is relegated to just steem because even reddit that dosen't have an actual monetary reward sort of suffers from similar problems within the idea of capital but I don't think that means there aren't matters of design that enhance or detract from these mechanisms that could be more elegantly thought through. In the past few years I've just become more interested in Behavior Economics which kind of looks at how the user interfaces with different types of questions when making decisions.