I understand where you are coming from. In my opinion the content discovery is more a UI issue, for example on steeve.app both the search and the content ranking is different to what you get on steemit.
The fact is that you are going to use another blockchain and therfore the economics of Dtube will be disconnected from steem. Technically dtube will have the same connection to this blockchain as other video delivery platforms... just another link. Users will need an account on your native blockchain and steem will not even be used for bandwith.
steeve is centralized.
That is not the point. The point is that the ranking of content is entirely up to the user interface and there is no need for another blockchain to acomplish this. Besides, the content displayed on steeve is the same as the one shown on other steem interfaces so your comment doesn't make sense.
No, steem's rankings are built into the blockchain. Any rankings not built into the blockchain are not using the decentralized consensus and deviating hiding part of the blockchain from the user.
The payout is descentralized. You can rank the content based on that or any other metric. In the end all user interfaces are just fancy block explorers. So what if steeve uses a custom algorithm to display recommended content? You can still search for everything else. Again, that is not the point. My point of contention was that Dtube will use another blockchain to rank content and I was using an example to show that the same effect can be acomplished by other means.
It can, but it sacrifices the idea of decentralization.
Descentralization is a tool that helps with censorship resistence (that is the real goal). But some applications require some level of centralization that is inevitable. People don't need to run a full node to transact on bitcoin (and it would be impractical), they can do it just the same using a light wallet. The same principal applies when interacting with the steem blockchain. You can either run a full node and connect an interface to your local instance or you can use a light client (like steemit, busy, partiko, etc).
Yep, that's true. But do you see the advantages of running the sorting with a consensus system?