Without wasting time on an introduction, let's compare a few approaches to earning on this platform:

Approach #1: Producing high-quality content. Think of an article idea, do research, then write, edit, and polish it, find a picture to go along with it, and finally publish it. Even for practiced writers, a substantial mid-length article takes a few days to complete.
The top articles on this site, which cater straight to the platform's target audience, very rarely earn more than 3, maybe 4 dollars. Do keep in mind that not everybody is knowledgeable enough on the topic to cater to the crypto-niche, and that any other topic on here will barely earn a fraction of that. The average earnings per article is probably somewhere around 10 cents.

Approach #2: Ignoring content completely. Treat publish0x like any other faucet. Visit this page a few times a day while you're at work or on the toilet - Bookmark the "new posts" site, click the first link on top of the page without reading the title, scroll to the bottom while the text hasn't even rendered yet, and tip yourself 80%. This earns you some 2-3 cents per day, which, compared to other faucet sites, is pretty amazing. 

Approach #3: Spamming shit-tier content. This is the "content"-producing approach, fine-tuned to investing the least possible effort. Post a picture of your dog with two lines of text. Copy-paste parts of an wikipedia-article or a travel guide. Post a picture of a chart, and write "Bitcoin price went up today! What will happen tomorrow?", padded with 50 additional words that say the same thing. Alternatively: "Famous person said X about Bitcoin today!" - Don't even need padding on this one, you can post that as a one-liner. Worse yet, post some "Technical Analysis" gibberish - you might even automatize this, with a simple script stringing a selection of random words together to form the likeness of a sentence, in the fashion of wisdomofchopra.com. You can produce something like this in less than 5 minutes, and suddenly 10 cents per article doesn't seem so bad.

This isn't sustainable.

It doesn't take a genius to see that spamming shit-tier content is the "optimized" approach to earning here. You can churn out low-effort "articles" several times a day, and suddenly you're earning a few bucks per week with the same amount of effort that earns you only a couple of cents on other faucet sites. Best thing, you don't even have to click through captchas.

The abundance of this low-effort content will keep the vast majority of readers sticking to the ignore-content approach, of course. Nobody wants to sift through mountains of shit to find the few articles on here that might be actually worth a read. A lot of the "readers" come here for one fact only: That this is one of the best-paying faucets around.

The two approaches reinforce each other: People tip randomly and without reading because content is shit, and shit content is the best-paying option for writers because people tip without reading anyways. The obvious losers here - apart from the platform and community, in the long run - are those who try to use this platform for publishing quality writing.

What's the solution?

This of course is a tricky question. I can think of a few measures, but the bottom line is that improving the overall quality of content on this site would require losing the thousands of content-ignoring faucet users in favor of having a chance to slowly build a sustainable, content-oriented user community. Short-term page views would take a massive hit for sure, which is why I think the publish0x-Team is unlikely to implement such a long-term strategy. Even though I'm convinced it would be more sustainable, and even more profitable, in the long run.

• The most necessary action would be to heavily disincentivize the mindless tipping of random articles. One way of doing this would be to make sure people spend a minimum of time on an article, or to measure their scroll speed, before enabling them to tip.
• Another disincentive would be to drastically lower the percentage of the tip users are allowed to claim for themselves. Make it not worth the effort to (ab)use this site as a faucet, and people might start using it as a place to find good content.
• A less painful way to improve the site would be to make it easier to find good content. Unfortunately this is also the hardest thing to do. The recently introduced categories give us a way to roughly sort the mountain of spam - I honestly think filters would be way more useful. Instead of giving me broad categories, maybe give me ways to filter out all articles containing particular keywords.
• Ideally, make those filters last through sessions and tie them to the user's account, so that we don't have to re-enter them on every visit.

Other articles from the community also had some great ideas for improvement, but most focused on technical details and ignored the major problem this site has, and the one that is integral to its current design: That a large part of the user-base simply doesn't care about content, and that these ones are exactly the ones that profit the most from the tipping system as it is implemented right now.