I think both Yours and Akasha aren't very good designs and are futile attempts. I only mention Synereo and not those others because it's specifically the main opportunity or threat to Steemit in terms of what it can do.
Akasha is futile because Ethereum isn't going to be able to scale to Reddit or Facebook transaction speeds and even if it can, I don't see how Akasha which will be a smart contract, would be secure, or fast.
Yours? Isn't that built on Bitcoin? I wouldn't worry too much about that. Synereo on the other hand is built on a foundation which has the potential to be both secure and fast. It's not going to have the sort of smart contract bugs of Ethereum with The DAO, because it uses a functional programming paradigm, with formal verification, and very well correct by construction methodology. It's also something which can scale because by design anyone can host a node, the users can sell resources to the network, and it's composable.
But none of it means anything unless people can understand Synereo enough to want to use it.
Ditto Newbium.
I wrote a critique of Yours.network on July 29:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@business/blogging-on-the-deck-of-the-titanic#@tuck-fheman/re-business-blogging-on-the-deck-of-the-titanic-20160827t021305470z
The thing is, does it matter? What matters is IMHO is how many people are going to be using those two platforms. I feel Yours will have a big advantage in that department versus Steemit, Synereo and Akasha (which I believe will have the 2nd biggest supportive community/developers behind Yours). Whether or not they do anything better than Steemit is a moot point. They don't have to.
They all will have their own core believers that will stay, just like Steemit has, no matter what they do. But going in, both Yours and Akasha will have big communities and lots of developers ready to post and help build apps. They will all also, at least in the beginning, bring in a portion of the upset Steemit user base as well as those who simply want to maximize their visibility on multiple platforms.
I don't' believe Akasha will last for the reasons Dan has brought up previously. I don't know enough about Synereo, outside of I rejected it upon initial research long ago. I haven't followed it's progress though, perhaps things have changed for the better, but I will likely still give it a shot, to maximize my contents exposure. Any content creator would be doing themselves a disservice by not posting on these other platforms and it's likely that any investors would be doing themselves a disservice by not getting in before the initial FOMO pump & dump. ;)
Ultimately though, I think Yours will succeed simply because of the existing largest cryptocurrency community and developers ready to support it. I like Steem and hope the best for it, but it has some serious issues that remain unresolved with no real answers to those problems at this point as well as serious public relations issues not only with it's own user base, but the remainder of the cryptocurrency world.
And that's not factoring in the non-cryptocurrency community looking for a better social media experience. I feel most of them are going to go with whatever is easiest and Yours will likely be that choice because there are more people to recommend Yours in the Bitcoin community to their non-crypto friends and it cuts out the middleman when getting into crypto.
I simply want a decentralized social media platform and I'm not going to stick with just one. I started with Qora and watched it fall apart (but is being rejuvenated again) and now I'm trying out Steemit, as I will all of the others. The more choices for content creators the better I say. Competition among these decentralized blockchain platforms is silly. They all are competing against the censorship and control of governments/corporations and we as a group should support them all.
To anyone questioning stellabelle ...
Attacking stellabelle or anyone else for simply wanting to try out another solution that may be more beneficial to them in one way or another is detrimental to the overall goal of supporting any and all platforms that are providing a way for the masses to ditch Facebook/Reddit/Twitter and any other social media outlet that censors and controls content.
There is a much larger goal here that needs to be focused on instead of starting a competition between this or that decentralized platform. We need to support them ALL. And by doing so, they will all get better with time and more of the non-crypto masses will eventually join one or the other or all to try them out.
If you are projecting success based on the size of the cyrptocurrency community (and one degree of relations from them) that can be brought into a social network, then you are focused on failure.
Success is bringing in millions of users from outside of crypto-currency due to viral spread. Meaning that people outside of crypto should be bringing in people from outside of crypto. For that we need the correct design.
When they transform to POS (casper I think) they could catch the desired speeds.No?