Yeah LEO is more than content. It embodies all that crypto/blockchain claims to be so it's great to see them making moves.
The favouritism is by design on Hive because dapplr should really be better received by the "establishment of Hive" but instead they shunned it. @ecency is the 'pet mobile app' of the hive group but the development of that only started moving when dapplr showed how easy it was too develop a good mobile experience.
I haven't tried it though because I have goggl services disabled on my phone and they only offer it through the appstore. It does look good though and they're well received by users that utilise it.
It shows what communities can do here and the powerful thing is that they offered it for free. Coincidentally, ecency then removed their beneficiary clause from using their app shortly after dapplr released free. Funny that.
Anyway I'm not against making money.
My one main gripe with things here is that people don't seem to realise that users need to find this attractive, welcoming and sustaining. For years this project of "social with rewards" has just not done that. For the million plus that have come through the door, only a tenth of that remained and then a tenth of that could say they're well rewarded.
So second layer sure better be amazing or who's even going to care!
Their excuse was the fact that Dapplr wasn't open source. I don't think it made any sense. That @netuoso was getting paid thousands upon thousands every month for absolutely nothing while DApplr wasn't getting any funding at all was very telling. Ecency is better than nothing but it is quite clunky and it has some usability issues. For instance, entering your posting key to it is a pain in the ass and if you accidentally log out, you have to insert the key again. Now that Hive Keychain supports presenting the keys in a QR code, all mobile apps should be able to upload the keys from Hive Keychain by reading the QR code. Compared to mainstream social media apps, Hive DApps have improved a lot but there still is a lot to do. I don't use Instagram but I have it installed on my phone. Someone with a room temperature IQ is able to use it.
You're absolutely right in that the whole idea of social media with rewards has not proven to work adequately well. While it is true that earning even $10 a month is much better than earning nothing, it is not enough for most people to leave comfort of the mainstream apps they spend time using. But if the user experience were as good as on mainstream apps, the potential to earn would definitely be a plus. But that's the thing with mass adoption: there cannot be enough money to go around for most people. This extremely simple thing was a really tough thing to understand for many. The monetary value of the average post on a mainstream platform is extremely small. Twitter is at the top of social media platforms in terms of being able to monetize their monthly active users. Their annual revenue per MAU is $9. While it is clearly higher per daily active user, most likely up to an order of magnitude higher, that $90 a year per daily active user would not be enough if the user experience on Twitter sucked or if the platform were as much of a hassle to use with all the key management and stuff as most Hive apps.
On social media, the reward distribution will inevitably be quite top heavy no matter what. What Hive as a tokenized platform has going for it is the very low threshold for starting to earn.
I wonder how many user even Splinterlands has been able to attract from outside the ecosystem. Probably not many. Have they started their Brave advertising campaign? The success of Leo is far from certain but the prospect of earning crypto while talking about it sounds like a no-brainer. Also, curators on Leo seem to understand their role. And what's different from other DApps is the emphasis on measuring and benchmarking all progress. This is actually surprising as that Tribe is around money and the leaders on that platform are business people. A tokenized Seeking Alpha with a heavy emphasis on crypto seems what they're aiming for.