Every time I visit I find it hard to engage with most of the content here. Steemit is loosely based on Reddit, but there is a stark difference in content and community. Much of the upvoted content, while high quality, is not necessarily interesting or useful. Most of it seems like an answer looking for a question, and this makes sense when you think about the monetary incentive. The angle seems to be to create content that will appeal strongly to a wide range of people, but in effect that seems to just generate buzzfeed-like titles with long-winded filler content. Why? I think there are two reasons:
There are no subs.
This is a distinct difference from Reddit. No subs combined with the incentive for wide appeal makes articles less focused, more shallow, longer, and ultimately less interesting. By using tags instead of subs, users are encouraged to include as many tags as possible to reach a wider audience, which makes searches for those tags less likely to be relevant. It also means weaker communities, which ultimately means less interaction and more disconnection between readers and writers, which brings me to number two..Questions are discouraged.
Let me ask you: Is a question content? Perhaps it is, but that is not immediately clear based on Steemit payment incentives. It is not the person calling the helpdesk who gets paid, it is the person answering the phone. The professor gets paid, not the students. And yet the helpdesk technician does not call the client in anticipation of their problem. The professor does not seek the student out when it is time to sign up for classes. The content creators can only create worthwhile content when they understand what people are looking for. A technician giving you a solution to a problem you don't have is just an annoyance. A professor with no students is out of a job. An answer is only as necessary as its question is important, and there is no clear reward for asking questions on Steemit, which makes users less likely to ask questions, which leaves users in the dark as to how to target their content.
I came here today with a different question, but after poking around a bit it seemed as though there was no obvious avenue to ask it. Even the "Submit a Story" button seems to discourage questions. I think an environment that is more nurturing for interaction, questions, and community can only help Steemit moving forward.