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.

You didn't actually read what I wrote or you didn't understand it, which is equally a problem.

Also, if "how to alpaca" is the most absurd combination of words you could think of, we need to get you exposed to a lot more of the absurdity of the Internet.

"Tutorials and how to guides" aren't real content – at least as they are realized around here, and I've written enough of both of them myself to know. They certainly aren't generally written by people who legitimately want to talk about how to do things but instead get targeted a lot as "easy formats" for people who don't have something they actually care about to write about. Yes, some people legitimately enjoy the process of teaching and showing other people how to do things. They are also a prime example of a field which is churned daily by content farmers looking for easy hits.

There is an extremely active and well attended maker/process community for just about anything that you want to learn about on YouTube, and they do extremely well for themselves – not just financially, because there are a butt load of problems with any kind of reward system rooted in YouTube's infrastructure (and most of them are getting what money they get from Patreon, anyway), but they find audiences. In part because it is much, much harder (though far from impossible) to make content free how-to guides in video, though if you have spent any time looking for how to do something, you probably turned up more than 30% of the hot guide videos on YouTube effectively being contentless, droning, useless stuff that effectively just recites a few lines from a manual.

So yes – "tutorials and how to guides" or a theoretically legitimate choice of things to write about, but they aren't the sort of thing that we're missing on this platform. Not even close.

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.

But that's not true, is it? And that goes well beyond the issue of "tutorials and how to guides;" that goes into choosing an issue that you're passionate about and writing about that at length, with real understanding. Even if you do so, even if you think of it is your job and put the work in every single day – if you place ads and affiliate protocol links to cat stuff – you are guaranteed to get the money rolling. You are guaranteed anything except that you have written about something that you care about and are passionate about and hope that other people likewise will find it.

There is no guarantee of money, there is no guarantee of anything – and on the Steem blockchain there is no guarantee that anyone that cares about your content will be able to find it because discovery is not now and has never been important to even a base level to the designers of the interfaces or the underlying database. Finding content, bringing content creators and consumers together, placing them in proximity so that they can engage with things they care about – that's not what we do here. Quite the opposite, on most occasions.

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.

SEO is a scam, unfortunately. It's sad because the acronym as a term of art is meaningful, but it can be summed up as "make sure the metadata on your page is set appropriately and that a web spider can scrape your content, so stop using all that dynamically generated JavaScript crap if you want anyone to be able to find it." That isn't what people who talk about SEO are selling, however. Look at any page talking about SCO and they will go on at extreme length about "guaranteeing being on the top page, first three lines, of every Google search for anything even close to what you're talking about." Or "maximizing the earning potential of your ad program with these three simple tricks no one but us can do." It's digital snake oil. It is the "make money fast" of the digital promotion business.

The reason that it's crap is that the underlying search algorithms are designed to and evolve to minimize specific targeting simply based on phrasing because doing so represents an exploit of a specific algorithm. The underlying assumption is that "an SEO engineer" can and will manipulate your content so that it achieves representation in search results which don't accord with the actual content. That is what they sell. As you say.

I know this from being on both sides of this particular fight.

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.

This just tells me that you have not read much if anything that I've written. I mean, all of that is true up until "guides are a scam, tutorials are a scam." It would be more accurate to say that "guides and tutorials are often lazy content and as such have inherently low value." Again, I say that as someone who has written some very involved, very complicated, very technically documented tutorials and guides for extremely focused purposes.

You have actively gone out of the way to miss the important thing regarding what I'm talking about and that's this:

We don't need guides and tutorials. We don't need people who specialize in cranking out a guide and tutorial every day on a different subject, none of which that they really care about. We don't need more posts about cryptocurrency, cryptocommodities, or other masturbatory incestual topics. We need to be a place where people who care about subjects and topics go to write about those things, to create content involving those things, and where people who are interested know that they can go to get a diverse set of experiences.

On the creator side of things, we need actual interested creators to want to bother with this platform. First and foremost. It has to fulfill a need for them/us that actually works for the only important part, the second step, finding an audience and having an audience find them.

All created content is interactive. All of it. Interactivity isn't a function of topic or format so much as it is a function of engaging with your audience, and that's performance. If anything, guides and tutorials don't lead to very much interaction. I wish they did. That would make it a lot more fun for me to do what I do, but particularly on the steem blockchain, we don't have a user base which is largely driven by that kind of feedback. There are makers on the platform who have a readership that comments on their project updates and how to's, and that's great. But that's not particularly a group that's being underserved.

You know what I haven't talked about in this reply? Money. I haven't talked about tokens, payoffs, getting rich, curves, staking, or any of the crap that normally is the real central idea, even that you have brought up. I am explicitly not talking about making money – because the obsession on making money is part of why this platform is so in the garbage, and why other platforms where it is immaterial to the process are doing extremely well.

I care about content. I want to care about content. I want other people to care about content. I want other people to recognize that the ongoing toxic environment that keeps things around here as they are, in many cases, is the fact that the only kind of engagement that people talk about is "how can I make money?" You did so yourself when you are talking about cat content, and I thought that was very revealing.

Back when blogging began and that there was a bit of a gold rush, I was there on the front lines. When advertising interfaces began to be easily publicly available, I was there. When SEO salesman started to show up and talk about how they can make sure your blog was in the top few responses every time, I was there. I was also helping inside DEC with AltaVista; I was there. When decentralized, independent server-based blogging started being overtaken by centralized social media architectures, I was there.

All along the way, this has been a problem.

When I appear on EFF panels, talking about blogging, social media, and being a creator in highly saturated media landscape, when people are asking what it is that they need to do or should do in order to get an audience, find an audience, keep an audience, and make a living – I point out that the last point is orthogonal to the others. If making a living is what you're looking for, this is not an occupation for you. In fact, obsessing about how you can bring money into the experience is going to destroy the experience both for you as a creator and for your audience.

If you want to be a creator, create because the act of creation and sharing that creation is important to you; it has to be more important to you than anything else that you could be doing with that time. You may or may not ever find an audience. There may or may not even be an audience for what you want to create. Finding an audience largely consists of the creator going to where the audience already is and then telling them that the creator exists.

You do that and all of your work is interactive. You do that about a subject and in a way that you're passionate about, and all of your work is interactive.

Once you have an audience, once people can find you, once you have put in the work, then – maybe – you can think about monetizing the audience you have. But you don't have to and it shouldn't be the reason that you're doing any of it.

The steem blockchain is badly designed and implemented for this. The way that the blockchain is discussed is badly designed and implemented for this. Look at the very post I'm replying to, the originator of this whole thing. All of it is talking about money. All of it. And while @paulag is absolutely correct that we need content consumers on this platform, what she's discussing is not how to get content consumers. "Interactive content" is no kind of guidance. "Guides and tutorials" isn't really broad enough to be talking about a solution. And those are tiny, tiny portions of what she's talked about, most of which has been about throwing money around.

I like a lot of Paula's work. Her analysis stuff is great, and I'm particularly sad to see so little of that being done lately. When she switches into "rah rah cheerleader"-mode, she just can't get away from hyping the part of the platform that does us the least good – pimping out money.

And that's it.