RE: Steemit: The Anti-Social Network
I'm not sure how this turned into a steem monsters bashing post in the comments but this is a huge problem for the future of the Steem blockchain and has nothing to do with steem monsters or how we create accounts specifically.
In order to grow the Steem platform we need new users, and for dApps to be built on Steem and be successful, they need to be able to onboard lots of new users. HF20 was codenamed "velocity" because one of the primary goals of it was to make onboarding new users easier and cheaper for dApps.
Steem Monsters can now claim about 20 discounted account creation tokens / day with our ~200k SP. Each token allows us to create a new account for free without paying the current 3 STEEM account creation fee.
The fact that this does not give the new account enough RC to reasonably transact on the platform and that we need to give the account further delegation means that this goal of HF20 has failed.
As far as I know Steem Monsters is the only app on the Steem platform that creates accounts for new users. The comments on this post seem to suggest that the problem is on our end for not delegating ~15 SP to each account created through our app.
Imagine you're an app developer looking for a blockchain platform to build on. You have a great app idea that could potentially have hundreds of thousands of active users. You look at Steem and find out that you will need to have millions of SP to delegate out to these users or else they will not be able to use your app.
The other alternative is to redirect new users to steemit.com (an unrelated site they've never heard of) so they can go through a very lengthy process to get an account by which point they've forgotten about your site entirely.
I have had almost this exact conversation with someone interested in building what seemed like a very promising app on the Steem blockchain, and I'm sure you can guess what the outcome was.
The point of all this is that, very simply, the RCs given from the burned account creation fee (or discounted account creation token) must be enough to reasonably transact or the Steem platform has no future. Period.
This is not an issue with how Steem Monsters creates its accounts, it is a fundamental issue preventing the growth of the Steem blockchain.
So, I think there's a case for making accounts with almost no activity. If someone just wants essentially a cold storage wallet that should be an option. I think it's good for the platform to have the lowest cost possible option available for people that aren't here to comment away. It doesn't really hurt the network to have these, and it can be good for people to safely store steem and sbd. It makes sense there is a super low cost option.
The question is what to do about accounts that do want to transact. The options are power up steem, delegate steem, and there appears a third option of delegating RCs. Though that third option doesn't exist yet.
So, this experiment is new and it hasn't been super clear for the last while exactly where RC pools and RC prices would land. I think things are a little more stable so it's a little easier to see. As before it looks like an account needs about 15 steem power to have a decent experience. The question is how to get it there.
Steem Monsters and other dapps could give away free steem, could delegate free steem, could charge more and give back some steem as power, or could charge more and give back some steem power. In the future we could also choose to delegate RCs.
I tend to think the best long term solution is to delegate RCs. This is already under development and there are github issues related to it. Maybe parts will be here before SMTs launch in March. Maybe not. I don't think it's safe to count on them.
So, I think RC delegation is the long term solution. The short term solution is likely charging more and putting steem on an account, or charging more and putting steem power on an account, or simply relying on the social aspect of this place to work itself out.
These things can also often happen socially where new accounts find places like the minnow support project share they don't have enough rcs to interact enough and kind people delegate small amounts of SP to them. I've seen that happen over the year and a half the place has existed. The steem monsters discord group is filled with people that want to help others as well. You can see that through the sheer number of contests that members run. I think folks could also wade into the discord and let people know they are RC limited and folks will help.
I don't think it should be automatic that everyone and anyone can suddenly get a ton of activity on the chain. This will lead to spam and spam will reduce all of our rewards. So, I currently like that there is a gate to higher activity. The question is how to pay for the gap for users who aren't spammers.
So, between now and RC delegation I'm torn between charging more to delegate or hand back steem power, or having the community delegate. Also, keep in mind that we have a free upvote service. Folks can get powered up by getting a introduceyourself post out there and getting votes from the steemmonsters community or steemmonsters account.
So, it's not currently seamless, there is still more work to do 2 weeks after HF20 landed, and in the meantime there are very low cost social work arounds (150 steem power for a week costs 1 steem last I checked, and could cover 10 new accounts for 1 week).
As for Steem Monsters all prioirities are maxxed on getting fighting out. Which happens on sunday. Once that's done there's time to look at other things like "what do we do about new accounts created through our service?"
Thank you very much for the reply here Matt... This point sums it up perfectly:
I'm very happy to have you weigh in and to explain your perspective. As a successful app creator yourself (that is bringing new people into steemit), I would hope that @ned hears this point and does something about it.
I mean come on guys (Steemit Inc)... Why don't you just change the algorithm for commenting? Make commenting count less so people won't notice you have constraints? You can limit the posts, you can limit video and things like that, but don't stop people's ability to speak. This is just common sense.
and @yabapmatt gets a witness vote....Im really happy to see more and more people daring to speak out.
The question now, is of course is what's to be done?
Yes I agree... @yabapmatt is the real deal. And he cares about the experience and the platform too!
You got my witness vote for this comment