My Experiences With All of the Other Steem Blockchain dApps So Far....
In the past few days I've messed around with quite a few (almost all) of the major Steem dApps (that is, distributed apps built on the Steem blockchain). The ones I've gotten to are D-Tube, Zappl, and dMania. DSound will require me to make actual music... which might take me a little while. And Utopian.io, while awesome is also pretty intimidating to post to.
Zappl is the first one I gave a shot, namely because it's the easiest and most familiar to get into. Everyone has some experience with Twitter. It's pretty great, especially given how new it is. There's not much to say - it works pretty much exactly like Twitter. It still needs a bit of refinement to get the same polish Twitter has, but for a new platform it'd say it's pretty incredible that it's about 80% of the way there, even before having launched its apps for Android and iOS.
D-Tube was interesting, but seems to have the same issues as YouTube. If you want upvotes and views, get ready to post videos for a year or already be famous on some other platform. Rough stuff. The IPFS system is surprisingly fast to upload - when it works. Other than that I suppose my main complain is that there isn't a load of content.... but that's actually maybe a good thing. This is a real opportunity to get in and gather viewers before any rush. And hey, you can always still post your stuff on Youtube, too.
dMania is strikingly on the mark as well. Like 9Gag, it's a bottomless hole into which your time and attention will slip, never to return. Competition isn't yet as fierce as on 9Gag, so there's still some time to submit your stuff and have a chance in hell that it'll be seen and upvoted. My dMania post is here. Took me a nice little slice of time, especially to modify the background, but it was fun and I think I'll definitely be doing it, again.
So that's it. These have been my experiences so far. The Steem dApps still have a far ways to go before they can go toe to toe with the big boys but remember - they don't have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough. Because unlike the other social networks, the Steem blockchain social networks pay. And that's a game-changer.
Thursday, November 16th, 2017
Source: Lil' ole me. @jenkinrocket
Thanks for the reviews. I just wish I knew of some way to collect and re-access such posts.
I also tried using D-Tube. Conceptually the idea is great. I like how it seamlessly integrates with the rest of Steemit. My single frustration is the quirkiness of the user interface . For example, why does it rotate my Snap photos 90 degrees? (I suspect it has to do with EXIF stuff) I did get it to behave eventually.
I wanted to include a video in a post I was working on. I discovered that I first needed to post the video using D-Tube and then edit it to include the text and other still photos. Did you find a better way?
I prefer to produce a single post and make sure it's clean and ready to go before submitting. I often do this off-line. Posting and editing is a bit disconcerting for me. Hints and help are always appreciated.
To be honest, I just posted my video up raw, taking a snap with the included button. Doing so took a few tries to get it to really work, but mostly I wanted to just see if it did work for you average user, and if so how well.
It's pretty no-frills right now, my friend. The quirks and issues will probably be resolved eventually, but if you want them to recieve priority you should head on down to Utopian.io and submit some suggestions for DTube improvements. Sounds like you're more experienced than I am with the platform.
Thanks for reading and commenting, and good luck!