An excellent and thoughtful comment @skramatters, and thank you!
As I mentioned elsewhere, there's a subtly myopic "smugness" around here among many of the people with influence that we "have all the answers to your social media dilemmas," but we actually have remarkably little to show for it... particularly in the context of having loads and loads of dynamic and interesting content to support such an assertion.
It reminds me of the early days of Apple vs. PC, where Apple users spent so much time being uber-smug about their "superior product" yet had very few real world applications (unless you were an ARTIST) to back that up... and so, they all say there, extolling their "greatness," while enjoying an 8% market share while PC based systems (that were "boring" but simply WORKED) had 92%.
A feedback echo loop in the hopes of gaining 16 cent steem is well, a joke, to me anyway.
Yes, that is a joke. And yes, a lot of people will come back with "tell that to someone in a developing nation where 16 cents pays for a days' food!" True, but I think it misses the point...
SteemPeak is perhaps doing the most towards developing a front end (at least) that is marginally USEFUL in a real-world context: It looks prettier, there are more features (like being able to group followers, favorite content lists and so on), and at least an ATTEMPT to simplify an interface that is otherwise FAR too complicated for the average web user who's idea of "How Things Should Work" is that you click a "Log in with Facebook" link and you're ready to go....
The smugness is comparable to the old PC vs apple camps, that's a great analogy.. Oddly enough I always found myself buying mac products second hand from artist friends and still to this day struggle on any other OS.
I will readily admit though that the mystique of apple hasn't held up over the years and I can imagine my iPad was my last used apple product purchase..
As for the tell that to someone in developing nation my immediate quip back is please tell me why this blockchain doesn't have a fantastic mobile app for those of us living in non first world countries? I include myself in that lot as I've lived on a second world budget for 3 years using only a mobile device on steem ever. It stands to reason if the focus was bridging economic inequalities we would have a mobile first design as well as fantastic and easy to navigate avenues for the less fortunate to mingle into the first world wealth distribution model we have here thus far. Furthermore, there would be a great emphasis to have created language portals and the best translators built into the platform so that those that aren't fluent in English could feel more confident in their content creation. I know steem is a baby and stinc is not worth discussing but I'd assume these kind of projects would be in the pipeline of a more philanthropic platform..
Steempeak by far has the best team here and they clarified that they will be condensing their 90 minute steem opus into a 10 minute general video in the near future.
Thanks for the well thought out reply and always I appreciate your presence on the platform.
Cheers