I have been catching up with the recent changes and I'm excited to see how it will all play out in time. However, I wanted to point out one aspect of this platform I have heard very little about since I have been on Steem: attention value.

The value of attention

Social media companies today get their value mostly from two things: selling our attention and selling our data. Attention has value and if a way to use STEEM to gain people's attention is implemented on the front ends (communities), it will give STEEM utility value, which will be redistributed to users holding and earning STEEM.

Right now, there isn't much demand for buying STEEM, apart from it being a bandwidth allocation token, resource distribution token through voting and speculating on future value. There is potential for so much more when you factor in the core business model of incumbent social media platforms.

I believe STEEM will be able to gain and retain value if we worked on the demand side of the economic equation. Adding utility does that.

Businesses, entrepreneurs, nonprofits; anyone with a message to send to the audience of a community will be able to buy STEEM simply for the value they get in return. In the form of attention, which may lead to more sales, clients or supporters.

That's what attracted me to the Steem blockchain in the first place: the potential to monetize attention through cryptocurrency, in a transparent and verifiably fair way.

Potential implementation

I'm not sure if this is part of the communities spec (I'll check and suggest if it's not), but it would make sense to design around ideas to use STEEM or SMTs in communities as attention tokens as well. So that there are ways to spend these tokens in exchange for a slot on a community's homepage for example. There are several ways to implement these and I'll go into a few below:

Featured posts (time-based)

• Spend tokens to get your post featured for a period of time
• Could be a timeslot based system, where you bid for 1 hour slots or 1 day slots, or whatever
• Could be bid based, where people outbid each other to get into a slot.
• Part or all of the spent tokens could be distributed to community owners, admins, mods, members; or just burnt, or a combination of the two

Sponsored polls/discussions

• Spend tokens to get a poll in the sponsored section
• Bid based, sorted by amount
• Options for token economics can be decided upon by each community: burn or redistribute

Any thoughts on these ideas?