From the start, I understood that Steemit was not expected to be, or even designed to be, the value generator for the Steem blockchain. Promising to pay people a little bit did produce enough transactions to demonstrate the speed and reliability of the Steem blockchain, as the developers intended.
I did like that posting on Steemit allowed me to accumulate SP, as a way to be part of whatever would emerge as 'the thing with value'. I looked forward to watching, and being part of, the evolution of an interesting ecosystem. I really want to see a project that works. You said:
It's also possible that one of the SMT projects will actually be put forward by people who understand gamification, social network design, social media, and UI engineering.
I want to see what something like that is. I don't have an understanding of what that would look like - that's not in my background or experience at all. So I will keep an eye open, for sure.
I'm not too proud to say that I might enjoy earning a little money, but I think it might be a little disingenuous to say that Steemit was not expected to be or designed to be the value generator for the steem blockchain. The white paper is pretty clear, the blue paper at be clear – all of it indicates that the creators knew that Steemit had to be a solid proof of concept and ultimately probably the heavy lifter for value and delivering value. Hand in hand is the obvious understanding and expectation that offering to pay people is one of the best ways to get people to show up.
The thing is that SP is, in and of itself, not actually being a part of "the thing with value." It's proof of stake so that you can get more stake, and that's the only purpose it has. In exchange for that stake, the steem blockchain effectively locks up crypto-commodity that you've earned/bought for 13 weeks as trade-off for that leverage.
It's a terrible deal for anyone that wants to earn a living via the sort of mechanism because it puts you in the terrible bind of first doing the work of being successful and then having to choose between being a "bigger part of the community" in a mechanical sense or taking that success in currency out of the network to do silly things like buying food and paying to sleep indoors.
It's great for investors. It's even reasonably good for media consumers. It's a rough row to hoe for media creators who have a broad appeal and a near impossible one for media creators who work in a niche.
Ultimately, I really want to see a project that works – mainly because I like to see things that work.
I do know (in a rough sort of way) what sort of architecture it would take to have a successful social media platform. The core of that experience, however, focuses on the individual and providing them a good feedback loop, delivering them media that they want to experience or access to an audience that wants the media that they create. It would have to manifestly avoid the belief that consensus determines value as opposed to simply reward.
That flies directly in the face of the philosophy that the steem blockchain is based on, so you can see where if there might be some problems if one wanted to expect such a thing to come to be.
Until then, however, we'll just have to see how things go.