Digital Point can have a new quality contest every month (that encourages quality posts). It might be limited to certain sections, and may require posts on certain webmaster topics. Every once in awhile, I'll see someone go out of there way to write a really helpful post, not to sell an ebook, not to refer you to their site, but they are just contributing. I remember quite awhile ago, a poster that wrote his entire method for making money with blogs and Adsense, it had to be about 500 words - I thought that was really nice. I think it would be too much work for mods if we nominated, but what if they noted extra quality posts during the month - then, once a month they could decide on a winner? It wouldn't have to be a big prize, maybe a $25 gift card, free DP advertising, a do follow link, DP t-shirt, free name change, free ebook (from the ebook section) or something like that. There could also be a thread or area to post all the monthly winning posts. I don't know if this would work, just a thought.
It's a nice idea in theory, but I suspect it would indirectly cause even more useless threads/posts. As soon as you start incentivizing people to post, you get all sorts of retards. I bet you would see people spinning articles they didn't write, people blatantly plagiarizing posts, etc. You would of course get some good posts, but I suspect it would cause all sorts of crap in addition to the legitimate posts. If we were going to do something like that, it would be better to do it without users knowing we were doing it.
While I agree that community in general tend to be chaotic.. How about a nomination based Member of the month type contest? It may require some work from your end, make a nomination committee (again based on Community nomination) for key subforums like Programming, SEO, Marketing etc. The Committee will nominate people, make the vote thread in respective subforums, and active community (people with certain amount of post and duration on DP) will vote to chose the winner. Winner gets a badge or may be premium membership for a month or so? PS: I have a situation, I have broken a rule of DP knowingly, but I need to explain it to you. May I explain it in a PM to you?