The Masses Won't Join Because Of The Rewards

@acidyo asked whether an onboarding campaign should be funded through Steem DAO. In the comments, a user suggested that many have quit because they're "getting zero for their hard work" and that the answer is not mass onboarding but rewarding users better.

That's a funny idea. It must be the one most self-serving comments I've seen apart from "investors are leaving and Steem is lost because I'm no longer allowed to get positive ROI by bid bot stacking etc.".

One thing that should be crystal clear to all of us is that the entire value proposition of Steem rests on the prospect of large-scale adoption, which is an absolute requirement for a healthy attention economy. I did some back of the envelope calculations last month that indicated that non-speculative price of STEEM given the current number of active users would be around $0.008 in the optimistic case Steem were as good at monetizing the attention of per monthly active user Twitter was. If Steem were as bad as Reddit at monetizing its monthly active users, the price might as well be zero because in that case running the top 20 witness servers would be strictly the province of volunteers willing to pay it out of their own pockets.

Besides, most content creators out there aren't even expecting to get rewarded! The entire concept is so alien to them as to be repulsive to a lot of to them! Why on Earth would that be? Because, in my experience, the whole idea of earning anything at all on social media without being some kind of a star and not having a massive audience makes most people suspicious. If you suggest to the average Facebook or Instagram user that a post of theirs with some quite decent photography, for instance, could be worth a couple of dollars, they become convinced that it must be some kind of a fraud.

Is the above bad news? No, it's fantastically good news! The average social media user is demonstrably more than willing to put in countless hours to create entertaining content for the consumption of their friends and acquaintances to receive worthless likes and claps and whatnot for their efforts! It is absolutely unnecessary to shower these people with the valuable base layer token of the blockchain!

SMTs are a brilliant idea as there is no need for them or any of the Tribe tokens to be financially worth anything at all to be coveted by the users. To call any of them worthless shit tokens is to be gravely mistaken. When new users are onboarded by specific apps and corralled into Communities or Tribes each having a dedicated front end forked from the existing ones or created from scratch, there is no need whatsoever for the possibility of earning STEEM to be rubbed onto their faces.

What is absolutely necessary is for the new Community or Tribe front ends to offer as frictionless and enjoyable a user experience as possible. That is the key. Nothing else matters. @midlet has written about this in the fantastic post entitled The UX Pyramid: The REAL reason Steem is stagnant.

Don't emphasize the money when trying to onboard the masses. That would be a serious mistake because mathematics dictate that doing so would be setting them up for a massive disappointment.