Since I am holding Lunyr in my portfolio I wanted to take an initial look at the just released beta. Here are my experiences:
The Interface is nice and offers required features.
Since Lunyr is supposed to be a Wikipedia-Style encyclopaedia there there are nice features for reference management.
The Focus on good content is clearly visible, before writing your first article you need to agree to the guidelines. A Checklist for writing your content is also included.
Posting on Lunyr requires LUN tokens and ETH = Gas, you can not create any article without ETH and LUN balance you therefore need to transfer an initial amount of those to Lunyr.
This is surely assumed to reduce amount of spam but for an initial beta phase this will possibly reject many people that wish to participate.
Once your contribution is approved you will be awarded with 5 HNR (Honor) an 5 CBN (Contribution Points). Based on current LUN price this does not look like a good deal since there is not yet an upvoting or applause feature such as steemit or medium.
Before articles can be posted they need to be reviewed. This process has to be carried out be 5 other users. This approval will also cost ETH = Gas to perform.
The example I selected was $1.69 to do so for a short 3 line article explaining the abbreviation FOMO. I doubt that this would be approved by many users as cost for it would be very high.
For each review a reward of 3 HNR (Honor) an 3 CBN (Contribution Points) is awarded, at current price of LUN this equals to approx. 0.00291 LUN ≈ $0.10 so at this point of time you have to invest 17x more in ETH than you receive in LUN. To me it seems unlikely that people are actually reviewing content on this basis, unless I am missing the point here.
The value of HNR Points is currently unclear, assuming that it is comparable to CBN this would also not be too appealing from my perspective.
Both, the price of posting and peer approval have been implemented to assure content quality. It has to be proven that people are willing to continuously pay for their own contributions and contributions of others to be validated.
As of yet 86 articles have been posted, it is the early age of the concept and we will have to see how attractive it gets for the users to publish content.
While steemit is focussed on a blog style social network the structure of Lunyr might pay a price in regards of possible adoption.
Further details
Transfer cost for LUN from Binance is pretty high, 31 LUN with a minimum of 2 LUNs to be sent. Transfer time of tokens was some minutes which was fine from my perspective. Not lightning fast but Bitcoin takes longer as of today.
Since I store my ETH on a Ledger, I can not continue to publish my first article. Be sure that I will keep you updated.
I asked the company, they plan on integrating the ledger soon. Also they will change their gas fee structure. Soon they will begin to reimburse gas fees on a weekly basis.
This is in deed good news which will still limit the amount of spam floating into the platform. Reimbursing will assist people to get moving. I am really exited to join this from very early stages.