You bring up a lot of good points in the Hackathon post you did. I was one of the technical mentors for the EOS Hackathons back in 2018. They were very exciting but like you said. Guys would do a rough concept and then got a somewhat large chunk of money for it but most of it wasn't further developed.
The LeoFinance guys are the real deal and I like how they have tried so many things and thought through so many theoretical concepts of how to drive demand to a token. It has been an interesting case study.
With the gaming and funding stuff it's tough. I have just seen it over time with EOS / Block One and also with STEEM / Hive a lot of people haven't gotten any love even when they put in a ton of work.
Ultimately the EOS situation was another great example. They raised 4 Billion in the ICO then still have 160,000 Bitcoins and let the community break there backs and did minimal amount of funding and just chilled with that fat stack of coins. It got so bad Brendan Bloomer set Twitter to where you couldn't respond on any of his stuff if he wasn't following you because everyone was saying he was a scammer.
With HIVE / Steem it was always tough to get funding. I put up a gaming proposal when the system first came out and got rejected. When Partiko didn't get funded after having that working app a lot of people were using it made me hesitant to go deep in it.
All that being said I have always talked about STEEM / Hive over the last 8 years and they have been interesting tests in a way. Look how unused the STEEM DAO is and the pricing and market cap has remained somewhat similar to HIVE's which is odd in some respects. Then over the years there have been so many attempts for other crypto social media to get rolling but none of them ended up comparing to these in a lot of ways. Maybe the initial funding and inertia was so great that it had that level of success.
One thing that has always blown my mind is that in the last 8 years freedom of speech has been in serious jeopardy but you don't get a ton of the type of content we see on the other platforms like on X.
With the incentive structure the way it is people gravitated more to producing what I call content mills where they just post nature stuff or pets over and over because they found that was more effective than saying anything that might rock the boat.
Once in awhile I will post some red pill dating type posts. It's not popular here which is odd when you think of the demographic of people on this chain.
I saw a report that said there are only around 4K active users on chain at this point which is crazy to think about in a world where so much stuff is getting censored on traditional centralized social media. People are more willing to spend all day on that stuff not making any money but in the same respect very few have been able to parlay any sort of STEEM / Hive fame or status into something else.
