You guys are thinking of it backwards. People aren't going to make good content for the sake of making good content. They're going to make shit that they think is going to earn them some money.
The problem with Steem is that nobody earns money unless they are blessed by one of the ~40 or so whales that occasionally give upvotes. Some people who have been here long enough and "networked" make money from regular upvotes from those people.
We'll ignore the vote bots for now as virtually all profitability (from anyone other than the bot owners) has been removed. 10% max payout? Color me unimpressed.
On the rest of the internet, content creators make money from 1) selling products, 2) being paid on a CPM model by advertisers, or 3) being paid directly by sponsors/product placements.
Most people who use this platform are too stupid/lazy to create a profitable business. Most people in general are actually too stupid/lazy to do that, but this website in particular seems to attract low quality human beings.
Some whales directly sponsor "shows" like the Hots or Shots thing plus a few more. And while that's great, homeboy is not likely to start making $10k/month any time soon, regardless of the quality of his shows. The money factory can't print that fast.
The only real "solution" to Steemit's problem of mental retardation infestation is to enable on-site ads or in-video ads, like Adsense for example. With a theoretically infinite potential payout, people would take promotion seriously like they do on platforms that enable bigger payouts (like their own websites or YouTube channels).
I would even argue that there is quality content on here, but without the potential for advertisers to make any money from the traffic, users aren't properly incentivized to produce anything consistently UNLESS they're being bankrolled by a whale.
In fact, I'll bet that if I automatically posted all Steemit posts to a new Wordpress website and added an Adsense plugin, I'd be making bank in no time just by posting the links to Reddit and other content aggregation systems.
Steemit links are shadowed on other sites but normal websites generally aren't. I could totally steal the content, push traffic with social media (thus cutting out any need for SEO), and make money from Adsense clicks.
Would that help content creators? No. But solutions like this are what's needed in order to keep this platform alive with more than just, "Hey guys look at this new thing we built for Steem that nobody is ever going to use!"
My 2c.
RE: What is "good" content?