Suppose a platform like Quora wants to issue a virtual currency based on upvotes and other similar factors: How would such virtual currencies find real value in real life? Is it possible from an economic point of view?
Very good questions!
A turnkey solution for implementing just that is the Smart Media Token (SMT) protocol on the Steem blockchain currently in the final stages of testing. Adopting the SMT protocol would only require some UI work on part of Quora and providing users a tool with which to create Steem accounts of their own. It could be implemented on a small scale first within a specific community, for example.
It is obvious how such currencies in an upvote economy would find value. On Steem, the both the author of a piece of content and the curator (upvoter) receive a portion of the content reward pool that regenerates continuously. The reward system is designed in such a way as to reward curators for early discovery of popular content. Popular content has value because of the traffic it drives. Simply put, advertisements placed next to popular content are likely to get more attention than unpopular content. On Steem, a user’s vote value depends on the amount of low-liquidity influence tokens (the liquid and low-liquidity tokens can be swapped with some time delay) they hold. Steem has a community-driven curation system. If a company like Quora adopted a system like that, the initial token distribution could easily be tailored to the needs of the company. The upside would be that all users could be paid content creators or curators. The curation system on Steem has negative votes to keep spam at bay.
The reason to purchase the token would be that it would give influence in the attention economy. An individual or a business could reward their followers by upvoting valuable contributions to their content such as quality comments, thus promoting more engagement.
For more info on Steem, join the Steem Quora Space called The Steemian Roundup - link: Steemian Roundup (https://www.quora.com/q/otycmrjbbhahuqae)