Pretty soon iPhones will be given away for free because users data is more valuable than the hardware. Only about 50% of the world's population is currently online but this is changing rapidly. Traditionally, companies have offered free services in exchange for user data but this has consolidated the power of information into the hands of a few centralized organizations who profit massively while the users who provided all the value receive very little in return. For example, WhatsApp was purchased by Facebook for $19 billion not because of some great technology or their 32 engineers but for their 500 million users data; the users received nothing in return. Blockchain technologies are changing this so that everyone has an opportunity to be rewarded for the value they add to a platform.
seriously, look at Steemit. £700 for a girl stood in front of a mirror in her underwear trying on clothes for 1.5 minutes or $35 for this fellas article which is carefully thought out and written and a great piece of content (regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees) ....where is the reward for adding value ? Its reward for the populism.
I don't disagree with you at all in regards to Steemit posts. My statement is probably better aligned with a project like BAT rewarding users for their attention.
The "problem" with Steemit is that they are committed to distributing a fixed amount of tokens to users regardless of the quality of the work. It's a finite resource that everyone in the ecosystem is competing over. Natural selection doesn't select traits because they are "high-quality"; they are selected only for survival. Unfortunately, survival in Steemit's ecosystem means spamming into oblivion and joining the populism.
Steemit's SMT, by contrast, functions more like a subreddit, or niche with specific rules for survival that the community enforces through the exchange of that community's token (similar to Reddit's moderators). "Girlsinfrontofmirrors" would have no incentive to post in "thoughtfulfellas" because that community would not reward such behavior and vice versa. This enables members of the SMT community to thrive without having to compete with the entire ecosystem. The most popular posts in the niche might then go back into Steemit broader ecosystem reflecting something like Reddit's "Rising" or "Hot" page.