I agree with @lifeaef completely - It would be great if @zombee could hand off dMania to a group of devs that could maintain and improve the platform. I'm not quite a dev myself, although I am a project manager who manages dev teams to build complex software applications, and I would be willing to help with an effort like that.

I think that one of the biggest problems, if not the #1 issue, was the fact that @zombee tried to do everything himself. No one person can manage a platform of that size, and no algorithm will ever perfectly address all of the issues that arise. What dMania really needed to thrive was a group of admins/curators to help with the effort, so that abusers didn't slip through the cracks.

The 2 main problems were abusers and spammers in my opinion, and both could be dealt with fairly easily by humans putting in some effort. I think that dMania would succeed if these 2 things were implemented :

1. Manual curation by a small group of curators who were incentivized to spread the rewards and only reward original content. Obviously, self-voting wouldn't be allowed, and scammers would be more easily identified and stopped. The beneficiary rewards could be changed so that part of the rewards were spread among the admins/curators, since they would be putting in a fair amount of work and would also be barred from receiving rewards (or at least from receiving bot votes).
   
   
2. Shitposters who do nothing more than repost JPG/GIF's that they found elsewhere were flagged into oblivion, and banned if they continued to post garbage after repeated warnings. Going through the Trending/New posts yesterday, I ended up flagging 13 posts and upvoting only 10 posts, and I was being very generous by not flagging more. In all honesty, I'd say that about 60-70% of the posts on dMania were sheer and utter garbage - a mix of selfies, random unfunny images/videos, copy/paste reposts and other junk that should never have been posted. That's a huge problem that needed to be addressed, and simply expecting users to flag such posts won't work because of the sheer volume and the fact that the users flagging posts then end up getting revenge flags on their valid posts. That and the fact that the spammers will just as easily repost more junk.
   
   

To the people that say that there's no value in memes - you shouldn't need any further proof than the fact that 9Gag is ranked 303 Globally and 695 in the USA of all websites!

Yes, a meme website is the 303rd most popular website in the world!!!!

Source: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/9gag.com

The user base and traffic figures for 9Gag alone, which are in the billions of pageviews a month, warrant a valuation of several hundred million $'s! Yet people somehow still believe that memes are worthless because they're not "quality content"??? People are seriously going to bash dMania when the front page of Steemit.com, the flagship website for STEEM, is littered with self-aggrandizing bullshit that was either promoted via whales' self-voting and/or excessive use of voting bots! I would much rather see memes than someone promoting the newest crypto scam, some jackass taking pictures of himself trying to look cool and writing some nonsense self-help garbage, or someone openly fighting with another user about abuse on the front page! This place looks like a trainwreck with what's typically on the front page of Trending. When users see that when they come to the site for the first time, I'm sure that there are many people who just turn around and run away as fast as they can and never join because they think this is a platform filled with spam and scams, and they're not wrong either.

People need to focus on the much bigger issues with STEEM/Steemit, like the Trending Page nonsense, the huge amount of the reward pool that's already bought and paid for by vote sellers, and the centralization of STEEM/SBD among a very small group of users. A meme app/site like dMania that's giving out less than $2,000/day in rewards and spreading it among a fair number of users seems like a plus to me when compared to the other rampant greed that's blatantly obvious to any new users who come to steemit.com for the first time and see what's really going on.

Would it not be better to try to improve on dMania's faults and build upon an app that actually adds some value and has the potential to bring in huge numbers of new users and traffic to the STEEM blockchain?

It just seems like such a waste to throw away a widely-used app that can easily be improved upon with some restructuring and managed with ongoing effort from a small group of users.