Open letter to @steemalliance and private "witness-slack" community
Four hours ago, an account called as @steemalliance posted an update regarding choosing a new leader for Steem. (See the original post.)
I feel I am not the only one excluded on these discussions. Leaked user list on a different private slack server (including some witnesses and big stakeholders) includes 71 members on this blockchain. But the community is much bigger than that.
What we get in the post is a just a teaser about what happened in a specific slack server lacking context of the general situation.
Questions to Steem Alliance
- Will you disclose all conversations on all channels for outsiders to get a clear understanding?
- What is @steemalliance? What are your goals? Who founded it? Who do you represent? What's the purpose?
- Why do we need to pick a leader? Isn't it possible for the community to form multiple kinds of organizations/committees and don't give the god mode to a single person?
Questions to "secret witness slack" community
Did you discuss removing Steemit's stake on #steemit-stake channel? If that's the case, why top20 witnesses started posting so-called public statements about not removing any account's funds? If you're not into it, what was the motivation of the discussion on that particular channel?
Edit: See the answers of @therealwolf and @llfarms.
Please understand that this post is created to learn more about the recent fuss and doesn't target any particular group of people. There are lots of discussions happening in multiple places and most of them are not public for the community.
I don't get why you didn't just ask. Of course you would've been invited. I figured you were there already.
The "secret slack" is a term that became coined for the Steemit Inc-run slack, because invitation was only possible through Ned. That and self-censorship made it inherently negative. All slacks are not by their nature "secret slacks". They're just expensive chats where membership is limited because of their cost. The witness slack and the original slack are not the same type by far. Take that from someone who's been in both and was removed by Ned from the original.
I wasnt aware of that kind of organization.
We have been running a community slack where you can get your invite via a simple webpage. There are solutions for that.
Not exactly true. I believe, if you need history (5k messages or sth like that) then it becomes pricey per user. However, there are also great free (free as in beer) alternatives to Slack.
This is only feasible for free slack which quickly becomes unusable if the user base grows too large (because paid slack requires paying a fee per user, per month, so unless you have unlimited funds or people are willing to pay to join, you can't open it up to everyone). In fact early in its history Steem had such a free slack and that is exactly what happened.
I don’t buy this excuse, but hey, it’s your paid Slack, your rules.
None of these are my paid slack.
But I can tell you what I said is exactly what happened to the public Steem slack a few years ago, and the community was much smaller. It isn't feasible.
the Steemalliance which is referenced in this post and the “slack dump” you are referring to are not in the same location. Whether the same people are involved or not could be easily seen by reading both transcripts. It’s all out there in the open.
The conversations had about the @steemalliance idea are listed in their entirety in the post linked, as I responded to in your comment there. Most of your questions about who made the account and who’s idea it was can be found in that transcript as well. I’m not sure if you have read it?
The rest of the questions cannot be answered as nothing has been decided yet (as said in the post linked). There is no talk of one leader and currently all nominations are coming from the community (including yourself). This is an attempt to move forward it the best way possible, no decisions have been made. All conversations on the topic can be found in this post
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemalliance/steem-alliance-takes-shape-or-a-steemit-backed-community-governance-organization
The only thing not included is where Ned went into servers asking for nominations, which could be easily found by looking. As they were just the screenshot at the top of the post followed by individuals nominating those names listed in the post, there isn’t much to find.
I’ve tried to answer your questions the best I can. Transcript of everything in the room will be posted tomorrow. Hopefully soon there will be an open to the public location for these conversations, but transcripts to the chain will continue for transparency.
🤦♂️
Oh, god, how many private slack servers we have? Thanks for the heads up, I have edited the post accordingly. Separated the questions.
It's not possible for the community to select/nominate without knowing what they're actually nominating. It's good to take things into the action but this looks like so pre-mature at the moment.
No. Logs shows some people talking about creating steem alliance. But it doesn't show why do we have #steem-governance channel on that server? Who're the founders of the server? What was happening on the servers in other channels? Which users can read these channels? etc.
How is it any different than belonging to several discords? I'm sure many have discords they do not invite everyone to.
Many slacks exist owned by private individuals, not all are secret.. they are just like a discord server.
The server where the transcript (in the @steemalliance post) came from is the Steemit Inc. Dev slack, after the comment was made publicly about the call for nominations by Ned, he collected names. After 24hrs or so that channel was created and the names were added there. The channel did not exist before the transcript states. No talks about it were held elsewhere. Aggroed set the channel topic as seen there and that was it.
The idea was more of a foundation (as described by Ned in his public call, which I will try to find an additional screenshot of, but he quoted himself in the transcript). That helps to organize funds to help with the development of the chain. “Governance” May not be the right word. As said in the transcript, all names may change.. it’s just a place holder to get it started.
This all happened 4hrs before the post went up and as you can see from the transcript the goal was to get the post out, get as much of the community involved, then start making plans. The nominations are simply for individuals who would be interested in or thought to be good in something like this.
Many may decide to not want to be involved or additional roles may be needed for specific tasks etc.
The Steemit dev slack is owned by Steemit Inc and is home to Top witnesses, backup witnesses, devs, and a few community members plus the Steemit Inc staff. My understanding is it’s where communications happen for hardforks among other things. I can’t speak for Steemit Inc. but since I have a slack server I do know that only a limited amount of people are allowed before it starts to cost a good amount of money per person to have it. Maybe that’s why. Or maybe they needed a place for top 20 to all be in the same room to make decisions. That’s about all I can answer on the specific slack as it’s not mine.
It will not be the home to this community @steemalliance though, as was said in the post. The group will have a separate home that is open to the public and as soon as it’s up, a link will be posted.
I hope that the full transcript plus the very open answers will continue to help individuals see this group is attempting to stop all the back room secret talks and instead bring this organization to the community and be a part of that community.
Thanks for the detailed answer and a better context. Looking forward to seeing more about the @steemalliance.
👍
You’re welcome 🙂
Do you not understand that the Steem community consists of people who are free to communicate with each other however the hell they want?
I would imagine across the entire community there are MANY slacks and other communications vehicles represented, which range in size from very small, maybe even 2-3 people, to very large.
True and I have no objection to that.
I touched on this in another comment on another post loosely associated with the "secret Slack" and off-chain happenings surrounding Steem. All of this chaotic nonsense highlights one important fact about Steem: it's centralised and it's private.
Sure, the witnesses themselves have some kind of power in choosing to support a particular version or not, but as I also pointed out elsewhere, as long as there is a financial incentive to "get in line" and collect your profits, most witnesses will never speak out of turn or do anything that jeopardises their profits (because running full nodes is damn expensive).
This whole mess also highlights Ned's noticeable lack of experience running a multi-million dollar company, as well as his immaturity (knee-jerk reactions, poor communication, defensive and highly reactive). Everything has been mismanaged, and if this were a true community-owned project where we got a say in day-to-day operations, Ned and his incompetent cohorts would have been ousted by the community ages ago.
While community initiatives that aim to change Steem are well-intentioned, because STINC owns Steem, change can only go so far and STINC is the gatekeeper: everything goes through them, concensus for such a move would never be achieved amongst all top witnesses. Forking and removing Steemit Inc and Ned's funds will only kill this platform.
One thing that is certain: Steem is not an open source project. It's a privately run for-profit company that will always put its priorities above the community, as we have seen time and time again.
100% upvote from @betgames worth $0.37
When you say cohorts, you are including Bullies and Abusive Downvoters, right?
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I kinda feel like you @emrebeyler, but it would not be fair to comment on something I don't understand. I surely want more clarity over what is happening behind the scenes rather than waking up to a new controversy everyday and keep wondering about the future of my projects.
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Question: why is so much "discussed" off chain?
Edit: typo
Everyone involved including @ned wants all the discussions regarding the initiative public. Many of us just woke up or returned after a weekend and just going through the discussions. Everyone is making attempts to have the discussions open and transparent. For most people involved the last 1 - 2 weeks was very stressful. Irrespective of what they said or did this is one common situation. Please provide some time so that things can be put into place.
Oh, I don't even care about this non-issue to me. Steemit incs financials are their own, maybe they want to cash out all their steem dumping on the markets, fine by me... They get some cash for whatever, and the community will eventually recover. I'll be right here along the ride posting about my poops and smoking weed and computer tech, Buddhism and whatever else is going on, and maybe one day actually release the apps I'm working on for steem, which will likely (assuming x,y & z align) include my own node and datacenter (or a closet rented out with high-speed uncapped connections and a series of minimal cost vps servers).
I just don't like the disconnect.. we (ok, I) want to talk about the platform.... On the platform, not still tied to another network, like slack or discord etc..
Edit: glaring typos, my mistake
Personally, I would like to use an on-chain asynchronous communication app that behaves like https://zulipchat.com
What happens when people run out of RCs. They're just muted? Spend a bunch of money some people don't have to buy more? Does this really seem like a productive way to go?
Steem is not all things to all people for all purposes. That's unrealistic.
@smooth That's why I said on-chain and not Steem.
Also, it will be something similar to the proposal here : https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/1466795
@bsameep had came up with the idea independent of the above.
I'm not sure there are any blockchains which are much more scalable than Steem (though there may be some in the future) which means any attempting to do the same things will run into the same sorts of capacity constraints, though the details will differ. A lot of these projects are addressing the issue by way of ignoring it, wishful thinking, or even false claims.
@smooth See the link I shared - its the same bitshares 2.0 core + chainbase and the proposal is by our own @blocktrades :-)
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I feel like, while transparency is essential for a healthier evolution of Steem, too many voices talking at the same time would cause too much noise and a lack of direction.
What about the committee presenting various options to the community on a regular basis along with individuals defending their preferred option through Steem posts?
Could we then use dpoll to let people express their views centrally and get a better feel for where the general consensus would be?
Transparency doesn't mean too many voices. E.g: Discord lets you set permissions on channels where only a group of people may talk while keeping the conversation open to anyone.
The https://steemcommunity.github.io/ discord does exactly this, all channels are readable by everyone and so far it seems to work quite well. Feel free to join :)
Yes, that is what I meant.
And good idea on the polls! :)