Hello everyone I am the lead developer on this project here to answer some of the questions!

something similar to Steemit? But what about the cost to comment in the live network? Isn't that a non-starter if the cost is too expensive, just to comment?
I guess it's sort of like Steemit? The way 0x60 is built though, it resembles more of a social pyramid/hybrid in my opinion.
There's the dev on top who earns from topic creations
Below are topic creators who earn from users commenting their topic
And finally there are the users commenting who directly earn from the act of commenting alone
However unlike a normal pyramid the actions of the users below don't give any gains to the dev on top.
The cost to comment on a live network is indeed an obstacle, but it is my belief that when a comment costs money, users would naturally be more careful in choosing the right words etc. to get their point across without unnecessary spam. Hopefully this leads to more meaningful discussions?
Maybe you have other methods of fighting spam?
In addition to the fact that each comment will cost you Gas, there is a built in function in the smart contract to "ban" users.
The way it works is anyone will be able to (not implemented in the front end dapp yet) give a warning to a user.
A warning will cost you 1 BOARD token which gets burned.
If a user receives a total of 10 warnings, they will be unable to create topics or post comments on the platform.
There is a way for the admin to remove this block should the need arise.
I left this part out of the whitepaper for now because we haven't actually tested the functionality yet.
Since BOARD is an ERC20 token I believe the price will naturally adjust on the open market and theoretically it won't go lower than the amount of Gas it takes to mint 1 token. There is no incentive to sell the tokens for a lower price. Of course we cannot know this and the success of the project (or experiment, if you will) is dependent on whether or not users believe there will be value in the BOARD token in the future. So basically just like any other token out there. Except we start from a working use case, not from simply copy pasting a token contract

Ideally 0x60 will be a system that feeds itself if the following conditions are met:
1) The users see potential value in BOARD token and are willing to spend their Gas on it in order to sell their token later when topic creation becomes more expensive
2) The advertisers realize that people are interested in BOARD token and visit the platform (traffic for advertisers increases) and want to create topics about their own projects in order to gain new users
And since the outbidding of topics increases by 1 BOARD token each time, it will take more and more tokens to get their topic out there.
This makes sense because as time goes by, more people will hear about 0x60 and it means more visitors land on the platform which justifies the increased costs to advertise!