Cool I am happy to help! So Hive is the base layer, and dapps like Peakd or Ecency read and display the data from the blockchain. There is a 2nd layer token system called Hive-Engine, TribalDex and LeoDex, they are all basically the same but H-E is the first one, TribalDex has more advanced features, and LeoDex is professional looking and cheap to use. So you can deposit Hive into the hive engine as hive.swap, and trade Hive for other coins. There are community tokens, there are social tokens, there are NFT tokens, its a bit complicated but lets talk about community tokens first. The LeoFinance community has been around for a while, and they launched their front-end dapp for their community LeoFinance.io which you can use, and it shows market & finance related topics. So for users who mostly post about Bitcoin and Money, they can use the LeoFinance tag to participate in that community. Your post will appear on their front end, but you also get their Community token or "Tribe" token, in addition to the Base layer payouts which you recieve as HBD and HP. HBD is the Hive Dollar, a debt type asset which is meant to stay around $1 and supply is kept around 10% of the total Hive supply. HP payouts are vested or staked Hive which give you "vesting shares" which basically represent how much your upvote counts towards the distribution of the rewards pool. Also how much you have inVESTed in your account, and the platform overall.
Ok so you also will get LEO tokens, and you can stake the LEO as LP, which gives you the ability to distribute LEO to users just like you help distribute Hive rewards. With Hive you need around 101 HP staked in order to earn voting rewards, but some tokens have different tokenomics, and you don't need quite as many. Others, you need more. It all depends on a number of factors which I don't fully understand either, but let me focus on the basics.
Proof of Brain was described as the method by which we reward users in communities with tribe tokens. So then someone created a POB token and community, and it is general use, but the token is held by users who have (for the most part) been around for a while and understand what we are doing here with voting, looking for the best ideas and rewarding users work we appreciate or highly esteem, place value upon. So you can add #proofofbrain to your post, and earn POB tokens too. Stake your POB and you'll be able to give upbrains when you vote on content with the #proofofbrain tag.
That is the gist of it. I am doing research into the communities that are booting up, and there are quite a few already. We are in the early phases, but Hive is the place to be, I have no question. We should all try to bring 12 friends here and help them get their account setup, because I think we should have more organic growth, as opposed to the speculation money coming in and pump and dumping this amazing datalayer. We are doing something here that is so important, please read https://peakd.com/@dan 's book More Equal Animals, it is free at that link. I believe it articulates what this experiment here is really about, and how important it is to everyone. This is a new digital economy and we need to respect it. More than just a website, this is an exercise in true freedom.