Although the issues are important and I have raised them too, I don't see the economic viability of Synereo. I wrote on Bitcointalk.org recently:
Please check my logic.
Synereo has a chicken-or-egg dilemma. They need massive adoption to drive demand for the AMP token by advertisers, yet what is their plan to onboard adoption? The masses don't care enough about ideological decentralization to adopt some quirky new social network.
Steemit showed how to onboard some usership, but it also appears to be limited by the fact that blogging isn't that popular and isn't something very many people can do well. Also there is no way to distribute the rewards such that all users would be incentivized to join for financial gains, even a uniform distribution would be a paltry amount per user. (also add that it is stuck in a circle-jerk where we can't maximally earn unless we cowtail to the preferred memes there)
Also both were allegedly "pre"-mined ~90%. Steemit claims it will distribute about 40% of that to signups, but signups appear to be mostly Sybil attacks, not real users. And no where near the millions of signups needed to distribute that 40%.
Regarding the plan for advertisers to buy Synereo's AMP token, I wrote:
Advertising revenue is not sufficient to pay the users. We've documented this so many times, it is really ridiculous that I've had to repeat this dozens of times. I was the first person to point this out several months ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-are-you-worth-to-facebook
You could pay a few curators or authors from ad revenue, if the other users don't expect to get paid. But then what is your onboarding paradigm to bring in the masses?
I am waiting to see how Synereo actually works. For me at least, the process calculus mumbo-jumbo technobabble is an enigma at this point. But I don't understand in any case how they expect to be able economically justify this with an advertising revenue model. Perhaps they feel they can much better target ad spending relevance, and thus achieve much higher revenue per user?
Btw, I have also written the following about Steemit recently:
I highly doubt it. Paying blogging by diluting investors (or later by capturing transaction fees for some widespread commerce) doesn't make any sense. The entire point was to onboard the users to enable a widespread commerce ecosystem. It was never about paying for blogging long-term.
Why does Facebook need a blockchain for this? To be able to pay authors by taking the money from investors? What is the investment incentive? Again I don't think any large market has been demontrated, nor any sustainable funding model.