antonopoulos mentioned a concept where every 'like' would cost something, much like in a real market, and platforms wouldn't have to sell user data. one 'like' could be as cheap as a single satoshi or less.
in reality nobody would pay to give someone a 'like' even if it's as cheap as 0.0001 usd. but it's a basis for many other creative ideas. a bunch of companies are already coming up with their own implementations. steemit has proven to be the most successful one so far. but nothing is guaranteed.
facebook has been notorious for crushing (or buying) potential competitors. a million users is probably not even in their radar but if they do decide to crush steemit, nothing's stopping them. they can do exactly the same or come up with their own version of a rewards pool.
SMTs would enable other big communities to fuse with steemit. and steem would be the basis for all tokens to flourish. any website/individual/company that has a big user base can create an SMT and immediately start monetizing. their users can monetize too. steem needs this in order to scale quickly before competition catches up.
if it works well, there will be 'too many tokens'. thousands and thousands! technically anybody can create one. but only a select few will have enough influence to create a token that has any value.
tokens will compete each other to see who can create the biggest rewards pool. that's a good thing because steem prices will go up. the whitepaper says steempower and other SMTs can have 'shared influence'. steem will also be a 'bandwidth usage measuring stick'. which is why i keep stressing who's thinking about implementing an SMT? who's got both influence and incentive to make one. (fb? my wishful thinking)
social network has absolutely no right to say what's good or bad. i don't think morality is even an issue. it's simply what survives the market and nothing more. again, it's why i'm not a big fan of GPT and users being whitelisted by steemit inc.
i have no idea what steem points are. i would leave them alone 😃
Wow!! Awesome answer. I just got stormed by the grammar Nazi because of stress to but my post up while my kids were jumping on me. Oh well.
I really like your comment. I don't have time to do all the research... so I'm glad to have a friend like you. Just reading your comments I learn a lot.
i didn't know about grammar nazi until now. it's actually quite funny.
just know that i'm guessing a lot so you should do some googling yourself when you have time!