I joined Steemit the very first day. I've used it a bit and checked back occassionally since. There are plenty of flaws with Steemit that goes beyond the obvious pumpNdump/pyramid/inflation/whatever you want to call it economic problems.
The problem with a platform like Steemit is it caters to the okayest and the most, not the best. What I mean by this is the way the voting/payment system works, everyone is looking for the most "good" content to upvote, because others will upvote it as well. Tits and walls of text are dominating trending day in and day out. You can read these posts, and many of them are riddled with errors and generally average quality. Why? Because everyone involved is there to make a profit (look at the dozens of monetization guides that get voted to the top). It's not about having something new, thought provoking, or different, it's about circlejerking anything and everything that the community can agree is worthy of votes.
The result is a feedback loop and a subsequent echochamber of the same recycled garbage over and over again under new names. Steemit claims to seek to provide a curated news source. That isn't going to happen because the only things getting votes will be in line with the community's opinions. FFS, look at how every other god damn post is an introduceyourself post. There is no value in this platform other than getting rich off of the efforts of others. It's a top heavy ecosystem and everyone disillusioned with the thought that they can make money are lining the pockets of the dev team and the top posters/botters.
I should have realized that because the more high reputation votes on a post that one votes on, the more curation reward they receive. Thanks. That is the most astute post I've read. Thus as you say, it becomes all about the game and not some other quality of the content, thus the content will become dysfunctional w.r.t. (unrelated) to any criteria other than the game.
And this result will apply to their plans for Peertracks also. It won't be about the quality or social diverse matching of the music. It will be about driving pumps to shares.
Steemit has literally nothing to do with peertracks afaik. Different team, different code, different target market.
They used the Graphene block chain. I figured maybe the back dealings are closely affiliated. Maybe not.
The pumping shares of musicians had Dan's fingerprints on it. He always designs these weird Rube Goldberg machines that do strange economic incentives.
If this fails magnificently as it looks like it probably will, then should be Dan's final curtain call in crypto. This will pretty much firmly establish his reputation as a kook (which I already pretty much suspected based on some of his bizarre ideas and designs when we used to converse on this forum in 2013 ... which CoinHoarder thinks is me being jealous but rather it is just me evaluating if Dan is worth my attention or not...).
Obviously smooth was much more pragmatic (he could careless if Dan is a kook or not as it is irrelevant to what he extract from it) and just mined when he saw the opportunity to mine. I have never been a miner and not focused on looking for altcoins to mine.