Community Engagement Post - What do you expect from your witnesses?
I would like to get input from the community on this topic. Please reply in the comments below with your thoughts.
I plan to use the information in a post that I am putting together on how to be a good witness.
I will be splitting the liquid portion of the payout from this post between all of the users that contribute to the conversation in a valuable way.
A witness should consistently educate all members in the platform. Once a week, pick an ideal day to promote and tell us your progress.
They all should together voice their opinions and reassure us how steemit is doing.
All witnesses should use a channel or a tag and lay out their progress and help all steemians build trust in steemit.
N.B.
What is a witness duty on steemit ? All I know, witness creates block for steemit and they get compensate well. Please advise.
I will actually be creating a post on this topic in about a week. Stay tuned :)
Some other users may also reply to your comment with their thoughts.
Cool !! Be waiting for your post.
As a witness @timcliff your post will fill more blanks.
Thanks.
Keep on steemit!
A few specific items:
I think weekly is a bit too frequent, but I agree that they should definitely be regular.
Regarding witness involvement in spam control, plagiarism, child abuse, etc. and regarding mediation (re: your flagging war point) I think esteemed (eh? ;) ) people of the community can do this. It can be the case that witnesses do this but should not be required of them. To be honest I think the larger stakeholders have more of a responsibility here.
While I don't think much changes week by week, especially on the node reports, the nature of Steemit and that almost immediate drop from attention of most posts after the first day is why I would suggest a weekly post(which really could be a cut and paste when things haven't changed).
I feel witness should bring different things to the table and be more focused on whatever their niche is then trying to cash a very wide net.
While I would agree I want to see some kind of update or least them being active here weekly.
What would be cool is if ones that had similar things they bring to Steemit would get to gather and create a collective blog from time to time more on a month scale. That invites in community engagement where there are several witness their thought the day to interact with it till it closes.
I’m not sure how much working together if any happens behind the scenes.
As far as the disturbing illegal things going on this site I can only hope Steemit Inc. is working on dealing with that more. Just flagging it is not enough when it comes to certain things even more so if their servers are storing it. I don't know if witness have a more direct commutations line to devs to deal with things like that faster or not.
3 primary wants from wintesses:
Another thing I'll add, but didn't want to edit the original post:
I don't want witnesses to necessarily issue long weekly updates. I think the long updates should be limited to important updates either monthly or quarterly, and monthly may be too frequent.
The other thing is that witnesses shouldn't feel obligated to push the platform in one direction or another so long as overall growth and innovative change is taking place. We need to keep Steemit and open and accepting place of free experimentation.
Well said. Everyone is trying to help the value of STEEM rise but there are many ways to do this and a witnesses long term vision for steemit is extremely important.
When I voiced concerns that in the near future, steemit could become saturated with SEO-like articles, primarily for advertising purposes and that regular people would have a much harder time getting their material seen, the response from a few witnesses was "Why do you care? Your account will be worth a fortune since you were here early on."
I would like to see witnesses who are more concerned about the environment and culture of steemit because this place is more than a money making opportunity for me and a lot of other regular users, whether they realize it or not.
Bravo! Indeed! And I'm sorry some of the witnesses gave you that response. Hoping @jesta @timcliff @gtg and others see this and take note.
I'll try to get to know these witnesses as well. Thanks for mentioning them. :-)
I love this one, clear and to the point of what I'd see to be the core responsibilities. I think this is the best answer here if I could just add that they need to be able to actually run the witness server and perhaps a seed too.
Agree, they certainly need to be able to run the blockchain well. Sort of a bare minimum requirement from my perspective.
I always felt someone declaring to be a witness covered these things in their starting witness blog.
Perhaps they should consider a monthly or a quarterly update that references these things if they have not been covered in a recent witness update post.
Totally. I wasn't aware of the starting witness blog, but if they can link back to it that would be helpful. General navigation around Steemit needs to be improved so that this would be easier, too.
Active
Weekly to bi-weekly witnesses updates on what they have been up to. While I understand not every week will be blog worthy in what they are up to. They should keep people up to date as a way to engage with those who have either voted for them or are thinking about doing so.
Community member. While they do not need to be active 24/7 they least need to show up to Steemit a couple times a week and blog or leave comments. It makes it easy for anyone checking up on who they vote for to see if they are still active and more importantly what are they up to outside of witness report.
Witness servers themselves. They need to do the best they can to keep them running and not missing blocks. They should also keep them updated or inform everyone in a blog post on why they are not updating to the latest version.
Someone who has been with Steemit for at least 3-6 months depending on how active they are. It takes time to not only get to understand how Steemit works and make friends but also have some kind of track record. I also want to know if this person is committed to running as a witness in the long run. It’s easy to show up and two weeks later think “oh I’ll be a witness” than a month later moves onto the next project in cryptocurrency that catches their eye.
Impact on Steemit
Use their reputation to support projects/communities. There are a lot of different communities out there focusing on all kinds of things. I feel this is important that they are willing to help grow, support, and even promote it. It shows they care enough to get involved to such a degree in something that they are risking how the public view them based on what happens to the project/communities.
Passion. They need to have a passion for something. It could be anything from fighting spammers, working to improve quality of life, engaging with minnows, going out and spreading the word of Steemit. Whatever it may be they need to care enough about something that is trying to solve, create, or bring value to Steemit.
Have opinions and are willing to speak their mind. With how much power Steemit gives to a witness I don’t want it to be filled with a bunch of “yes” only people. Those who agree with anything no matter what not wanting to anger someone. If they have no backbone then they won’t stand up and speak out if they witness something that needs to be improved or addressed. Therefore, their impact on Steemit itself is very little.
Knowledge
What is this person bringing to the platform being a witness that others are not? That’s great if they are expert on blockchain technology but what is something new they are going to bring into the eco system? What personal experience and knowledge do they have that will further progress the platform?
While I don’t expect every witness to be an expert on everything they should least have some basic understanding of quite a few things. If they can’t even format a blog, know how to reach out for help when their witness server stops working. Then, they have far too much research they need to do before they should even try to be a witness.
Well first of all, engaging with none witness users about what they'd like from witnesses is a great start.
I'd like to see communities made a top priority as I think they have the potential to really help content creators connect witheach other and potential readers and improve the culture of steemit. If we connect based on interest and a sense of community, our posts are all more likely to be read. The current layout of steemit is a bit unorganized, making it really hard to get your post read after the first hour that you post it, even with a fair amount of followers.
I think more witness support for manual curation and manual curation initiatives would be fantastic. I know of OCD, which I just made a post about...if there are any more manual curation initiatives, please tell me (curie is half and half if I understand correctly). Since it seems bots are here to stay, the least we can do is create a culture where manual curation and real engagement is encouraged as much as possible, and actually practiced by whales. I'm not sure what kind of changes to the structure of steemit could be introduced to encourage this, but witnesses do have a lot of influence so just continuing to voice support for this kind of behavior might be mildly effective.
I should also add that I like when each witness has their own unique contribution to the platform, whether that be App development, community engagement, promotion or education on how it all works behind the scene. I don't need weekly updates but it's important to know where the witness stands on important issues, decisions and debates.
I see you engaging a lot here, I found you in the comment section of multiple non-trending posts and just realized you are a high ranking witness, that makes me feel quite good.
I'll be voting for you as witness!
meep
Cool, thanks :)
What I look for in a witness first and foremost is communication of what they are doing. If they are unable to do that because of time constraints, having some sort of public relations is essential to me. A good example of this is @jerrybanfield's post today showing what the top 10 witnesses are up to. I also make an effort to promote and support witnesses who I know are working hard for this community. (How can I vote for you if I don't know what you do?)
Number 1 also is integrity. When I see the efforts witnesses go through to help others, it gives me confidence that they are not just here for the payout. So I suppose I judge integrity by what type of service these witnesses bring to the community. It is easy for me to see how helpful people like you @drakos, @rycharde, @reggaemuffin, and @netuoso are. (incomplete list, just who came up off the top of my head)
I will include the ability to act quickly when the community experiences crisis. many witnesses got my vote during the bandwidth crisis, simply because I knew that they were there for the people who lost service during that time (above mentioned included in that list but many more I mentioned in my "easy witness voting guide" at that time)
Willingness to take a moment of time to answer the concerns of the community, bandwidth crisis, for example. More current would be the "Voting Abuse" crisis, which you highlighted from the new whitepaper is part of the role of witness.
I will come back here and update this comment if I can think of any other "essentials". Thank you for everything you do @timcliff!
Saludos, soy de Venezuela y nuevo en esta red. Entiendo que los testigos son lideres de divisiones de trabajo virtual que llevan el peso de la avanzada en la criptocurrencia; es decir la hoja de ruta a seguir en el caso de estimular y generar confianza en los hacen el crecimiento de la red.
En tal sentido lo primero que debe promover más que informes largos y repetitivos como los que hace el capital mundial es centrase en hacer valer los valores y principios que los que participan en este movimiento
Saludos. Documento mi trabajo de testigo en informes de testigos periódicos, que publico aproximadamente una vez al mes. Si está interesado en ver lo que estoy haciendo como testigo, puede revisar esos informes. Si hay algo que sienta que debo hacer además de lo que ya estoy haciendo, hágamelo saber.
Just like how a dictionary or glossary does it.
How to be a good witness: For example, see @timcliff
..and please don't be humble or shy about it. I've watched you evolve for months (and soon years) doing this your way Tim, there is a lot to be learned from you, and you openly share yourself to everyone. Thank you.
Thanks @intelliguy! Appreciate all you do as well :)
I expect witnesses to be competent, trustworthy, and active members in the Steemit community. They should have extensive knowledge about cryptocurrencies software and network. I think the goal of witnesses should be to contribute positive, valuable information to this platform. If they strive to have the qualities I listed above then I think they will be great witnesses for Steemit. Thanks for sharing! It is great to see leaders on this platform continue to try to improve and grow Steemit. Stay hungry! I am looking forward to following this thread.