P.S.: If enough artists put a "price" on social metrics within their works, it would generate market dynamics between the platforms. This would force them to behave in a way that is beneficial to the creators.
Well, you as an artist using bots would be shooting yourself in the foot. If others do it for you (competition?), they're wasting money and also making you look better in comparison...
I've been closely following both Mycelia and UJO. Also helped out bootstrapping Resonate[0] a bit. I think most of these initiatives have the same problem; they are putting a horse in front of a car - using new technology to address yesterday's model.
The reality of today's content consumption is that there are other useful, unaccounted tokens of exchange alongside money. Going forward most people will simply not pay for recordings[1], and especially not in meaningful amounts for niche content (the driver of human culture). But they can contribute a lot by spreading the word or otherwise caring. Building audience size and "metric capital" is more important than the small number of direct sales we can generate otherwise.
I think free content and patronage with money or word-of-mouth is a better model. It is working really well for podcasts, blogs and similar. It is not typical for music as we are still stuck in the cultural anomaly of the 20th century.
My idea was to try and reintroduce a gentle value connection between the maker and the audience. Something resembling a gift economy[3], not an exact accounting of debt. There are lots of good ideas to be found via anthropology.
Patreon is great, the only thing is that we shouldn't need a middleman that takes a cut. But insofar as teaching people a new behavior, it's wonderful. It will take a decentralized identity management solution to move past that. Something like uPort[0].
To the second point - we are already probably at a level where basic needs could be met with relative ease, given the will[1].
