Inside the blockchain developers’ mind: Can EOS deliver a killer social DApp?

cointelegraph.com:

Cointelegraph is following the development of an entirely new blockchain from inception to mainnet and beyond through its series, Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind, written by Andrew Levine of Koinos Group.

In my first article in this series, I explained why Ethereum and Steem haven’t been able to deliver a mainstream social decentralized application (DApp), despite taking two very different approaches and how this makes the solution seem. Therefore, why not combine the fee-less system developed for Steem with the flexibility of a blockchain with smart contracts like Ethereum? Then, we could give developers the best of both worlds, enabling them to create free-to-use applications with the freedom to add new features whenever they want.

One could argue that this is exactly what Dan Larimer was trying to do when he left Steem and began work on EOS. Now, four years after the release of EOS, Larimer is planning to release “Fractally,” a new social application built on EOS. But, this begs the question: Why has no one been able to build a successful social media application on EOS? After all, it's not like no one has tried.

Block.one, the company Larimer founded and led as the chief technology officer, invested $150 million into their own social application Voice, which they then released not on the EOS mainnet but on its own dedicated blockchain.

This was odd because the entire purpose of a general-purpose blockchain is that it should be possible to launch any application on top of it. As I explained in my previous article, the whole problem with Steem was that it was its own separate blockchain and so it didn't benefit from the kind of developer and user adoption that Ethereum did. It should come as no surprise then that