I don't have an answer here, it's an honest question. I'm new on Steemit, but the quality of posts is overall pretty terrible. 90% of what I see is porn, a single photograph stolen from somewhere where else (uncredited), a link to a single YouTube video without context, or unintelligible meta-rants about Steem.
It reminds me a bit of the early days of Twitter, where the only things people posted about was porn, how to get followers, and how to use Twitter. :-/
Steem as a cryptocurrency is one thing, but Steemit itself as a content platform seems lost. Other than directly linking to specific stories, it's unimaginable that anyone would ever find anything I've written, and the general content quality is so painfully low, I don't really want to spend much time looking for other people's content. 90% of the comments I get are people asking me to follow them back. (Wow, it really does remind me of the early days of Twitter!)
There's so much potential here, but they'll need a massive overhaul of the UX/content discoverability/quality filters for this to really ever catch on, IMHO.
The premise is "Blog. Get paid.", but that only works when you have a platform where people can find valuable content easily. Otherwise we're all just upvoting each others' stolen porn in a ponzi wankfest.
Or maybe I'm just an idiot who doesn't get it.