Hi, @apshamilton, I'm moderator of Snax and I'll try to answer your questions

1. about benefit for early adopters
   Now we are at the beginning of the path and we are trying to further encourage new members of our community. For example steembountyprogram and various programs from our partners like @dragosroua, within the framework of which your post was written). The very idea of Snax is that the authors receive a fair reward for their activity and the quality of the content. You talked about the pioneers and emperors. Ok, we have our own leaders, these are our block producers. But one important difference between Steem and Snax in terms of whales is that our BPs dont have any power over how much rewards people would receive from Publisher Rewards
   Although each of our BPs is still set to receive as much as top influencers on twitter the block producers have a significant cost burden that they have to carry, especially as we will be adding more resource consuming networks to the blockchain (You can read about it in this article https://hackernoon.com/decentralizing-social-media-rewards-steem-and-snax-comparison-ac17201824cc)

2. about use of existing social media platforms
   Snax as an overlay solution does not have access to the internal social media statistics for «ReachС» calculation (such as number of views, clicks, etc) Therefore, Snax introduces its own indicators:

• Interaction Level
• Account Weight
• Followers Weight
• Attention Rate
  To calculate these indicators, Snax uses KPI provided by the social platform. For example, for content posted on Twitter, Snax takes retweets and comments for Interaction Level calculation and count of followers for Account Weight calculation. Very important that A weight of KPI also depends on the Weight of the publisher (That is, the weight of or retweet for each account is different)
  Snax does not aim to replace existing social networks. Snax ideas - integration of blockchain, cryptocurrency and Dapps into society by building a fair cross-platform reward system for content authors. Advertising in existing social networks is aimed at increasing the profits of the networks themselves. Snax is intended to reward authors for quality content that is in demand, motivating them from development. Today, people are comfortable writing posts on Twitter and Facebook, ok, we are trying to implement integration with them. Tomorrow other platforms will be popular, including decentralized, we will integrate with them. Our task in this matter is maximum user comfort. We rely on open metrics, so on the contrary, Snax guarantees that regardless of the arbitrariness and abuse of the social network, the author will receive a fair reward.