RE: Steemit @ned Talking About Smart Media Tokens in San Francisco
I'm guessing those oracles could be a lot, lot juicier than a reputation system at the moment. I think I obsess on the latter a bit because the NYT comment system keeps being used as an example. Maybe he has in his head how it works but really as a pure comment system I don't see how the economics of it work. You provide a comment system which saves people the effort of building one - but they could get it from Disqus with an existing user base. Sure the commenters can earn NYT coins but who provides the money to give those value - if it is "investors" not users then what causes their value to increase? Are commenters going to sink money into NYT to bump up the reward their upvotes give? Or bump up with comments to the top? That seems unlikely and a bit antithetical to a good commenting community.
Buying a media token if you are a publisher on a site seem much more likely to me but only NYT is a publisher on their site. Unless of course Ned thinks that advertisers should publish their ads and have the platform count clickthroughs or impressions by users as upvotes. Sure you could do that but it seems far from what he has talked about so far - maybe because morphing Steem into an ad-network powering token might be rather unpopular with it's current base community. Let a few SMT users build that with the tokens and morph the platform that way and you can say "oopsie, didn't see that coming ;-)"
The way I think it should work on NYT is that they commit to using a share of revenue from ads to buy tokens. A successful commenting system means more eyeballs on content which means more ad revenue which means more tokens bought which drives up NYT token price which means more people want to be commenting etc. etc. That would however require NYT to provide an unpresidented degree of transparency about ad-revenue.
Or maybe they should partner with Basic Attention Token and Brave browser folks and build a system that automatically funnels some of the BAT earnings from ads to buy NYT tokens.
Oh yeah, and reputation... to keep the trolls out. But I digressed :-)
If I'm not mistaken (some of this is over my head), he did speak to the idea that advertisers could influence posts by purchasing tokens. Did I understand that correctly?
Yes he did and that already works for Steemit as "promoted" posts (or even comments). However it is really not clear how that would apply in the NYT example - or anyone trying to use a pure comment system. Unless advertisers are going to be inserting comments with ad images in them so they appear below a relevant article mixed in with regular comments. But I think as a commenter I would find that annoying and people would be downvoting ads all the time, and an advertiser I'd probably not find that a compelling system to use.
But I suppose someone could use SMT only as an ad content system, not for comments (or independently of comments on the site which would use a different token). So advertisers would buy the NYTAD token and then create adverts which would be placed on pages and then they use NYTAD tokens to promote their ads above their competitors. In that system I don't think there would be voting or author rewards - it doesn't really make sense to me, no one would vote on ads anyway and the economic system of ad/publisher reward makes no sense which leads me to think it isn't a good use of SMT as is. My idea of using BAT makes more sense to me but is more complicated.