You're exactly right TM. I mentioned a while ago that I expect Facebook, Amazon and Google to launch their own tokens/cryptocurrencies... but these would be heavily centralised, and I'm absolutely sure they'd all be pre-mined to ensure no one profits more than those companies. For those reasons they'll never really be mass adopted... in fact, they'll likely annoy everyone if the new tokens are a barrier to entry to purchases (which I doubt). What I expect is that we'll all get paid in Facebucks to watch ads on Facebook.
I'll pass on that, thanks Mark.
They can give customers a direct benefit simply by accepting the created currency. Advertisers are paying tokens for advertisements being visible, users earn coins as a percentage by generating clicks and use Dollars for buying the products. Out of these profits the advertisers are buying coins on a free market. It is possible to create the perfect illusion of a truly independent and distributed system in this way. If something is going in the wrong direction, simpy stop accepting the coin and invent the next one. No risk at all.
Yeah...the currencies of those sites might have short-term utility and excite people. However, over time, as people start to learn about decentralization, they will quickly see how living under the control of those sites is not in their best interest.
I honestly don't know if people object to commercials as much as I do.... but Facebook will always have ads, Google will always have ads and Steem never will. On that single point alone we can be confident we've hitched our horse to the right wagon.