Open letter to @steemalliance and private "witness-slack" community
Four hours ago, an account called as @steemalliance posted an update regarding choosing a new leader for Steem. (See the original post.)
I feel I am not the only one excluded on these discussions. Leaked user list on a different private slack server (including some witnesses and big stakeholders) includes 71 members on this blockchain. But the community is much bigger than that.
What we get in the post is a just a teaser about what happened in a specific slack server lacking context of the general situation.
Questions to Steem Alliance
- Will you disclose all conversations on all channels for outsiders to get a clear understanding?
- What is @steemalliance? What are your goals? Who founded it? Who do you represent? What's the purpose?
- Why do we need to pick a leader? Isn't it possible for the community to form multiple kinds of organizations/committees and don't give the god mode to a single person?
Questions to "secret witness slack" community
Did you discuss removing Steemit's stake on #steemit-stake channel? If that's the case, why top20 witnesses started posting so-called public statements about not removing any account's funds? If you're not into it, what was the motivation of the discussion on that particular channel?
Edit: See the answers of @therealwolf and @llfarms.
Please understand that this post is created to learn more about the recent fuss and doesn't target any particular group of people. There are lots of discussions happening in multiple places and most of them are not public for the community.
Please don't mix topics.
1.) Steem Alliance aka a community foundation is currently being developed AFAIK and is very, very new. @aggroed has also been working on a similar concept, so I hope they can merge in some way or another.
I currently don't have too much information on the planning, but I think most of it will be public.
2.) The "leaked slack server" you're talking about is simply a slack server designed for Steem Witnesses to have communication with each other. Over the last week, it became a bit chaotic as more and more people were invited (stakeholders & others).
Now everybody could suggest people to invite and that you didn't get invited would mean that nobody was suggesting you - even though you should have been there from the beginning as you're a witness. Sorry about that.
However, as you can see, it wasn't closed off - everybody had invite rights. And it was far from being a secret society. Again, there were preperations to present our topics to the public in a structured manner, but things span out of control very quickly.
On that server, there was the #steemit-stake channel created, simply to have an overview of Steemit Incs stake. I can understand how it can be interpreted as a threat, but at no time, there was a majority consensus in favour of doing anything in that area - there wasn't even a plan in place. At least not from my perspective.
Now as you can see, the "leak" of data without any context has done more harm than good. I can understand that transparency is important and a lot of people have worked on providing those, but I don't see a reason why everything should be publicly visible. Sometimes people are cautious of speaking the truth of what they really think in a public forum. Especially when things are interpreted the wrong way.
Fact is, Steem has a lot of different people. And many times there are discussions where people have different opinions. It was the same way on the slack server. Few were hugely in favour of the PR HF21 for their own reasons and many were against it. But that doesn't mean people should be banned from the slack just for having a different opinion.
And since they weren't banned, discussions arose. Which from the outside looked like people in that slack were staging a coup. Where in reality, people (especially longtime stakeholders & witnesses) were very frustrated about the direction Steemit Inc was taking. And when people are emotionally upset, I guess things are said which they don't really mean.
But anyway, I'm repeating myself.
I hope this made things clearer, but I personally had enough drama.
I'd prefer someone visible at least openly propose a coup. So steemit.inc learn that there are consequences.
"Reform don't work; I think it's time we tried revolt,
but I don't got the guts to jump up and go first,
so I just shout until my throat hurts,
and I curse and I curse"
Can you give me a invite link?
It's difficult having transparency in an open forum when there are sensitive topics needing to be discussed, but avoiding transparency just causes even more problems down the line as we can see here.
I'm a witness and was not "invited" into these discussions. Now I have to filter through comments of those who were to try to determine what was discussed. The whole secrecy approach just makes leadership look even more frayed and lost. If we are claiming to be transparent while not acting transparent then we're just deceiving ourselves and destroying any sense of being a true team.
Thanks for the clarification. I am sure this summary will help more people to learn what happened where.
what @therealwolf shared is correct & I nominate @emrebeyler to the steem foundation / alliance (whatever the future name is) - will do this in the @steemalliance thread too.
I don't get why you didn't just ask. Of course you would've been invited. I figured you were there already.
The "secret slack" is a term that became coined for the Steemit Inc-run slack, because invitation was only possible through Ned. That and self-censorship made it inherently negative. All slacks are not by their nature "secret slacks". They're just expensive chats where membership is limited because of their cost. The witness slack and the original slack are not the same type by far. Take that from someone who's been in both and was removed by Ned from the original.
I wasnt aware of that kind of organization.
We have been running a community slack where you can get your invite via a simple webpage. There are solutions for that.
Not exactly true. I believe, if you need history (5k messages or sth like that) then it becomes pricey per user. However, there are also great free (free as in beer) alternatives to Slack.
This is only feasible for free slack which quickly becomes unusable if the user base grows too large (because paid slack requires paying a fee per user, per month, so unless you have unlimited funds or people are willing to pay to join, you can't open it up to everyone). In fact early in its history Steem had such a free slack and that is exactly what happened.
I don’t buy this excuse, but hey, it’s your paid Slack, your rules.
None of these are my paid slack.
But I can tell you what I said is exactly what happened to the public Steem slack a few years ago, and the community was much smaller. It isn't feasible.
the Steemalliance which is referenced in this post and the “slack dump” you are referring to are not in the same location. Whether the same people are involved or not could be easily seen by reading both transcripts. It’s all out there in the open.
The conversations had about the @steemalliance idea are listed in their entirety in the post linked, as I responded to in your comment there. Most of your questions about who made the account and who’s idea it was can be found in that transcript as well. I’m not sure if you have read it?
The rest of the questions cannot be answered as nothing has been decided yet (as said in the post linked). There is no talk of one leader and currently all nominations are coming from the community (including yourself). This is an attempt to move forward it the best way possible, no decisions have been made. All conversations on the topic can be found in this post
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemalliance/steem-alliance-takes-shape-or-a-steemit-backed-community-governance-organization
The only thing not included is where Ned went into servers asking for nominations, which could be easily found by looking. As they were just the screenshot at the top of the post followed by individuals nominating those names listed in the post, there isn’t much to find.
I’ve tried to answer your questions the best I can. Transcript of everything in the room will be posted tomorrow. Hopefully soon there will be an open to the public location for these conversations, but transcripts to the chain will continue for transparency.
🤦♂️
Oh, god, how many private slack servers we have? Thanks for the heads up, I have edited the post accordingly. Separated the questions.
It's not possible for the community to select/nominate without knowing what they're actually nominating. It's good to take things into the action but this looks like so pre-mature at the moment.
No. Logs shows some people talking about creating steem alliance. But it doesn't show why do we have #steem-governance channel on that server? Who're the founders of the server? What was happening on the servers in other channels? Which users can read these channels? etc.
How is it any different than belonging to several discords? I'm sure many have discords they do not invite everyone to.
Many slacks exist owned by private individuals, not all are secret.. they are just like a discord server.
The server where the transcript (in the @steemalliance post) came from is the Steemit Inc. Dev slack, after the comment was made publicly about the call for nominations by Ned, he collected names. After 24hrs or so that channel was created and the names were added there. The channel did not exist before the transcript states. No talks about it were held elsewhere. Aggroed set the channel topic as seen there and that was it.
The idea was more of a foundation (as described by Ned in his public call, which I will try to find an additional screenshot of, but he quoted himself in the transcript). That helps to organize funds to help with the development of the chain. “Governance” May not be the right word. As said in the transcript, all names may change.. it’s just a place holder to get it started.
This all happened 4hrs before the post went up and as you can see from the transcript the goal was to get the post out, get as much of the community involved, then start making plans. The nominations are simply for individuals who would be interested in or thought to be good in something like this.
Many may decide to not want to be involved or additional roles may be needed for specific tasks etc.
The Steemit dev slack is owned by Steemit Inc and is home to Top witnesses, backup witnesses, devs, and a few community members plus the Steemit Inc staff. My understanding is it’s where communications happen for hardforks among other things. I can’t speak for Steemit Inc. but since I have a slack server I do know that only a limited amount of people are allowed before it starts to cost a good amount of money per person to have it. Maybe that’s why. Or maybe they needed a place for top 20 to all be in the same room to make decisions. That’s about all I can answer on the specific slack as it’s not mine.
It will not be the home to this community @steemalliance though, as was said in the post. The group will have a separate home that is open to the public and as soon as it’s up, a link will be posted.
I hope that the full transcript plus the very open answers will continue to help individuals see this group is attempting to stop all the back room secret talks and instead bring this organization to the community and be a part of that community.
Thanks for the detailed answer and a better context. Looking forward to seeing more about the @steemalliance.
👍
You’re welcome 🙂
Do you not understand that the Steem community consists of people who are free to communicate with each other however the hell they want?
I would imagine across the entire community there are MANY slacks and other communications vehicles represented, which range in size from very small, maybe even 2-3 people, to very large.
True and I have no objection to that.
I touched on this in another comment on another post loosely associated with the "secret Slack" and off-chain happenings surrounding Steem. All of this chaotic nonsense highlights one important fact about Steem: it's centralised and it's private.
Sure, the witnesses themselves have some kind of power in choosing to support a particular version or not, but as I also pointed out elsewhere, as long as there is a financial incentive to "get in line" and collect your profits, most witnesses will never speak out of turn or do anything that jeopardises their profits (because running full nodes is damn expensive).
This whole mess also highlights Ned's noticeable lack of experience running a multi-million dollar company, as well as his immaturity (knee-jerk reactions, poor communication, defensive and highly reactive). Everything has been mismanaged, and if this were a true community-owned project where we got a say in day-to-day operations, Ned and his incompetent cohorts would have been ousted by the community ages ago.
While community initiatives that aim to change Steem are well-intentioned, because STINC owns Steem, change can only go so far and STINC is the gatekeeper: everything goes through them, concensus for such a move would never be achieved amongst all top witnesses. Forking and removing Steemit Inc and Ned's funds will only kill this platform.
One thing that is certain: Steem is not an open source project. It's a privately run for-profit company that will always put its priorities above the community, as we have seen time and time again.
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I kinda feel like you @emrebeyler, but it would not be fair to comment on something I don't understand. I surely want more clarity over what is happening behind the scenes rather than waking up to a new controversy everyday and keep wondering about the future of my projects.
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