So, I think you and I come from the same starting perspective of 'not a fan' of advertising @tarazkp, to the point of avoiding as much of it as we can. In my mind, the ability for anyone to get their wares directly in front of an audience (ie, posts, comments and anything else) without the traditional methods of advertising (commercials, now banner ads/adicles/infoads) is the future.

Maybe it's a pipe dream. Maybe the ability for a dApp to exist without charging users while not having some other source of funding (ie, advertising) is impossible. Maybe not everyone and everything that could end up on the STEEM blockchain is going to be able to survive just on the reward pool (or whatever other potential financial model might exist here).

The issue for me is, I don't know if anyone has even tried to look at anything else. There's the STEEM reward pool and if that doesn't seem to be working, then it's straight to advertising, from what I can tell. It seems to me that just because Steemit Inc is having some pretty big issues, that all of sudden, everyone is in panic mode, and it's either run for the nearest exit, or it's forget any idealism, it's time for businesses to see our data (for advertising to be effective, in some way or another, businesses will need to be able to target us—be it personal data, or be it our personal preferences on the blockchain).

Does the current STEEM business model work, or doesn't it? If it doesn't, can some other models that are in keeping with STEEM's intent spring up in its place—ones that might work for individual dApps. If not, then it seems to me that we don't have much of a future for crytpocurrency, at least not the kind STEEM is. The utility kind. The ones you can actually do something on.