RE: Introduction, and a newcomers experience with Gridcoin.
I think you raised a few good points here. Getting into Gridcoin is not the easiest and being a "dumb user" is simply not possible. What seems logic and everyday business to us, might be a hurdle too high for many others. For example, I could never imagine quiet a lot of my friends getting through the entire process of installing and maintaining the Gridcoin wallet.
I also think that the payout method we have right now for Gridcoin is not ideal. RAC is hard to see through. Furthermore, as you mentioned, it is impossible to just join and get the coins coming without joining grcpool. It would be a much more pleasant way to get paid based on the credit one acquiered in a certain timespan - let's say once a day - and see direct results of what you have accomplished.
Now comes the BUT:
Even though there are some paid developers for Gridcoin, none of them do it as their full time job (as far a I know). These people develop Gridcoin in their free time that they could just as well spend with their families, their hobbies or sleeping (right now, some of them probably lose sleep). Since the community of Gridcoin is - even though it grows rapidly - still rather small, I learned that just bringing up an idea is not enough. There will be no one actually building up on it. We have to actually take matters into our own hand and improve what we don't like. That is the beauty and the burden of decentralised systems.
Now comes the BUT BUT:
It is still very valuable to write about the concerns you have and simply put your ideas out there. Posts like yours have an immense value for the community and start discussions about important topics that might be picked up by the devs.
I personally have not written any code yet for Gridcoin and probably am as "dumb" a user as it gets in Gridcoin. Therefore I do not mean anything above in a judgemental way, I have simply learned that during the months I have been involved in Gridcoin and think it is not the most obvious thought out there.
Thanks for your answer, and for taking the time to comment on my thoughts.
I feel it important that I underline, that this is not meant as as hard a criticism as it perhaps sounded.
I actually like Gridcoin very much, the idea behind it is good, and is has been working fine.
I am sadly not a programmer, so I cant help fix things. I only try to point out the shortcomings that I see.
But perhaps something could be learned about, that when the network is in its current state, information gets important.
They dont have to say much.
Just a short "Yes we know its broken, and we'll fix it, hold on", or "Everything is allright, the network just needs to fix itself", would probably put a lot of peoble's minds at ease.
Right now I think the maintainers of gridcoinstats and / or grcpool are frustrated with the state of things.
I would be, if I tried to provide a service and the network seemed to work against me.
Now I'm just hoping that the problems we are seeing gets fixed soon, so that we can have a reliable network back :)
Added later:
As to the dificulty of joining Gridcoin, yes it seems very hard, and many of my friends would have a hard time too.
I had the benefit of being a long time Boinc user, so I know that part of the system in and out, better than most I suspect. But still it was very hard, and with a steep learning curve to join Gridcoin.
That's true. There are no official posts from the devs as far as I know. You are actually raising a good point there!
If you are looking for a place where you will get this information, join the Gridoin Slack channel. There are the devs and the grcpool and gridcoinstats admins around and also a bunch of other great people!
I have now joined the slack channel, and a few more, they are very informative and have also installed a Gridcoin client to run on the testnet.
So I'm trying to help a little :)
There is a statement from our lead dev on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/gridcoin/comments/7tqe3z
But I know it's hard to keep up with so many different platforms.