RE: A Call to All Steemians: Please Help Support @steemchiller and SteemWorld!
Hi @glenalbrethsen, and thanks for the support!
You're pretty much echoing my own feelings there. He's one of those fairly rare developers who's not only a top shelf coder, but he has a really good sense of usability and design. I find myself wishing that STINC would contract with him to fix the main Steemit UI. You know, throw him 100K Steem and say "Here, make this WORK, for 'real' people!" Because we need that kind of fix, if we're going to have ANY kind of mass adoption around here.
It blows my mind that he built SteemWorld by himself, AND he has a job. As for the witness thing, I believe it's a time/money issue, as well. Setting up a witness requires an up-front investment in both time and money... and it takes a while to get somewhere. You have to become a posting marketing machine to pull yourself into the top 50, and then into the top 20. In an ideal world, he might be able to partner with someone who's a highly visible community member and involved poster... so you have the promotional half and the technical half of the witness... as we are seeing more and more with "community" witnesses.
So I think he has just been realistic about being able to manage "what it takes" to manage SteemWorld and run a witness. Of course, he also hasn't "been here since the beginning," which also makes it harder...
But I just feel strongly that he deserves our support!
=^..^=
Yes, I believe he does, especially from all of us who are sitting on his app all day checking out what's going on. It looks like in his first weekly update that I read after making my comment that he intends to become a witness, so maybe that will help with more expenses than just the witness server if he can get high enough up there. I have a few votes to make yet that I would gladly give him one.
Doubling or tripling up on a witness server seems like a good way to go, especially when sharing expenses, and if you're not that well known. It seems to take a while to build a reputation.
It would be great if someone were consistently revamping the Steemit UI. I'm wondering what Communities is going to look like, though, and there is SugarSteem that theuxyeti has been working on that I think is supposed to have something ready to use by the end of summer. Haven't been seeing as many updates but I think that's more or less the target.
I'd rather the "flagship" app be the one with the innovations, but I suppose as long as it's connected to STEEM, it doesn't matter so much.
The main issues aren't Steemit related anyway, but related to how STEEM is distributed, so regardless of the interface, we're still going to have that to contend with, and more, I guess, with HF 20 and potential other changes.
I wish they were paying more attention to the main Steemit features and UI, but it seems like STINC is more interested in having a bunch of other people develop free standing apps based on the promised SMTs.
The other thing I wish they'd do is add to the main UI in such a way that the "major" apps could all be launched from within Steemit, maybe from a dropdown menu. It would offer more of a sense of community cohesiveness, which would help the retention problem by making Steemit more "sticky."
I take a very tiny amount of heart in knowing that as long as I am growing my SP balance by 5-10% a month, I am part of redistributing Steem from the top of the pyramid down. Sure, it's very minor, in the greater scope of things, but at least it is something. And then I can look to folks like yourself who've managed to build a pretty respectable stake in just double the time I have been working at it.
=^..^=
Well, 1,000-plus of my SP comes from smaller investments I made over the course of three months, when prices were lower, but not quite as low as they were a week or so ago. So, in reality, by the time the payouts are made tomorrow, I'll be around 420 SP for six months that I've earned. I believe the additional has helped with that, but I don't know how much.
I wish Steemit Inc would do a lot of things. And I wish more of us would flat out demand it, but we appear to be too independent and stubborn to do that, so we keep coming up with workarounds and apps. Quite a bit of it gets some delegation or some form of rewards, while others don't. It always seems to be the ones with the better sell, whether they have a superior product or not. I've always thought of that as being backwards.
I'd like to have separate pools and quit having things dump into Steemit. I don't go looking for memes or videos that much, so I guess out of sight out of mind will do.