Excellent read and your conclusion is precisely my view.
Smart Media Tokens and the attention trading have the greatest potential to establish a long-term positive trend for the price of HIVE
I had s similar conversation just recently. That rewarding the time spent as an active observer needs reward in order to retain a large userbase. Just rewards for CONTENT (and clicking an upvote button) is a limited system.
I believe that HIVE could implement that now. Without SMT. A simple example would be creating a chat app that rewards the mundane social interactions. Users who don't even interact with the platform can earn incentive rewards, and by that, the Blockchain benefits. Fractions of hive accumulated by simply choosing HIVE for your communications would be a good way to reward people from disadvantaged countries (provided the use of the rewards in real world is also implemented).
You can then build on that model using your examples. A user can then opt to receive ads. That grants them a little better ability for rewards and the brands advertising have actual ability for an ad to be viewed and lead to possible product sale. Rewarding purchasing through this system again, also something that could carry incentives.
All these proposals currently exist as little closed projects that, as you explain, see themselves as mass adoption solutions but really WON'T add the value the platform needs. Without SMTs also, the fundamental backbone is missing in order for these operations to be truly working for that common goal.
Personally I've got some clever ways on how this here (and Blockchain in general) could be coupled with other platforms which would be great benefit to this platform, the talent of content creators, and the future price. The system just isn't there yet though so I won't elaborate on them.
I see this system as a top down solution. Reward the top and convince yourself that you're going to attract masses... simply because you've become indoctrinated into the cultish belief that this is the best Blockchain and everyone in the world will want to be a blogger or a clicker.
Blogging is a solid foundation for a social network, but Hive can be lot more then just a "decentralized blogging platform".
Some people are good at writing long and meaningful posts, but there are many other forms of social interactions, which can also provide deep value, especially, when the knowledge is accumulated over a number of posts made by different people.
For example, a quality in-depth review of a restaurant has value as a separate post. But at the same time, a stream of social posts with photos of the dishes from that restaurant, posted by different people, tags, ratings can offer even greater value.
Waivio makes it easy to create data structures on Hive blockchain. You can create a new restaurant, new business, new product, dish, list, page and more. This new item will have a permanent link on Hive, but the data fields (title, address, hours, social links, avatar, photo gallery, etc.) can be added to that item by other members of the community.
Now, every time you include this item link into your Hive posts, it will be automatically associated with this item. For example, you add a link to a restaurant and to a dish. Now your review will be featured as part of a news stream on both objects.
Another important factor is that all that data is available on the open public blockchain and you can use it to build social sites, apps and services.
For example, a company that sells a product, can put description of that product directly on Hive blockchain and all their resellers can simply index it from the chain.
And when the manufacturer updates that information, it will be immediately updated on all the sites.
When someone would like to build a social site about hiking and integrate related products, they could just select them on the chain and have them listed on their fully social and interactive website in minutes.
Man that's again my view. Collaboration of the network to realize value of the collective, whilst granting elemental value and reward also.
I'm very supportive of the ideas you're expressing. You are the very people needed here to evolve this thing.
That's an idea I hold too that for example on a platform like Instagram, there could be actual reward for each post when it's linked to a business that generates sales and has a cultural connection to the collective.
Similar to your restaurant example, I see for instance, a person wearing a branded outfit as DOING MARKETING in those images they upload wearing brand X. Since they've also (likely) purchased that item, the company has received reward already, so then a return for the marketing done by the wearer is a system which benefits both parties.
As is, people pay for brands AND advertise for free by wearing those brands. Only corporate wins. These systems are what will change when we as that free workforce realize how broken that system is.
To just claim "this is decentralised so bring your content" is nothing. There needs to be new systems excecuted that give the outside a look of something that makes better sense. The flow on effect is what then generates that real world use that Blockchain and reward systems will eventually become.
Years yet imo.