Alright, so let's talk current state vs ideal state (and this is mostly just my personal opinion....)

First of all I think the economic model is really quite good at focusing content here, and actually the reason I thought of you so readily as an ideal steemian is that it's designed to reward value provided to other users. Your links tend to be positively dripping in value, so they're surely not an etiquitte breach. Mild to egregious self-promotion seems acceptable as well, as long as the post itself adds value to the site/discussion/what-have you.

So, all of the links that you mentioned are certainly quite acceptable. Also, there's the "tradition" (lol @ tradition-- site's ~4 months old) of an introduceyourself post-- here's mine's part I, and it's Part II. I'm pretty stream-of consciousness, so well, my posts reflect that.

In terms of the content I'd say that on steemit we're a lot closer to Medium than to reddit, despite the user interface. Posts with no "body" and just single links do not tend to do all that well with respect to the economic model. However, if those links were seen as providing value to the community, then it's pretty likely they would in fact do well.

And that's the last point: Like most all social media, Steemit is a rather capricious animal, just like the humans who create it through all their frenetic writings and keyboard smashings. You might post something really simple (a reply to a comment, for example) and suddenly find it valued at $500 (this totally happened to me once) and you might also post a https://steemit.com/steemit/@faddat/an-atheist-on-a-mission-from-god-tm-what-the-hell-i-m-up-to-and-why-it-matters and see it valued much less than one of your comments.

But at the end of the day, I think that of the social media sites I use, I like steemit best because participating here is clearly not a waste of time. None of the other sites has considered paying me a single cent and most have repeatedly asked me for money (ahem! Facebook! Linkedin!)