A decentralized social media app interfacing to the Steem blockchain is necessary to fend off the assault by governments and financial elites on inconvenient information which exposes their wrongdoings, aka"Fake News".
The "Fake News" agenda ain't going away and infact the EU is doubling down and considering introducing fines. Any post deemed "fake news", "hate speech", "russian propaganda"etc will be taken down or obscured by the EU Ministry of Truth. If not the hosting sites will be faced with hefty fines.
picked up on this but his solutions are mere legal technicalities which legislators will be able to tear apart (if a law becomes an obstacle they change the law, simple) and even the self-labelling of posts as fake news won't cut it...as the fake news label will most likely mean internet oblivion in the near future.
https://steemit.com/fakenews/@dantheman/the-future-of-real-news
End goal should be a decentralized uncensorable social media app. a text only version in 2017 would be already an important milestone. At the moment I'm only aware of Twister (a clone of Twitter) as a decentralized social media app, but unfortunately it is not delivered in a way that it can be adopted by the masses (no executable etc). Something like Twister based on Steem would already be fantastic and a gamechanger. So even if the centralized Steemit website would one day have to surrender to the tyrants, the decentralized app would survive unscathed and uncensored.removal of SBD, using Steem as currency instead!
at the moment the currency dominating the Steemit economy is the US Dollar = the SBD.
users pay each other in SBDs when exchanging services and also the coin used to promote posts is the SBD (there's not even an option to pay with Steem ).
I think this undermines Steem as a currency and reinforces the status quo of a US dollar based world (frankly it goes against everything I believe in). I'd like to see SBD scrapped as soon as possible. Now that there isn't hyperinflation no more the use of Steem as a currency is viable.
best wishes for 2017! Steem on!!
Simon