If we want to bring content consumers to Steem, what we need is real content. We need things that are not tutorials, how-to's, or guides. We need content which people want to see and engage with. We need content which covers a lot more ground in a lot more interests than just the cryptocommodity fad of the week, or "I got rich on the Steem blockchain and you can too," or "how to write a better clickbait article"…

Let me disagree here. Well, with your whole comment. You're working on a big, big misconception.

Look at the two things you said there. "real content", and you contrasted it with "tutorials and how to guides" as if they were opposite things. And then you jumped right onto "I GOT RICH ON THE STEEM BLOCKCHAIN", which is obviously damaging the blockchain itself with false promises (read my last post about this).

The problem I have with your comment and your idea is that you're tunnel-visioned, thinking that interactive content = "How to get rich with this trick that bankers don't want you to know". That is ONE niche, the 'get-rich' content that is one of the most hypocritical things on the Internet, where people sell get-rich products and the one getting rich is the one with the product.

There's WAAAAY more than that on 'interactive content'. Steem has none of it right now. Steem right now is communities wanting to cuddle and be happy without providing anything other than pretty things, poems and inter-motivation, and people talking about Steem. There is no value content.

Let's look at the how-to's. Google the most absurd combination of words. I google'd 'how to alpaca'.

https://modernfarmer.com/2015/09/raising-alpacas/
https://www.wikihow.com/Run-an-Alpaca-Farm
https://www.thespruce.com/alpaca-farming-on-the-homestead-1835747

You can google any 'how to' anything and you'll find tons of interesting content about any niche. You can google pretty much anything you want to learn or know and you'll find that information online. How to ride a bycicle, how to raise a kid, how to raise twins, how to raise a cat, a dog, how to take care of your phone, tablet, TV, computer, how to take care of a rope, a shoe, an antenna, the air, space, the ground, whatever. Any combination of words you can think of, there's probably a how-to guide about it. Point is: it's not all 'how to make money' and the typical afore-mentioned vicious cycle of selling scammy stuff to dumb people.

You may ask right now: but how can you make money making random guides?

You don't. That's the point of a niche. You don't just go writing guides about random word combinations. If you pick, let's say, taking care of cats, you can make daily posts about cats, how to take care of them, ideal products and tests you've run yourself, and I can assure you that if you place ads and affiliate product links to cat stuff, you'll get the cash flowing, and there will be an audience, not just from Steem users, but from people who google stuff.

And here comes the other topic you mentioned. You said that SEO is a scam. But SEO is not a product, or an ideology or anything. SEO is literally Search Engine Optimization. SEO is grabbing some words, putting them in some tools and evaluating whether you'll get an audience or not. It works for ANY topic, not just "get-rich-quick" scams. You can do SEO about academic topics like brain research and target low-competition keywords so that your newly made article about revolutionary research will show up as first result and not 5th or 2nd page when people look for that specific topic.

It's the same with everything else you mentioned, honestly. So many long comments, read most of it, and it's all tunnel-visioned about how clickbait is scam, SEO is scam, marketing is scam, guides are scam, tutorials are scam. Like, for real? Google a tutorial on how to make a strawberry cake with chocolate and vanilla. You'll find it. Is that a scam? I consider that relevant content if you're interested in making strawberry cakes with chocolate and vanilla.

@paulag didn't say "we need to scam people". She said "we need to create value content that people usually interact with". You yourself mentioned guides and tutorials. Those are two of the many possibilities. And there's so much more out there that is interactive and useful. What she's proposing is for us to shift the focus of our posts from useless stuff into actually useful and mostly INTERACTIVE stuff that will bring more of an audience to actually use Steem, vote and raise the value of the currency, not by making false promises but by creating actually valuable content.

How that translates for you into "let's scam people", I have no idea.