Good points. What do we have left? The profit motive? Facebook made about $4.3 billion last year. They have two billion users. The masses won't put up with any of the inconvenience of having to deal with all the keys and stuff in exchange for $2 per year no matter how poor they are. So, the profit motive is out. Freedom from censorship? That only interests the political fringe or assorted weirdos. Forget about it.

My conclusion is that no Steem app that tries to be the next Facebook or the next Reddit is going to be very successful if the target audience is people not into crypto. Fortunately, Millenials seem to be a lot more into crypto than older people.

Will that mean that no Steem apps are ever going to break into the mainstream? I don't think so because there are areas where ownership of content is crucial. One such huge area is gaming. SteemMonsters uses custom JSON to store objects on the blockchain. Steem works well for storing digital assets. When money is involved, I think many users prefer retaining ownership of their digital assets. For storing digital collectibles or data where proof of authorship or authenticity is needed, Steem can work well. E-commerce is another area where apps can be Steem can be successful. The reward pool(s) are/(will be) built in tools for rewarding users for activities. When buying and selling are involved, a lot of people get greedy and may go to great lengths after all manner of bonuses. ¨

Finally, we shouldn't forget visitors who are users without accounts. Those people are an important part of the traffic. That's where quality content may come in.Oracles could be used in conjunction with SMTs to tailor rewarding systems to maximize quality. Once we have SMTs implemented, that is.