It may not be effective but it is a something that makes an effort to achieve a common goal that we all have and that’s more bitcoin adoption.
There still is a huge gap in education and removing barriers to entry for new users to come in, understand bitcoin, it’s usability and have real world scenarios to experience so it makes the connection even grater.
Silk road is a great example of creating user adoption, like you said regardless of the types of products they sold on the site but it did help tremendously with adoption then. Obviously that only catered to a certain set of people and not the masses so what we need is different approaches that trying to find different angles where we can tackle the same problem and even if we make a small impact it will compound as we go along.