We don't need a smart contract nor Dapp, to put up some content and get paid for it.
What Steemit is trying to do is collectivize our funds amongst the entire social network, then redistribute our funds based on who receives the most valid up voting.
Sorry but people don't want to join a social network to have their funds taken from them (for all those who are average) and redistributed to those who are above average.
Dan Larimer is a smart guy but in my opinion has always been (since I first debated him in BCT in 2013 about his plan to pay every token HODLer a dividend) a socialist/collectivist in a faux Libertarian skin. And that is why in my opinion all his designs have failed to achieve greatness.
The challenge is creating a system capable of identifying what contributions are needed and
their relative worth in a way that can scale to an unbounded number of people.
A proven system for evaluating and rewarding contributions is the free market. The free
market can be viewed as a single community where everyone trades with one another and
rewards are allocated by profit and loss. The market system rewards those who provide
value to others and punishes those who consume more value than they produce. The free
market supports many different currencies and money is simply a commodity that
everyone finds easy to exchange.
Since the free market is a proven system, it is tempting to try to create a free-market system
where content consumers directly pay content producers. However, direct payment is
inefficient and not really viable for content creation and curation. The value of most
content is so low relative to the cognitive, financial, and opportunity costs associated with
making a payment that few readers choose to tip. The abundance of free alternatives means
that enforcing a paywall will drive readers elsewhere. There have been several attempts to
implement per-article micropayments from readers to authors, but none have become
widespread.
Steem is designed to enable effective micropayments for all kinds of contribution by
changing the economic equation. Readers no longer have to decide whether or not they
want to pay someone from their own pocket, instead they can vote content up or down and
Steem will use their votes to determine individual rewards. This means that people are given
a familiar and widely used interface and no longer face the cognitive, financial, and
opportunity costs associated traditional micropayment and tipping platforms.
Edit:
someone has claimed that payouts from Steemit are a deception.
My post comparing Steemit and Synereo.