About money (second half of your comment)

You don't want to think about money, and you think it's a buden. Not a surprise, and also that's just like... your opinion. Personally, I don't have enough money that I could afford not to think about money at every turn I take. Neither does my family. We live on the edge of poverty. Regardless of whether you would personally appreciate content made from the heart, anything I invest a lot of time into, I have to take into account whether it'll allow me to eat next month or whether it'll be a waste of time.

Steem allowed me to earn enough to live in 2018. I haven't done much with it in 2019 because the market share got reduced a lot. I instead spent that time learning enough about the Internet market to start investing a lot of time on it again. My passions are pointless if they don't allow me to survive, and they wouldn't, not here in Venezuela at least, so that blows over the second part of your post: whether you like it or not, there's a ton of people like me out there in the world who won't invest time and effort into a platform if it doesn't have the potential to give something back.

So yes, I talk a lot about money, because money allows me to live. Whether I'm passionate about it or not, it's my bread and water. Literally. Can't buy food and water without money, and we're scraping by to live month to month.

So, second part of your reply only applies to people with more financial freedom than us lowly third-worlders, sadly the majority on planet Earth.

About "real content" (first part of your comment)

Ok, so first of all, your argument against guides and tutorials hangs from a very thin and unstable rope which is "trust me, I've written a lot of guides". Ok, let's say that as you say, 30% of guides and tuts are useless, and that we already have a ton of guides on Steem (do we??). My point was not that only guides and tuts are useful, but that what we call 'interactive content' is more often seen on monetized blogs than on Steem, where (check out any front page, this is easy to verify with one look) we mostly have tree-huggers who want to share how their day went and people reporting on the state of Steem itself.

Second, yes, if you know how to work the system, you can monetize it. I've done it a few times already, got 900 followers in two weeks, got $2500 in a year, with 0 investment, only crawling up the system little by little. With comment sections, interactive titles and images, I got around $1000. The other $1500 I got from chat networking and self-marketing. So if you know how to work people and you know about technology and the Internet, it's a given that you can do this. I taught 3 people and they did it as well, 2 of them even better than me, because I'm lazy and they're not.

Well, this money is good for third-world but useless in the first world. But your claim that there is no guarantee of anything is, in my opinion, false, because the information is out there, I've tried it, I've used it and I've earned with it many times already, always with success, and I've shared it and people have earned with it around me. The only ones that didn't succeed were the ones that literally got bored after 2 weeks, said "omg no profit" and left to find their own means in the "real world".

Third, you claim that SEO is a scam. Your affirmation is based on the information you see on... people who sell SEO services. I never said that you should buy SEO services. Yes, most SEO services are dubious at best. I wouldn't buy anything unless I was well off enough to afford throwing money around, and even then I would do a ton of research to find something legit-looking. However, back to the point: affiliate marketing, and all that foul-sounding crap can actually work. Check this link, countless people live off of it. Yeah, it's not the best business, both in ethics and in earning level, but it's there and it can work if you put time and effort into stuff that's proven to work. However, of course, you must be frugal with your investments and not buy stuff you don't absolutely need or you're not sure of its effectivity. invest blindly = lose it all.

What I'm talking about is not buying scammy SEO services. I was talking about doing SEO yourself.

However, SEO is not the whole deal, and it can't be the center of your business unless you're selling SEO services. If you do SEO for your business, that's only one part of it. You've got to optimize everything: Your business model has to be able to get all the prospective buyers into the door and onto the product, which must be easy to be bought, both emotionally and physically, and you've got to be able to keep your clients as leads for future business. Only that way can you grow.

Business will have to include all kinds of marketing. Pulling people from offline and online, from ads, comments, posts, random mentions, affiliate partners, social networks, etc.

So, in conclusion:

In YOUR opinion, people shouldn't try to look for things to earn on, but to earn on the things they already enjoy. Sadly, that's not possible for most people, not on the level you intend. I do enjoy the Internet, and technology, and that's about it, so I'm lucky to have been able to earn with them. However, that kept me far from other stuff that I enjoyed like learning languages, going to long-duration events and camping, etc., because I had to put my time on it. Unfortunate, yes, and I did balance my time to be able to do that while earning online. However, it was not as much as I would have desired, but that's the price of being poor.

You claim that you can't make money with SEO and the associated techniques of pulling customers out of thin air (i.e. search engines). I can't soften the blow so I can just say: you're wrong; if you have the knowledge, you can make it work to earn enough. Maybe you don't like taking it to full scale and doing all that's necessary to succeed, but that's on you, not on SEO.

P.S. You mentioned something about browser-rendered javascript applications not doing well on search engines. That is definitely and absolutely true. It's quite a problem. It can be fixed with a few tricks that Vue provides, but it's not efficient, loses a bit of trust and STRAINS the server like hell with such a big userbase and the sheer amount of blockchain requests that must be tended to serverside. However, you've hit the nail on the head with that statement. Adding that serverside pre-rendering is actually one big solution that could tip Steempeak upwards, among many others.

My point:

Last but not least, this whole discussion is not going in the same direction as the original point, which was: the content on Steem is absolutely terrible. When was the last time you googled something you needed and found yourself on Steem? When was the last time you needed something and said "ok I can probably find that on Steem"?

We have terabytes of information, and we have one of the most active userbases on the whole Internet, and yet we don't have anything useful. As I said before, it's all tree-huggers and people talking about Steem.

My belief is that if real content is actually created en masse, regardless of how much you would appreciate people making guides about how to trim your toe-nails with a knife, people would undoubtably find themselves on Steem because there will be something of use in here instead of random chitchat like this which leads nowhere and nobody will find useful till the entropical end of the universe.

However, Steem is not the best platform for that, due to what we mentioned before, no pre-rendering on Steempeak, the best developed front-end, so no SEO for people's posts, so people won't put their content here but on their own websites. Obvious consequence is that Steem won't be home to SEO content farms but to other kinds of efforts. That's why I doubt that Steem will peak again in the near future until a new selling point is found, because currently there's none.

Additionally, as paulag implied, there are too many content producers right now.