Good point. Those are some expensive mugs!!
For how much users should pay - it's quite interesting. The money that steemit pays its users is entirely democratic. It issues roughly the same amount of currency daily, and distributes this to writers based on up-votes.
Funny enough, the more advertising dollars enter the ecosystem, and the more the world values the STEEM cryptocurrency, the more valuable the payments will be.
Watch out for even higher payments in the future, when Smart Media Tokens increase the demand for STEEM. Another way of looking at it is, if facebook distributed its massive profits to to users who got the most likes... how much would they be earning daily for 'silly' posts? Hundreds? Thousands? More?
Their posts are what is making facebook to be a profitable company.
Sitting on money or give it back to outside shareholders sort of feels like it won't be as effective as if you would share the money back instantly to the users that helps the platform grow and actually increase the quality of the service. If Facebook instead of sitting on billions with scarcity mentality if they would just share that with it's best content creators they would create more abundance and happiness. Money is best invested the fastest when you share it with other people that will now work even harder and faster at producing new value.
The old system is mainly breaking apart since these new are so much faster and more effective. Clearly more speed in value transfers is exactly what people want. We get real time feedback and can track how we are doing so much faster. No need to wait several months or years to see how our investments are doing. It's right there in front of our faces instead.
This non sharing of value that we see on the other platforms makes people starting to turn more selfish and it becomes more how you can trick others or how to bait them into doing a certain action. Which eventually destroys the integrity of a platform and it starts to rot and break apart from the inside. Eventually there is just an empty shell left. And people have no real incentive for creating real value. Everything becomes half baked.
I'm missing something though when comparing to Facebook (And I totally agree about the rewards that should mainly go to the users providing the content, I'm not defending Facebook :). I just need more understanding):
There is the content part, which is now rewarded by upvoting (and will get bigger with SMT).
On the other hand, there's 'our' behaviour: we like posts, we have friends, we go to events, we post about topics (, we visit other sites outside the eco-system, we buy products outside, the eco-system, ...). That information is very important to advertisers. And easy to sell in a centralised system. How do you extract this information on a platform like steem?
Who gathers and exploits this?
We want to exclude a mediator, so this would mean this behaviour (or at least the behaviour we want to be open about) should go straight to advertisers? And rewards should come back from them straight to the individuals?
I don't see that yet :). Technically but also on a more functional level.
Any ideas?