What is a dapp you think steem needs that hasn't been developed yet?

View this answer on Musing.io

A Medium-looking front-end Dapp built on the Steem blockchain. 

Explanation:

Medium is a  writing platform that's neutral and censorship resistant, Governments can still subpoena the website or send cease-and-desist letters to them, but as proven during the 2016 Malaysia 1MDB scandal, Medium has not budged when foreign governments pressure them to shut down someone's article without court-orders. 

As of 2017, they have 60 Million monthly page visits their whole business model revolves around subscription and revenue sharing based on "claps". As readers you can read articles there for free, but will need to pay $5 monthly to access "Locked posts", usually exclusive content of higher quality.  "clapping" on an locked posts means you are telling Medium to allocate a portion of your $5 to the author of the post. With Medium taking a cut to keep the lights on and employees fed.

Why is there a need for a Medium Front-end:

Medium.com, for all its promise of fair revenue sharing and neutrality, is ultimately still a centrally-held company based in the United States of America, Their servers are easily shut down and domain name easily taken away. While this has not happened to Medium.com it has happened to a social media operating on a similar modus operandi, Gab.ai, was shutdown through political pressure to their domain name provider and server host GoDaddy.com. This is because Gab.ai tries to be a Twitter but with MUCH MUCH more freedom and less political control.

One look at Medium.com and you can see their comparison with the Steem blockchain. If Bitcoin was what Paypal tried to be, then Steem is what Medium is trying to become. Medium is hails themselves as the internet's last neutral ground, but even then, we know one day they're gonna give. At first maybe blocking horrific hate speeches, doing things that are mostly justifiable, and then slowly like Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, they will police every posts uploaded. It's not a matter of if, just when.

Why a Steem Dapp:

I will explain this by comparing the strong points and weak points of Medium to Steem.

Design - Ever since Day 1, Medium was created with Design in mind.  The Founder of Medium, Evan Williams already has an impressive retinue of past experience including Blogger and Twitter. Medium is designed in a way that makes reading so much more comfortable than any other UI. 

I haven't seen any writing platform that is as satisfying to read as Medium.com.

Revenue Sharing - This is Medium's weak point however, if compared to Steem. Anyone can be a subscriber on Medium.com with a $5 fee every month. Payable using Credit Card or Paypal. However if you want to make money writing for Medium though, you can only do it if you're in the US or "supported countries" using Stripe. So someone like me has to perform some legal blackmagic-fuckery to get an EU business licence, set up a business in Estonia as an E-resident for a fee, and then set up a Stripe account. Not exactly clear cut step and mind you, this will cost upwards of hundreds of Euro before i can even make a single cent off Medium.

Compared to Steem, Medium isnt exactly for everyone. Someone like me needs a significant investment to even qualify for their "Partner's Program". I can only imagine how much 100 Euro will cost a typical Guinean Steemian or Venezualean. 

Steem posts are available for anyone to read (no locked-post BS) and anyone with Steem Power can reward post authors, there is no $5/month barrier of entry. 

Being a Steem writer (and earning from Steem) is also instantly available. Granted, you need to earn enough to cash out. There is no barrier of entry to being a paid content creator on Steem too.

Centralization (aka no decentralization) - All of Medium's user uploaded articles are hosted on Medium, most likely in a single dedicated server. They surely have backups somewhere but ultimately it's controlled by Medium.com. It wont be too hard for the US to issue a warrant to close down Medium for whatever trivial reason.

Steemit.com however, is just a front end. Sure, it's also controlled by a US based company. But Steemit.com can close down and i still can go to busy.org to write and read Steem posts. If that got shut down I can go to SteemKr, Esteem, you name it.. The best defense is not an impenetrable fortress but a camp that can disappear at a moments notice. Similar to Bitcoin, governments will find it much harder to shut down the Steem Blockchain.  Best they can do is post flagging, which is a feature available for everyone - no special political power to anyone who is not a participant.

Conclusion

Steem blockchain already has excellent revenue sharing and decentralization. What most Dapps on Steem lack is design, which Medium.com has perfected. A marriage between Steem's backend and Medium's front end will (in my opinion) make the perfect politically-neutral writing platform.  Where everyone truly has the power of free speech regardless or geography and demography. 

I am aware that Medium.com's code and designs are patented and copyrighted, but it should not be that hard to learn from their design philosophy and apply them to a Steem front end. Dapp. 

Anyone who comes out with such a Dapp that's good enough will probably be the first project to finally break into the mainstream writer's space. 60 Million monthly page visits will find themselves being offered a similarly looking alternative with way better revenue sharing program and truly politically neutral platform.