Let's speak honestly: Steem, Golos.io, Synereo and Sapien are very different from web 2.0 social networks and not in a good way.
First thing first, content monetization is broken in a term as it not reward authors of good content. but force them (authors) to bend their creativity to create "pop"-content (popular content), something not creative, but focused on wide range of curators, as it means "more curators = more money". In fact, monetization is killing creative content, forcing people to think not about what they want to tell, but what others want to hear. But if you will use some imagination on that subject you'll see that it is great censorship method and Orwell and Huxley both was wrong about future of censorship. We don't need to restrict access to information, nor create sea of false info, just give illusion of freedom (blockchain != immutable), then create money voting system and you get it, perfect censorship system, where everything is ruled by money and their holders (oligarchy?). By the way, that's why democracy isn't working either, in community decisions don't take into account the interests of minorities, the smaller community the more clearly you see it. For example, if you'll take a look at Steem or Golos news you'll clearly see that by the fact there only one hashtag active - blockchain. That's the second thing.
Crypto-freaks centralization. On start of platform it wasn't something bad, but years have passed and we still here. In fact, it's not a social network anymore, it's just another blockchain info news site. Why is that happened? If you still asking that question I assume you just skipped the first part. Because Steem/Golos/(put a name of blockchain-based social network here) is not for everyone, but only for crypto-anarchists, created by them and for them. They write, they voting. It's like giving a "like" on your own photo in Instagram - senseless. So, we formed second problem and may a take a look in paired problem.
Steem/Golos/etc never were a social networks in first place. It's all just a crypto-Medium clone, which in it own turn just a social news network if there is such term. It's dellusion to think that news is all that social network needs. Nope, in last couple of years most of popular social networks are replacing focus from news feed to chat. And what doing Steem? Nothing. Where friends? Oh, yeah, followers will do the trick, aren't they? Where personal photos? Organizations accounts? Right, they are useless, because no one is interested, all that we want to read is another report about EOS development. Where games? Strange that obvious choice for monetization through blockchain is never used... Where chat? Nope, Rocket.Chat is not counting as one. News is good, but when they are look like your news, not just rewrite of some info from official EOS dev site!
It's not social when there is no society in it. Yeah, we are just bunch of strangers who reposting news and waiting for reward.
When someone is talking about problems we are waiting them to make proposition about solutions. Unfortunately, I have only some thoughts about them and not sure if we even need content monetization, because most of problems are connected with it.
First, obfuscation of reward and layered rewarding library. How will it work? We are don't need to create another social network, because it won't change anything. No, we need to be smarter, make a library or extension for tracking likes on all connected social networks and login in that network become your public part of key in wallet, so everyone in all social networks are already users in that blockchain and can get their reward even if they don't even know about it yet. Second, obfuscation mechanism of reward system. By some state-of-art formula of reward calculation you will never know how much money you'll get for your post as it will not depend only on likes and power of curators, but by thousands of factors and to increase your value for network you'll have to connect all of your logins to one identity. That will finally make people take focus on creating something that they want to say and not something that people want to hear, finally creativity instead of pop-art. But, reward system can't be random, just obfuscated. In perfect state it must take a value of post by calculating how much work was done by person to create a content, so reposts will value nothing in such system as you not make any work for that, because you're not origin of content. Perhaps some neural network system for comparsion of posts to exclude rewrite of material.
By the way it will elliminate second problem as well. And third too, but not completly.
For next one we will need to extend library for secure exchange of content (optionally) and messages. To create optional more secure, transparent and user-oriented layer for existing social networks which will include everything on every network (photos, videos, music, posts, games, chat, friends, organizations, ads, etc). It makes a perfect system for both users and networks, as first ones will receive money for spending time and making content for network and second ones will receive their reward from ads without data-collecting if user don't want to be traced.
This material is not trying to offend anyone and just providing a simple idea about improving existing order of things.