I really appreciate you sharing with us about China and your perspective.
Doesn't it make sense that people are more willing to tip for live entertainment, because it is an interactive process where the tipper gets to influence the content of the entertainment. The key point is the value produced is worth the value of thinking about making a tip, i.e. if a girls drops her panties or contributes to some other fantasy of the viewer, then the viewer may value that significantly.
Whereas, for written content rarely with the reader value the content more than a few pennies (fractions of a dollar). And this cognitive load is too high on the viewer, who is reading many blogs per hour. This is why microtipping does not work:
http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/17/changetip-must-die/
Steem solves this problem by making tipping appear to have no cost, because everyone shares in that cost. My recent blog was about who pays this cost on Steem.
But it appears to me that Steem has game theory vulnerabilities.
I agree with you there is great value in persisting the content, and no one can own, censor, or control our content and our list of followers. In my opinion, that is where the real value is, not in the tipping.
So I think the model of Steem will need to change to reflect rewarding the real value of Steem. I am actively working on this aspect.
Note that liquid STEEM could in the future be used to tip livestreaming. That is the sort of ecommerce feature that could be later added to the Steem ecosystem.
I don't think we can control what people are going to choose to do. Perhaps to some extent people were doing these sort of activities before the Internet and livestreaming, we just didn't see it prominently published. We are leaving the resource scarcity age and there will be more and more time and capital for people to explore other sides of human nature and social interaction. Nature is (bi-)fornicating.