RE: My community proposals for the Steemit Development Incentive Program
Once upon a time, Steem posts had a view counter at the bottom of each post. This was eventually removed - I suspect because the numbers were generally low.
I suspect that was the main reason, but also combined with that is that it's probably tricky to figure out what counts as a legit view, and with the Steem blockchain in theory there could be multiple frontends so no individual frontend can have an authoritative sense of how viewed the underlying info is.
Activate SMTs
If there was ever a time for SMTs that time has passed, IMO. There was a time in the crypto world when launching your own token was the big thing, I'm not an expert but I don't feel like that's the zeitgeist anymore. Even if it was, I think people would want to build on top of more established chains.
Maybe what they could do would be to use a relative scale of some sort in order to report views as a proportion of the overall views on the site, i.e. quartiles or quintiles or something like that. Then different sites could reasonably report different numbers, no matter how many dapps there are. That gets rid of the concern over low view counts, too.
That's an interesting idea, it seems like it solves several problems.
On one hand, I agree, but on the other hand - the work has already been done, and we've seen some evidence that communities can benefit from layer 2 tokens. It's almost certainly not a killer app like we once hoped, but I still think it would lead to some improvement for community participants.
I have no way to know for sure, but my guess is that (like a lot of software projects) it's less done than the developers thought at the time. I suspect it would probably need a lot more testing to be released, at a minimum.