I hate to say it ned because I love the vision of steem. But this to me is not an experiment. It is forking the code and dividing the communities over problems that could have been fixed with customizable front ends for steem.
To me they are getting not only to clone it, but a code review by the people working on steem in addition. An Experiment would be to actually try to build something we need using another chain.
not to mention i18n is built already (not sure if @misha did a pull request, but it s question of time.) not to mention @misha already built a feature that auto-detects country then recalculates $numbers to local currency using yahoo-provided exchange rates. this works locally, and can be merged into steemit.com repo.
but still forking makes sense - different token distribution, another (not dollar) currency binding (probably this also won't make sense for you. :) ), ability to tweak logic of tokens flow (it s probable that steemit solutions are biased culturally - like all solutions people make daily), different copyright policies - ton of reasons possible.
The proposed solution of having a different chain still doesnt solve all of this. Additionally steem itself is capableof creating steembacked(enter fiat here).
Want to be paid in steembacked gold instead? Its possible!
Hate the game, not the player:
Laws being what they are, AFAIK, this is the best solution.
Not to mention the as-of-yet-unsolved issue of machine translation. It fails to capture nuance, and nuance is the key to writing well.
What laws specifically make this a necessity and in what jurisdiction?
I want to know details.
As for hate. There is no hate only genuine (and valid) distrust of intentions.
There is no need to translate content, just need to translate the few words on the actual interface so that russians understand how to post, create an account,etc... Afaik golos will not translate english post to russians anyway, they just want russians to post russian content and they can do that just fine on steemit.com
The only needed feature is an option to select prefered language so that russians can only see the russians content if they wish to.