Steem vs Synereo, which one will lead the decentralized social media revolution?

[iamnotback]

It is a zero sum game. You have to extract money from some users and hand it to others. Are readers of fluffypony's post really getting $832 of value from reading that  

Probably not. There is an early adopter dynamic where the reward pools is set as a percentage of capitalization, capitalization is being driven by expectations (right or wrong) of a future user base, but rewards are divided among the current user base. One the actual use base is more in line with the expected user base, rewards per post should be much smaller.

The could be self-fulfilling though, as users continue to be attracted by the large rewards and it becomes a form of promotion. Rewards will probably continue to increase dramatically over the next few days, since they are calculated based on a trailing average price.

Also, the customers here aren't really the readers. It is those who want influence. Being a passive reader you may benefit from a positive externality if you happen to like what is being produced and given exposure on the site, but you will have no say over what you get to read.

A pyramid is still a zero sum game, it is just the losses will fall on the greater fools who come in last. (because the very high payouts create an overvaluation, because when payouts fall then so will usership because Steemit only offered a privileged class of content curation and not actual degrees-of-freedom or anything innovative in terms of the network effects and economics of scaling usership)

Perhaps you didn't read what I added to my prior post:

The very high payouts on Steemit right now are an illusion. First you can't cash out, except over a long period of time, creating a pyramid scheme. Second, the payout levels will decrease as more content is produced. Instead of allowing people to click "Like" and pretend they aren't paying for it (where those with higher standing get to spend more of other people's money), just deduct the money from the users' balance! But then of course you couldn't hide the pyramid scheme from the users.

Those who want influence over a permissioned system that can't scale are utter fools, unless they are just gaming it to extract the maximum income out of it before it implodes.

Steemit can't control what I read. The entropy of the Internet is unbounded. They can't put a wall around the Internet with their closed model social networking. Unlocking great value on the Internet is about enabling each user to control his/her filter for content, i.e. decentralization, and not enabling some privileged class to decide my content filter for me.

All the economic incentives of Steemit are misaligned. I suggest reading this:

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/contracts-oracles-sidechains/#in-our-society

[iamnotback]

A pyramid is still a zero sum game, it is just the losses will fall on the greater fools who come in last.

You are right, Facebook is a pyramid, Reddit is too, and so are all businesses that are run from the top down (power structure/decision making).

Incorrect. The usership of Reddit is not predicated on being paid. It is predicted on that anyone can start a new subforum and discuss. It is all about usership and not about any financial pyramid.

You are conflating the top-down ownership of the site, with the bottom-up usership model. Tsk. Tsk. You are a marketing neophyte when you make egregious errors like that.

The stock price of Facebook might (?) be a bubble, but that is orthogonal to the usership model. It is true that Facebook is top-down trying to siphon their users in certain directions and trying to maximize their income from the users, but Facebook is limited by what is popular. If Facebook doesn't align with what users want, they lose more users to other social networks. To maximize income, Facebook has to employ gamification.

What actual innovation does Steemit offer that increases what users can do and benefit? Nothing. It is a reasonably slick imitation of Reddit, but we already have Reddit.

Dumb speculators are good at driving a bubble like Ethereum. I have to presume that most of them lose money each time, because it is a zero sum game. The last fools in, are the losers every time. So they may be able to drive a bubble and it will appear that Steemit has unlocked some model for scaling up a social network, but unless they add some unique features that drive usership other than the financial pyramid, then it will implode on itself. We went through this with Ethereum and everybody said we were wrong and it was different this time.  

How much extra money are our miners making, and what can we use it for instead of nothing (bitcoin model).  How cheap will your miners work, before their turn their rigs toward Ethereum?

DPOS is not secure and I am preparing to start a detailed thread about proof-of-stake. Just like when we said Ethereum was not secure, everyone told us to try to break it. We must wait until something is worth enough to break, then it is broken.

The extreme waste of resources in Satoshi's design disappears when all mining is financed only by transaction fees. It is all about scaling up transaction rate.

I will also explain why it is impossible to have 0 transaction fees and not break the Nash equilibrium that makes a block chain trustless (i.e. trustworthy because we don't need to trust anyone).

P.S. JAMBOX was a red herring that AnonyMint threw out there to get Steemit and Synereo to waste their time down wrong directions. Do you really think I will put my best ideas out in public before they are launched. I will continue to throw curve balls to get other projects to chase the wrong objectives, because the altcoin arena is cut throat competitive. There is no such thing as respect for intellectual property and thus altcoins are a chaotic bazaar of money-grabs and very little actual investment in technological advancement by the top engineers in the software industry. It is very, very difficult to achieve a significant innovation and also get paid for it. It is much easier to create some pyramid scheme.

[iamnotback]

The owners can shut down Reddit anytime they want, just like Ethereum, STEEM, or any other centralized organization can always choose to self-implode, or change strategic direction.  

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3czzvh/eli5_who_controls_reddit_besides_you/

"It's a private company. The company has a management team who are given a lot of ability to decide how they want to run it, but ultimately have to comply with the wishes of the investors (owners)."

And your retort to my points is what?

In theory (given the maturity on the exchanges), the major stakeholders of DPOS can also collude to muck with Steemit and short the tokens and cash out while destroying it.

One would think the shareholders of Facebook would have something to say about Facebook's directors tanking the company and shorting the stock (insider trading).

[iamnotback]

power structure:

The many users have less power than the few owners.

Pyramid

Sound familiar?

You are conflating orthogonal issues.

The scaling of the usership in Reddit is not a financial pyramid. Thus Reddit's usership isn't likely to implode when the pyramid does.

Reddit and Steemit (DPOS) will be controlled by major stake holders, but that is orthogonal to the usership adoption model.

You are bit slow minded. I already told you this.

[Netnox]

synereo, the name is a fail, nobody know what it means and its hard for many to pronounce. steem is a better name but still bad, reminds me of steam gaming platform. none of the two will succeed. after the huge getgems scam i wont invest in any israeli crypto project trying to get into us, eu, asian markets.

[SmirkinPepe]

Can someone tell me how money flows into the system for paying content providers in the long run?
Is it just speculators?
Please dont link to the white paper, I want the TL;DR.

[iamnotback]

...no real income yet, but they could sell ads...

And never be as good at it as Facebook, if they intend to remain "decentralized" (well the whales control DPOS any way). You still haven't explained why users will want to use it. I already explained the financial pyramid is not sustainable.

In my links, I had the calculations which show that ad revenue won't be enough to pay users to incentivize them.

STEEM is the first crypto to tap into the vanity of the human...

Why do we need crypto for that? We already have an overdose of social networking sites for vanity.

[smooth]

Perhaps you didn't read what I added to my prior post:

The very high payouts on Steemit right now are an illusion. First you can't cash out, except over a long period of time, creating a pyramid scheme. Second, the payout levels will decrease as more content is produced. Instead of allowing people to click "Like" and pretend they aren't paying for it (where those with higher standing get to spend more of other people's money), just deduct the money from the users' balance! But then of course you couldn't hide the pyramid scheme from the users.

It didn't see it, but it is inaccurate. Half the reward value can be cashed out immediately, and many authors have done so.

I'm not disagreeing about the longer term economic sustainability, btw. I don't really see it myself, but I'm willing to allow that things don't always play out the way they appear at first.

[iamnotback]

Perhaps you didn't read what I added to my prior post:

The very high payouts on Steemit right now are an illusion. First you can't cash out, except over a long period of time, creating a pyramid scheme. Second, the payout levels will decrease as more content is produced. Instead of allowing people to click "Like" and pretend they aren't paying for it (where those with higher standing get to spend more of other people's money), just deduct the money from the users' balance! But then of course you couldn't hide the pyramid scheme from the users.

It didn't see it, but it is inaccurate. Half the reward value can be cashed out immediately, and many authors have done so.

I know that because I read the white paper (a month or so ago). I didn't state anything inaccurate. I stated you can't cash out except over a long period of time. Cash out doesn't mean get only 50% of your money.

Also without sufficient liquidity, it may not be possible to cash out that 50% for those who have very high payouts, but I haven't been following whether the liquidity increased significantly since launch or not. In any case, it depends on greater fools coming in in order to provide liquidity for the early adopters to cash out and fuck over the new fools as is always the case with these pump and dumps.

I'm not disagreeing about the longer term economic sustainability, btw. I don't really see it myself, but I'm willing to allow that things don't always play out the way they appear at first.

Oh yeah it is I guess possible they would go create a really great social network with features that beat all the experts in Silicon valley who have created every variant of social network under the sun already.  

But the problem is that even if they did that, it wouldn't have bearing whatsoever on the utility of the financial pyramid they created, unless they would argue that was necessary form of promotion to drive initial adoption of their world-class social networking insights. Who on their team has any experience whatsoever in creating a million user s/w product or doing anything relevant in the silicon valley?

Look they have some decent coders who copied Reddit (if healthy I can code that rudimentary Reddit clone in 3-4 months myself also, not including the block chain integration). But copying existing social networks isn't bringing home the bacon. It is the innovations that are rare. The superstars create them. We have enough experience already with the Larimers to know they are aerospace engineers and not s/w superstars. Good coders are reasonably rare (50,000 of them in the world?) and I credit them on apparently being good coders and getting s/w work done (when all that others such as myself have done is foruming). Good coders who are superstars and create million user s/w products are much rarer (which I've done twice already in my life, but not in the past 1.5 decades).

I been thinking that we have so little follow through in terms of adoption of altcoins and actual user interfaces that we can point to as been used and showing up on Google searches, the I can definitely understand the excitement about Steemit. It is a breath of fresh air, except when realizing that DPoS is not a trustless (scalable trustworthy) consensus algorithm (and otherwise they can't scale transaction rate with Satoshi's PoW) and the financial pyramid nature of their integration of a token with social reputation (so far via Likes) payouts.

The fundamentals are NOT there for them to grow this into something greater. They'd have to scrap DPoS, which they aren't prepared to do. If it reaches a large enough valuation, then the incentives to game DPoS should kick in, which looks like it would end up being a power vacuum battle over influence of the ecosystem and profit opportunities with that ecosystem.

[smooth]

Perhaps you didn't read what I added to my prior post:

The very high payouts on Steemit right now are an illusion. First you can't cash out, except over a long period of time, creating a pyramid scheme. Second, the payout levels will decrease as more content is produced. Instead of allowing people to click "Like" and pretend they aren't paying for it (where those with higher standing get to spend more of other people's money), just deduct the money from the users' balance! But then of course you couldn't hide the pyramid scheme from the users.

It didn't see it, but it is inaccurate. Half the reward value can be cashed out immediately, and many authors have done so.

I know that because I read the white paper (a month or so ago). I didn't state anything inaccurate. I stated you can't cash out except over a long period of time. Cash out doesn't mean get only 50% of your money.

50% of the rewards are promised as cash. 50% are promised as illiquid stake. The promised cash portion can be cashed out immediately. Nothing is an illusion.

Also without sufficient liquidity, it may not be possible to cash out that 50% for those who have very high payouts, but I haven't been following whether the liquidity increased significantly since launch or not.

There has been no issue with liquidity. The amount of rewards is actually quite tiny relative to the market cap (and scales along with it, so this will always be true). Rewards may not always be big though, if the market cap falls.

Didn't read the rest of your post yet. Too busy right now.

[iamnotback]

50% of the rewards are promised as cash. 50% are promised as illiquid stake. The promised cash portion can be cashed out immediately. Nothing is an illusion.

Can't cash out and financial pyramid are not an accusation that the promises are broken. Fact is you can't cash out. Everyone is incentivized to support the pyramid longer and make it worse. It even worked on you, to get you to stop criticizing (or go soft on) DPoS because you are vested in this shitcoin. Futures contracts are slavery and the antithesis of degrees-of-freedom and thus truth. Even Proverbs speaks about that.

The illusion is on the n00bs who don't fully grasp the ramifications of everything. Same as it was for Ethereum.

[smooth]

50% of the rewards are promised as cash. 50% are promised as illiquid stake. The promised cash portion can be cashed out immediately. Nothing is an illusion.

Can't cash out and financial pyramid are not an accusation that the promises are broken. Fact is you can't cash out. Everyone is incentivized to support the pyramid longer and make it worse.

As a user you can ignore the illiquid portion entirely (treat it as having zero value), and still get paid for your posts. For bloggers that might well be a valid perspective since the vested portion doesn't really affect their blogging earnings (they gain a tiny amount of extra visibility by having more power to upvote their own posts, but it is negligible; talent matters more).

The pyramid argument here is no different from Bitcoin or any other token that depends on people wanting to buy it for other people to be able to sell. That doesn't make it a pyramid, just a scarce token that may or may not have significant value. Mostly it has value if people expect it to be useful in the future. If the Steem token develops a very large network of users comfortable using it, that will likely be useful.

It even worked on you, to get you to stop criticizing (or go soft on) DPoS because you are vested in this shitcoin.

I'm not a fan of DPoS. I agree with most if not all of your criticisms of it.

[iamnotback]

As a user you can ignore the illiquid portion entirely (treat it as having zero value), and still get paid for your posts.

But why would you throw away your opportunity cost. It has clearly manifested in your support of a pyramid that you otherwise normally label as "xerox copy of Reddit" with a "shitty PoS consensus algorithm" and a "financial pyramid". You've been all over the threads for this project even in the ANN section.

Btw, I made a conscious decision to not blog on Steemit, because I didn't want to become incentivized to promote it because of having 50% of my payouts locked up for (is it 2 years?). I could see Dan was trying to buy off my objectivity. I reject that!

Then after the marvellous bottom barrel accomplishment (and Bitshares' past track record such as creating BitUSD which has no market use case and an Open Exchange that apparently has no market use case), you allow the possibility they might somehow morph it into greatness.

For bloggers that might well be a valid perspective since the vested portion doesn't really affect their blogging earnings (they gain a tiny amount of extra visibility by having more power to upvote their own posts, but it is negligible; talent matters more).

Unless the income can remain high, then bloggers will eventually lose the monetary incentive to blog there.

In order for the income to remain high, either the rate of appreciation of the token's market cap (and liquidity) has to outstrip the rate of increase of bloggers, or someone has to inject income into the funding. Since I don't think they can inject significant income (even by selling ads), then I see the thing imploding when the appreciation of the token reverses (on the dump). As more and more bloggers cash out, the down pressure on the price will increase.

One might argue that the curators (those who can award the highest money payouts with their higher rep power) will drive a blog site where quality is rewarded and this will cause it to stand out above Reddit and others. I argue that it will collapse into a power vacuum destruction of the Nash equilibrium gamed to hell by competing interests.

Btw I haven't seen any extremely interesting content on Steemit. It is everyone jumping on to get some payouts. I don't see a need for me to revisit the site. I load armstrongeconomics.com and bitcointalk.org often. I haven't loaded Steemit in weeks. See social networks have a demographics based on their common interest. The common interest on Steemit is payouts and I bet eventually gaming the system. The underlying design is driving the wrong and unsustainable demographics. Larimers suck at marketing, except if we are referring to marketing to speculators (which I presume is their objective any way).

One might argue they are bringing females and others into CC who weren't interested before. I think this might be the strongest marketing argument they can make. Can they capitalize on that with some unique demographic niche which scales up? I studied several of the female bloggers and they were dysfunctional, oddballs, and/or not mainstream types (well I guess they'd need to be that way to be jumping into some CC blog site dominated by men). Didn't do a large enough sample to get a feel for what sort of community they are building. My guess is it is males in CC who are inviting females they know, which again seems like prostitution (buying off the females instead of giving them something they want to join because of its community value which is the normal mode of females). I'd really need to study it more in depth and frankly I decided that is a poor use of my time.

I mean really $1000 payouts for blog posts. Of course that will incentivize people to blog on Steemit. But that isn't sustainable as the typical payout. It is quite an expensive way to bring people into crypto, unless somehow most only get a few $ yet are still incentivized by the $1000 cases.

I'm not a fan of DPoS. I agree with most if not all of your criticisms of it.

Well we just handed more money to the people who keep promulgating stuff that is mostly a waste of our time. But anyway, I am not here to berate other coins.

So I will leave it at that, unless you want to debate further. Once again I will stand back with my popcorn and enjoy the fireworks when they eventually come...

[CoinHoarder]

50% of the rewards are promised as cash. 50% are promised as illiquid stake. The promised cash portion can be cashed out immediately. Nothing is an illusion.

Can't cash out and financial pyramid are not an accusation that the promises are broken. Fact is you can't cash out. Everyone is incentivized to support the pyramid longer and make it worse. It even worked on you, to get you to stop criticizing (or go soft on) DPoS because you are vested in this shitcoin. Futures contracts are the antithesis of degrees-of-freedom and truth. Even Proverbs speaks about that.

The illusion is on the n00bs who don't fully grasp the ramifications of everything. Same as it was for Ethereum.

If it is a pyramid scheme as you claim, and I do not think that it is, then these "n00bs" are going to make out like bandits.

Market Capitalizations:
Steem: $202 million

versus:

Facebook: $337 billion
YouTube: $80 billion
Twitter: $12.6 billion
LinkedIn: $25.4 billion
Instagram: $37.0 billion
Reddit: $4.0 billion

I don't believe it is a pyramid scheme, because new revenue streams pop up as the user base grows. Once you reach the levels of usership of the social networking behemoths, which is feasible considering the user incentives, the internet traffic alone can sustain the incentives indefinitely via paid advertising.

The social network on Wednesday said advertising revenue jumped 57% in the first quarter to $5.2 billion from $3.3 billion.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-revenue-soars-on-ad-growth-1461787856

The pyramid argument here is no different from Bitcoin or any other token that depends on people wanting to buy it for other people to be able to sell. That doesn't make it a pyramid, just a scarce token that may or may not have significant value. Mostly it has value if people expect it to be useful in the future.

This is another good point. It is no more a pyramid scheme than any other cryptocurrency in existence.

[CoinHoarder]

Then after the marvellous bottom barrel accomplishment (and Bitshares' past track record such as creating BitUSD which has no market use case and an Open Exchange that apparently has no market use case), you allow the possibility they might somehow morph it into greatness.

Your jealousy of Daniel Larimer has never ceased to amaze me. He has pioneered smart contract blockchain technology, and delivered on two cutting edge projects which are in the top 15 of cryptocurrency market capitalization. You have done nothing but troll the Bitcointalk forums (I feel your pain... I am in the same boat  ). You perpetually claim to have solutions to all the "flawed" cryptocurrencies, which according to you all of them are flawed, but are never able to provide any evidence of the said solutions. You are the definition of FUD.

If Bitshares' bitUSD and the Decentralzied Exchange does not have a use case, then why are people using it?  

https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bitshares-asset-exchange/

You can link to some FUD article if you wish to try and prove your point, but I prefer to link to cold hard facts recorded in immutable blockchains.

[iamnotback]

I don't believe it is a pyramid scheme, because new revenue streams pop up as the user base grows. Once you reach the levels of usership of the social networking behemoths, which is feasible considering the user incentives, the internet traffic alone can sustain the incentives indefinitely via paid advertising.

The social network on Wednesday said advertising revenue jumped 57% in the first quarter to $5.2 billion from $3.3 billion.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-revenue-soars-on-ad-growth-1461787856

That is revenue, not profit. I provided links to you upthread where I had done the calculations. I think Facebook is generating something like $10 per user per year in profit (given they have nearly a billion users). Sorry the ad revenue is not sufficient. Why do you all continue to force me to repeat this over and over again.

Google has much higher profit per user, I think 10X higher. But Google has a near monopoly on Internet ads and search engine driven ads.

The pyramid argument here is no different from Bitcoin or any other token that depends on people wanting to buy it for other people to be able to sell. That doesn't make it a pyramid, just a scarce token that may or may not have significant value. Mostly it has value if people expect it to be useful in the future.

This is another good point. It is no more a pyramid scheme than any other cryptocurrency in existence.

Smooth was being disingenuous.

I am sure he is smart enough to realize that the pyramid of investing is not what I am referring to. The financial pyramid here is the need to keep the growth of the market cap faster than the growth of new bloggers, else the payouts per blogger will decline.

[smooth]

As a user you can ignore the illiquid portion entirely (treat it as having zero value), and still get paid for your posts.

But why would you throw away your opportunity cost. It has clearly manifested in your support of a pyramid that you otherwise normally label as "xerox copy of Reddit" with a "shitty PoS consensus algorithm" and a "financial pyramid". You've been all over the threads for this project even in the ANN section.

I answer questions and respond to errors (including yours). I'm not promoting it, and I've made my skepticism well known about both the financial model and the daunting complexity that an investor faces in trying to be an informed investor (though many frankly don't).

In order for the income to remain high, either the rate of appreciation of the token's market cap (and liquidity) has to outstrip the rate of increase of bloggers

That certainly won't happen. As I said earlier, some future increase is already capitalized. The only real question is whether the rewards will remain acceptable, not whether they will remain as high as they are now (though in the short term they may, and probably will, go even higher).

Btw I haven't seen any extremely interesting content on Steemit. It is everyone jumping on to get some payouts.

I agree, there is a lot of circle jerking and posting whatever fad style of post happens to get upvotes. There are some bloggers who post pretty much what they would post elsewhere anyway and get paid for it. Dan is even one of these, although he gets way more votes than anyone else would as the Steem developer (basically a subset of celebrity effect). I sometimes downvote his posts to try to offset that a bit.

One might argue they are bringing females and others into CC who weren't interested before. I think this might be the strongest marketing argument they can make.

I agree this seems to be going on. Whether it can sustain and become a useful critical mass remains to be seen.

I'm not a fan of DPoS. I agree with most if not all of your criticisms of it.

Well we just handed more money to the people who keep promulgating stuff that is mostly a waste of our time.

We can't control what speculators want to throw money at. You are well aware of that.

I am sure he is smart enough to realize that the pyramid of investing is not what I am referring to. The financial pyramid here is the need to keep the growth of the market cap faster than the growth of new bloggers, else the payouts per blogger will decline.

Everybody knows the payouts will decline. What we don't know is how far they will decline and how much people will care. If people get a few token bucks instead of posting for free as they do on Facebook, Reddit, the "keeping score" aspect of it may still be more of an incentive than cashing out and buying refrigerators. By that time there may be a lot of users onboarded (including as you point out different demographics from traditional crypto) who could form a very large network of token users. None of this is guaranteed of course.

[chryspano]

The financial pyramid here is the need to keep the growth of the market cap faster than the growth of new bloggers, else the payouts per blogger will decline.

Is this any different than bitcoin? Did bitcoin had to grow its marketcap faster than the mining difficulty? why is it different with STEEM?

[iamnotback]

Btw, I made a conscious decision to not blog on Steemit, because I didn't want to become incentivized to promote it because of having 50% of my payouts locked up for (is it 2 years?). I could see Dan was trying to buy off my objectivity. I reject that!

Then after the marvellous bottom barrel accomplishment (and Bitshares' past track record such as creating BitUSD which has no market use case and an Open Exchange that apparently has no market use case), you allow the possibility they might somehow morph it into greatness.

Your jealousy of Daniel Larimer has never ceased to amaze me. He has pioneered smart contract blockchain technology, and delivered on two cutting edge projects which are in the top 15 of cryptocurrency market capitalization.

Agreed Dan has some accomplishments. I stand by my assessment that his ceiling has remained low because he has poor conceptualization of use cases and user marketing. Being in the top 15 isn't that difficult given the competition has been very weak. Nevertheless they have some productive coders and they have produced some serious projects with working block chains.

I don't know where you get the notion that I am jealous. I am just presenting how I see the facts objectively. That is one of the roles I play on this forum, and it is partially because I need to do it any way for my own ongoing evaluation of technologies, competitors, ideas, etc..

You have done nothing but troll the Bitcointalk forums (I feel your pain... I am in the same boat  ).

You have a conceptualization of the word 'troll' that many (50%?) people who read me disagree with. You'd also probably find some 50% of the readers who might agree with you because I pointed out some flaw in something they invested in.

You must not have read what I wrote a few minutes earlier:

Good coders are reasonably rare (50,000 of them in the world?) and I credit them on apparently being good coders and getting s/w work done (when all that others such as myself have done is foruming). Good coders who are superstars and create million user s/w products are much rarer (which I've done twice already in my life, but not in the past 1.5 decades).

You perpetually claim to have solutions to all the "flawed" cryptocurrencies, which according to you all of them are flawed...

You are welcome to go argue in the linked thread that I have not accurately described why PoS is not trustless. Until you successfuly do (which you can't because you will be incorrect), then your statement above is false.

...but are never able to provide any evidence of the said solutions. You are the definition of FUD.

How much BTC would you like to bet on the word 'never'?

I'd love to take some of your money from you. We can arrange an escrowed bet when you are ready to lose your money. Just let me know. I'll be waiting.

If Bitshares' bitUSD and the Decentralzied Exchange does not have a use case, then why are people using it?  

I linked in my above quote the thread (not even my thread) which discussed why the use has been disappointing.

Please try to stay on fact and stop the character assassination. Or put your BTC where you mouth is, so I can take it from you.

[CoinHoarder]

I don't believe it is a pyramid scheme, because new revenue streams pop up as the user base grows. Once you reach the levels of usership of the social networking behemoths, which is feasible considering the user incentives, the internet traffic alone can sustain the incentives indefinitely via paid advertising.

The social network on Wednesday said advertising revenue jumped 57% in the first quarter to $5.2 billion from $3.3 billion.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-revenue-soars-on-ad-growth-1461787856

That is revenue, not profit.

With a mostly autonomous solution, revenue would not be far off from profit. For instance, I posit the paid advertising proposal I designed will not have any expenses at all (other than ad duration): https://steemit.com/sip/@coinhoarder/steem-proposal-offsetting-steem-power-debasement-through-unobtrusive-advertisements

Even if it is as low as you claim, $10 per user per year is more than anyone is getting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.