SE tokens are almost completely worthless because their only utility is attention economy on a tiny platform.
Very true and there would definitely need to be a mechanism to trade the SMT tokens for value. Hopefully when SMT is ready someone rushes out an exchange system for them.
Frankly speaking, if content rewards in HIVE/HBD/Vests were done away with in the next hard fork, I'd probably quit posting like many others.
This is an important consideration for anyone involved in brainstorms about chain improvements. Author rewards will likely never go away entirely. But the form they exist in could potentially change. I will always try to fight for authors and curators to receive incentives to be present on Hive and to get others to join.
We really need a referral system built into the chain that couldn't easily be abused. Decentralization makes things very hard to prevent abuse from multi-accounts or other simple hacker techniques.
It's great that you brought up the referral system idea!
I'll re-iterate what I proposed not so long ago. I think it would be useful to run an initiative with rewards given for onboarding someone who makes an introductory post with their picture on it holding a piece of paper with the date, account name and other information written on it and that person stating that they were onboarded by the person to be rewarded. Additional rewards for reports proving that those same people are still posting after X months and that they have powered up some moderate amount of HIVE.
I proposed a referral system 2 years ago on steem.
Where the new user pays proportion of their uvpotes to the person who referred them (to a specific value, over a time period of 6 months if I remember correctly).
It never went anywhere, but I'll just point it out now.
(Who knows? I might be able to claim 30K in
back paycompensation, for the work I put in!)