How is Steem useful for you?

I know about the theoretical usefulness of #Steem. Censorship-resistant publishing is a great tool and important for freedom and democracy. But obviously, that's not how Steem is being used.

I know about the monetary #usefulness. People simply make some extra money with Steem, or they use it for funding their projects. But that's not what I mean by "useful". A money-redistribution machine is only useful when you're on the receiving end.

What about the practical usefulness as a means of communication? Do you actually browse through posts, looking for information? Do you read trending posts like you would read a daily newspaper? Do you discuss stuff with people?

Maybe it's just that I'm too old or something. I started using the internet when the world wide web didn't exist. We had mailing lists back then, or usenet news. I've somehow managed to accept web-based forums as useful these days, acknowledging that if you don't adapt to change you're left behind. But Steem isn't really useful as a #discussion forum, for example you can only comment 6 levels deep or so, and tree-structured comments aren't terribly readable either.

I'm not a social media type. I won't touch Facebook and the likes with a long pole. I do have a twitter account, and I have an account at xing.com for business purposes, but I haven't checked either for about two months, because of the lousy signal-to-noise ratio. I don't read blogs either, because I don't care about other people's cats or whatever bloggers post about.

Possibly the latter is what Steem is about. So, to me Steem has a SNR of near zero. Does anyone find it useful to see dozens of "funny" videos being advertised? Where's the usefulness in seeing the same "spot the cat" picture posted three times within an hour by different people? Does anyone care about the cat of some pseudonymous identity they've never heard of?

What do you find useful in Steem?