Why we don't want our witness to be our developers!
The eos bug gives a good example of why we need our witnesses and our developers to be separate groups of people.
Eos' 21 block producers came together, developed a patch, and deployed it all within a few hours.
Think about that for a minute.
21 groups of people came together, formulated some code, and made a change to the rules of eos that altered how eos functioned.
That is known as a hard fork, if the previous version finds supporters.
All without input from investors in the broader community.
They made an exclusive conference call, changed the code, and didnt bother to ask if anybody else liked it?
Its a club, and you aint in it!
If that happened on steem, why they could come together vote out super linear rewards, our best defense against selfvoting and crap content, increase vote weight by a factor of 4, making 10 votes a day instead of 40 is much easier to abuse, end the 4 posts per day rule that diminishes rewards for more than 4 posts, and allow abusive a**holes to begin to sell the reward pool to the highest bidders!
Who knows what shenanigans could be fomented by a group willing to collude in this manner?
If that ever happened, they could build walls that the community could never scale, or that new investors would ever consider climbing.
The abusers would increase their stake at a rate that would never allow the playing field to level out.
source
If they did that, lord knows how long it would take to vote out the witnesses that knowingly played along in facilitating the abuse.
How much loot could be grabbed out of authors' and curators' pockets?
It could take years to make steem attractive to the masses, again.
Hell, they could even hide accounts so that unless we can access the blockchain ourselves, we would never know about the abuse.
We would only see our rewards go to squat and be none the wiser because the hidden accounts wouldnt be on trending!
Who we elect to the top 21 is very important.
We need contrarians in there to insure that not just those backed by the abusers protect our interests.
Witnesses that put people ahead of profits.
I think we need to make a few changes to how the voting is done, too.
Downvotes gives them a black eye despite not having enough weight to out weigh the whales.
If a witness has 10k downvotes, its an f'n clue.
Expiring votes requiring revoting twice a year keep the legacy votes from perpetuating witnesses not currently active.
Think we will get any of that without devs that are not also witnesses?
Fat chance.
Think they will ever agree to double, plus one, the number of 'top' witnesses?
Come on, this is the new normal!
Interesting take on the situation that I hadn't thought of. It is worth considering.
Yep, the idea of hidden accounts abusing the pool occured to me a long time ago, but i never considered our witnesses capable of that level of collusion.
Now im not so sure.
I thinc some of them would find doing that amusing.
Oh that is 100% for sure already happening :) It isn't even that hard to find either
Can you show me one?
Im in discord with this name if you want to dm me.
I've heard this too, and I think there's some fairly close interaction between steemit Inc and those in the top witnesses (suspected to be freedom and co., though I don't know if I ever stumbled on anything conclusive), not unlike the situation at EOS. I keep hearing people bring up an exclusive slack channel to discuss certain changes as well.
This all doesn't bother me too much though because at the end of the day they still need to look out for the platform. If any action on their part triggers a mass exodus of users it is still a problem. (Like if they carried out all the suggestions of this post for instance ;))
So I guess that they can do a little bit of milking, but not too much lol.
I guess you werent here for hf18 & 19?
Those are the changes they made.
Those changes chose abuse over mass adoption.
And many good people left.
Im still here because it still beats my alternatives.
"Expiring votes requiring revoting twice a year keep the legacy votes from perpetuating witnesses not currently active."
Good thinking. Otherwise, witnesses are like Banks, where you pick one at 18, and somehow, 50 years later, you still have the same bank through sheer inertia. So many people are like this.
And that bank definitely is gonna take advantage of you because you have no agency. You are a passive consumer.
Basically, your proposal amounts to a call for "elections," and in a democracy, that's not a bad idea. :)
Until our witnesses and devs are different people this is what we get.
When I'm sure my machine isn't hacked, my vote will go only to anyone not already in the top 30 or so.
Yeah, now if only community votes mattered,....
One vote from freedom is all it takes to get into the top 50.
I joined steemit under the misconception is was a meritocratic platform...
Seriously , I did. That's my Sunday confession over....
😂
Ouch, it hurts when illusions are shattered,...
😂 - I thought I'd have gotten used to by now, by this time in my life...... but it still hurts!
😂