RE: Crunch Time! For Steemit, Devs, and Witnesses.
Greta post, Kevin. One of the biggest challenges we face is recognizing how some actions impact multiple things. Onboarding done wrong could increase spam and bandwidth issues. Increased blocksizes with so much known spam going on could cause even more spam and not solve the bandwidth issue. The blockchain is already quite large, and we don’t want to hit physical hardware limitations for full nodes if we don’t take blockchain bloat seriously.
I could go on and on. More marketing now would mean more problems if we don’t solve them first and prepare for mass adoption. Rewards tweaking when much if the problems we see relate to content discovery which may actually be solved via communities is another example of a tweak we could make but we’re not clear yet if it will actually solve a problem or introduce a new one. This is challenging stuff, but I think many smart people are up for the challenge.
I’m still on vacarion, but even here I’m trying to follow this stuff so we can keep moving forward and be making progress. If that means learning C++ and submitting my own pull requests, I will, I’m just not super clear on exactly what the best path forward for some of these issues are other than the long-term core blockchain retooling Steemit is working on with appbase. From there, we can hopefully seriously tackle these other problems from a long-term thinking perspective and not quick bandaid fixes. It’s difficult stuff, for sure. If we don’t pull it off, we’ll lose out and rightfully so. Let’s work hard to avoid that fate.
How will content discovery be solved with communities? We need filters! We need to get rid of Trending and Hot channels. It is soo easy, and it takes so much time to get something in that area, but then I hear/read the magic word communities again! But nobody is able to tell what feature it will have; If even the Steemit UI will have features, or somebody else need to build the UI. With Trending and Hot in communities, we will have Steemit on smaller scale in the communities.
As Kevin pointed out, we need a changing in vote culture.
I don't want to scare people, but one thing is for sure: Steemit will get competition, and my gut feel says it is closer by in time than you want to believe.
In my mind, communities will be better for curation as people subscribe to their favourites, and anything out of scope wouldn't be considered. It's just like subreddits, but of course, with some difference due to bc implementation. The features can be checked on Github. But yeah, agree about the filters/search functions. Upvoted to get more opinions on it.
Indeed Communities may be a better way to bring likeminded together; But that in itself does not mean people are starting to distribute their votes better, or less automatic. It also doesn't mean post will be more visible; Assuming we will grow our community as a whole and communities will also be having quite a few members. It even doesnt mean a reduction in Spamming and self voting (direct and indirect).
It’s a great question. I have on my mental to do list a task to go through the hivemind github (“communities”) and do a post on the progress being made. I was told by @timcliff there are even some mock-up screenshots there which may be interesting for us to evaluate in order to get a better feel for what’s coming and how it may solve some issues we see now.
That would be great; A summary of what is on Github in language most of us can understand. In the end, most of us are not tech savy, but amongst them could be great ideas for feature enhancements and use cases.
Thanks for explaining the issues at hand @lukestokes. Complex problems indeed, and I still personally think they're not easily solvable. Steem's just facing them sooner than all blockchain apps out there. Even eth app devs recently pushed forward the idea of having tx fees charged through inflation instead of users upfront. What would be the best place to get devs looking into the problems and solutions for the stuff mentioned in the post? Thanks @lukestokes, I like your focus on long-term development instead of quick fixes. Seems like you're having a great time beaching out! Have a great time with the fam :)
From what I've seen, they already are, they are just prioritizing work that builds a long-term foundation to solve these problems from the ground up instead of just painting them over. To keep track of what they have going on, see this post where I talk about the various Github repos and how we can monitor them ourselves.
Absolutely! I don't want to go back to Nashville. :)
Hi Luke + Kevin, I totally agree with Your thoughts...
However, I'm just a low-level fish here at Steemit but...
Have suggested a number of times to a few current witnesses that they form a Round Table for say, the top 40 Witnesses every month and record their meeting to the blockchain... either in writing or better yet, their video recorded session...SO, we could move forward with the many ideas to improve upon Steemit and the various issues You've both mentioned.
Perhaps You guys could make this suggestion of a regular Round Table meeting so Steemit does not continue to stagnate.
Let me know what You think...
Thanks Kevin for Your Post and Thank You Luke for Your comments.
Cheers !!
@aggroed has been doing a great job of providing a regular witness panel discussion via MSP Waves on Discord, which I think is a good step forward. There is regular communication going on between witnesses but it's not on the blockchain and not public. I'd like more transparency, myself, but I understand how some security patches need to be responsibly rolled out to protect the integrity of the system and how the old saying of "too many cooks in the kitchen" can prove true when everyone has an opinion on something but few have done the hard work of deeply understanding the game theory dynamics, motivational incentives, psychological challenges, and historical programming limitations of what is being done here.
As I tried to explain here, I don't think Steemit is stagnating. I think the team is working on what makes the most sense to work on, though I get how we'd all like to see more progress on multiple fronts. If the focus was on Steemit instead of STEEM, I think we'd all be worse off because STEEM is more valuable that Steemit.
Hmm agreed that Steem is more valuable of course, but Steemit should leverage its position at the moment though since it's in top 1000 and they've the resources.. at least for the rest of 2018. Most users are going through Steemit at the moment anyway and the UI/UX should be way improved. The rest of the Steem ecosystem can benefit from Steemit's success later, or else, too many disparate elements atm and the little skirmishes wouldn't be enough achieving enough of their own network effects/critical mass.. just my 2cents..
The interesting thing to me is when we say “Steemit should...” we (in a sense) are claiming more knowledge then they have. If they were to focus on UX/UI (above current requirements) the net result could be more signups, more bandwidth issues, more spam/blockchain bloat, more frustrated people concerned with poor content discovery, etc. it might actually make the problems they are working on now more difficult. Having money to hire more developers doesn’t mean a project will move faster with more developers.
I might be wrong about all this and maybe they are just incompetent and not working on what matters. When I look at the github activity, that’s not the impression I get though.
The good thing, to me, is how passionate this community is to see it succeed. Many of us really care about this place and that’s a fantastic thing!
Good Idea!
Maybe an Official DLive session...
;)
"More marketing now would mean more problems if we don’t solve them first "
Very well said.