Its an interesting experiment, it reminds me a lot of the issues I saw back in the day with steemit, even though they were paying users with new inflation giving them much more room to experiment, finding ways to distribute that inflation was always a centre of friction for the service, people would create voting trails on popular authors, they would create circle jerk voting groups, and create content farms just to keep bagging that inflation

Thats humans for you, we will find a way to drive certainty of returns or extract as much value for the least amount of effort, I guess one way to curb it is the difficulty adjustment like Bitcoin has done or like you propose a type of monerofication by switching up the game every so often to keep users guessing

The issue with rewarding content is its all arbitrary, what is quality? Is it insight? Length? Uniqueness? Reading time? Views? Comments? Reputation? What is worth a reward?