In an ecosystem, you want to incentivize not only the people doing the creation, but also the ones helping sift through the firehose.

With AI making content production cheap, there will be a never ending hose of slop to sift through.

Creation will be cheap, so sifting to find the diamonds in the rough will become much more important.

One pattern I liked for this from back in the day is the defunct music site Ame.st

Every song was DRM free and started off free.

The more a song was purchased, the higher the price went.

It would max out at 98 cents.

Prices for a song only went up, never down.

When a user purchased credits, they got a "rec" per dollar.

When you applied a "rec" to a song, you were betting that a song would go up in price.

You could cash out a rec, earning half of the price differential from when you placed the rec to the price the song now had.

This directly incentivized engaged users (like me!) to dive into the firehose of crap and find the good things.

Note that this pattern doesn't even fully require monetary reward; it happens emergently and naturally in social networks.

People earn a kind of implicit social credit when they discover great things, a powerful motivator to slog through the slop.