Thanks for the lengthy explanation. I have a few additional thoughts about your reply:
So if you get 10,000 views, that's $100, which is not too shabby...
I don't think even the top bloggers on here get 10,000 views, although the numbers do sound nice. Unlike YouTube, we only get 7 days to attract the viewers. Most posts are almost dead after the 2nd day. With more people blogging, having your post seen gets even more difficult. I don't know what makes you think that things will swing to having most people being consumers of content because what I'm seeing is just the opposite... everyone is so busy trying to write articles to get votes that they have no time for reading.
Don't get me wrong... I'm not arguing one way or the other; I'm just stating my observations and thoughts about what I'm noticing. Everything is subject to change and I hope it does change for the betterment of the platform. On-boarding more people is crucial, but the current situation is not suitable for growth. Things need to be done in order to keep the economy growing. Under the current conditions, on-boarding more people simply dilutes the reward pool so that nobody makes any money worth spending your time for; and like it or not, the current situation is that Steem is just another speculative coin. This is starting to change. However, in order to really make a difference and set Steem apart from other coins, there needs to be a market for tangible products. After all; once the Steem has been distributed, who is going to be selling Steem to the newcomers? How can one buy it if everyone only has a fraction of a Steem? What can I buy for 10 cents worth of Steem? I know... your going to say that the 0.10 Steem will then be worth maybe $100 to $1,000 USD. I wish! And maybe it will be. But I'm pretty sure things will have changed by then.
My guess is that if people knew that they could earn at maximum a vote of 1 cent, they wouldn't stick around very long. It is those curation trails with the big pay-outs that hit you every now and then that keep people excited.
I expect Youtube to eventually have their own SMT, it makes sense to have one off Steem that does everything they want rather than spend time and money building their own. Eventually, people will stop going ICO crazy, probably already happened. At this point, I think most of the blockchains that will exist do exist.
Bold thing for me to say... Why am I confident about that? I'm not saying there won't be any new really awesome blockchains, but I doubt many will come up, and I doubt they will be from huge corporations like Google. The reason is that blockchains have to be a public software, and its just much more logical for these companies to go the ERC20 route. But for social medias, SMT will be ideal and will interact with other sites, providing liquidity.
Tokens meet the needs of most corporations for their gift card type of monies and built-in ecosystems but with none of the hassle of needing to be a cryptographic fortress, that's the blockchain's responsibility. Sweet deal.
Okay, now to respond to your comment about most people being writers, artists and such. Yeah, for now that is true. What I'm thinking here is that the future apps will drive the consumer market. Right now, our community is actually quite small and we do need to bring in a larger audience for it to meet everyone's meritocracy hopes of rewarding people for effort.
Long term, I don't think STEEM will be thought of by anyone as a currency. But Hobo, its called crypto-"currency" man! Yeah, I know, but each crypto coin seems to be used in different ways. Delegation and the inflation-based reward system are the killer applications for Steem but due to that, plus the creation of resource credits, the script has been flipped. Like Ethereum's ether, Steem is more like a fuel. It powers your account to be able to do stuff by utilizing resource credits, and it empowers you to contribute on the network with upvotes that have value and social importance/authority.
As STEEM becomes harder to come by SBD will become more available on the network and people will not be able to earn much STEEM but will get larger amounts of SBD for upvotes. Therefor, the SBD is the cryptocurrency that will likely be used and the STEEM will be utilized. People will buy STEEM for influence or the ability to do cool stuff related to the steem platform.
Ultimately, I think it is very important not to think of Steem as being connected to a social media platform. Steem is meant for being on everyone's personal blog, podcast and the like. Its less of a social network and more of a tool for all social media networks. I expect steemconnect to gradually become hugely popular, the one primarily trusted sign-in. Imagine how revolutionary this is, no more signing up for sites, your Steem account opens all doors and makes you an instant member to any site that coordinates with Steem.
That's an interesting view of the future.
Do you know about Steem Keychain? I prefer that over Steemconnect. It sits in your browser as an extension and removes the need to copy-paste that long key all the time. Log in once and Keychain stores your key in your browser for future use! I love it.
I know of it, I haven't given it a deep enough look yet though.