I agree. Quality is a subjective word, hence the parenthesis around it. I'm sure we can think up of a better goal. My point was that ensuring people get paid

I agree. Quality is a subjective word, hence the parenthesis around it. I'm sure we can think up of a better goal. My point was that ensuring people get paid is not what our end goal is. We should identify what our end goal should be and try to see if a different tactic might accomplish that goal better (with less collateral damage). For example, people who create memes (the actual memes, not the images that later become memes) are motivated by social acknowledgement. Same goes for many Facebook posts. Mandating payment systems is unlikely to motivate those types of content creation, and may in fact suppress many other types. However, creating content based on social rewards (like most social media sites currently do) does help the creation of popular content.