You expressed my thoughts exactly. I've gained a lot of excitement about this platform, the community, and what I've learned here. But, the unreliability of our interface at steemit the last couple weeks has been frustrating. As @lukestokes said, without communication from the team or quick resolution of these problems, it causes users to lose faith in the system. It should be interesting to hear what happens at Steem Fest 2 and see the aftermath here at Steemit (hopefully there's aftermath, because if not, that would be a bad sign). Luke's idea of a Slack channel is great: put it up there for the community to see. If we don't see that they're "eating their own dog food" there needs to be another go-to resource that lets the users know, and see, that they're working to keep steemit running.

You mention this being a disgrace, and I think you're right. Steemit has had a strong start, a lot of support from within the community, and seeing growth to where it has then be suffering with dev communication and on-going platform reliability issues is a pretty bad look. It feels like this should have been something that got ironed out much sooner. I hope the aftermath is a better way of Steemit Inc keeping in touch with the community, being aware of the problems and addressing them efficiently, while avoiding hot headed episodes of lashing out at complaining users on social media.

_{Time to click the "Post" button, watch that wheel turn for a solid minute, and hope for the best.}