Demand creates value and this value is a subjective thing. That doesn't mean there are objective elements at play when it comes to valuation. For an example, utility can create a lot of value. Scarcity can create a lot of value. Generating income can create a lot of value. Manna (MANNA) has been distributing its token for free as a UBI method and they are valued less than $400,000 when it comes to makretcap. There is no user adoption/merchants and it doesn't solve any unique problem that other project have already solved. If @dlike needs its tokens to have value, it should create demand and there are many ways to do this.

First of all I have to say that I really like @dlike and I use it everyday and have a small stake I have acquired through posting and delegation. In fact few days after I made my post on Blood on the street delegation oppertnity, @dlike delegations more than doubled.

Bots & Promotion

I have said this time and time again that the voting bots solve a real problem that the in-built "promotion" feature doesn't. If you are starting out small and become popular,it's mostly due to chance and coincidence. I've seen many great articles go completely unnoticed and sometimes I see an unnoticed author occasionally get an upvote from a curation trail. There are many quality content producers that I would have missed if it wasn't for paid promotion.

Dlike is Basically Link Sharing

Sure you can post original content and I have posted photos for competitions. But I'd rather use Busy for that job. In my eyes @dlike is a massive decentralized curation effort. People use the site mainly to share links or read content. Adding YouTube videos doesn't work well and after being inactive for a little time I get automatically logged out and these things are annoying. But Alexa ranks are improving especially in Slovenia and Venezuela.

Pulling Off A Brave

There are many ways to implement promotions on dlike.io Simple slots to bid for easy basically an industry practice. But nothing you throw at viewers face will ever be as effective as viewers actively seeking advertisements. But this might seem ridiculous at first thought because nobody like ads.

The Power of Incentives - What If You Pay Them

Brave Browser still has not implemented their view ads and get paid feature. From what I remember they plan to take a 5% cut and redistribute rest of the revenue among advertisers and viewers. Nobody should underestimate the power of these little incentives. 2 months ago when @steemhunt switched for Hunt score based default rankings instead of going for random rankings, I wrote this article discussing its effects. Then came the Shuffle Button Lottery that paid users to shuffle the rankings allowing @steemhunt to have its cake and eat it too.

@steem-bounty is Already Doing A Great Job

There are many who get large amount of exposure by putting a small bounty. You can learn more details about the project here. @dlike can implement a similar system and with account based reward claiming, the fake clicks that plague the advertising industry can be avoided (although there will be some alt account farms here and there)

Bonus: Staking

I don't think too much attention/weight should be given to stake based systems as STEEM is already stake based. But creating the incentive to hold some tokens will create more demand and reduce the selling pressure. Link sharing doesn't take as much effort as producing longer and detailed original content. So limiting the max payout to a small amount and even using a maximum post limit per day is a good idea. We can increase these limits based on the token balance of each wallet (In a leveling system) IMHO these leveling increases should stop at an affordable level and considering there could be well over 100 million users in few years 1000 Dlike tokens seem like a very fair amount.

Feel Free To Discuss

Getting rid of oil or plastic and going back to being farmers or some hippies won't advance civilization. we simply need o find better and more sustainable solutions. Taking ideas form Brave and @steem-bounty and implimenting them on Dlike to promote posts seem like a great option and will bring a lot of traffic to the platform. Even if it is just few cents worth tokens, it at least something to gain. This could even decentralize the power from large voting bots and even make the more competitive.

Happy Steeming!