Crunch Time! For Steemit, Devs, and Witnesses.
First of all I want you guys to play the Youtube video above and know this is how the Steem blockchain is like to me - beautiful. My gut's feeling some pressure recently, so let's have a conversation about Steem's immediate existential risks and ways to overcome them as soon as possible. I'm in no way saying that current developers and witnesses are not doing anything to address some of the most pressing issues, but I'm just finding it difficult to figure out the relevant progress and discussions surrounding them. And crunch time is near.. so let's talk about it.
These points are some of the most sound reasoning I've come across chatting with other couple of investors on the platform. Just take it as a voice from a concerned user / investor:-
There are blockchain projects with enough network effects at the moment to branch into social media. Existing social media platforms out there could even start getting into blockchains. After 2 years of virtually zero competitors, time feels like it's close now for the emergence of a very real Steem slayer. It's already looming on the horizon. I don't have to say much about this.
However, Steem has been and still is in a unique position with proven user adoption. It has been driving websites like Steemit into the top 1000. That's rare for social-media startups because it's really not easy to get return users, and more importantly, getting users that become inhabitants. Network effects don't just spring up all that easily, even with loads of money reserved just for boosting user adoption. Lady luck has been good with Steem and its applications, especially Steemit.
But Top 1000 is still not good enough to eliminate the looming existential risks that Steem will be facing in 2018. So let's go for a Top 250 website as soon as possible.
Steemit Inc has the resources. Steemit.com is already in top 1000. Leverage the position. Top priority should be placed for sign-ups and onboarding. This is the biggest problem the dev teams must solve. Solutions in this domain will translate into the network's biggest business opportunities. Becoming a top 250 website / application could simply increase Steem's valuation massively, reduces risk of a dropping out the leagues, while attracting more mainstream entrepreneurs and developers into adopting the protocol. Just the sheer amount of attention flowing in as a top 250 website is what Steem needs.
Witnesses should consider increasing the blocksize to ensure smooth user experience. Please favour growing and retaining users. The bloat problem will have a better chance of being taken care of with mass adoption. It's a good problem to have anyway. Focus on maximising the network effects that Steem has been privileged to have experienced for the past 2 years.
Secure dashboard / application hub needed. I know that's https://steemconnect.com/, but what's the current rollout plan?
Finally, how about finding the Goldilocks zone for reward-curve? I like linear, but it seems to have been enabling tragedy of the commons at full-scale. Money is ultimately a social tool, and hence should work towards a common good for it to have any lasting value. So the voting economics could use some changes. What happened to curation and a meritorious culture? For one I'm happy to see @curie supporters still staying on mission. Maybe inching something like 13.37% towards n2 will solve most of the voting problems on the platform.
In short: supercharge signup / onboarding process, Steemconnect c/w user dashboard, and attempt to fix the voting issue just by going for something in between linear and n2. I'm sure this has been brought up again and again, but I just hope to be assured there are indeed enough developers pushing on developing the solutions, even if it means sleepless nights. Because that's what I will 100% do if it's in my domain, to be honest.
I know it's too easy for me to just talk and crack the whip here lol.. but I think plenty of us have been patiently waiting in confidence of developers and witnesses putting their best work forward. I just feel like making some noise now because time may be running out.
Anyway, happy 2nd birthday to the Steem blockchain! Much thanks to everyone who has been putting the time and effort into improving the platform. Your hard work is always much appreciated.
Good one @kevinwong!
I agree, they need to sort the sign-up process out, I'm getting loads of people to join but half of them are saying that they have been waiting a month with no luck!
A few have even said it was months ago, it's as if some of these new people have been completely blanked.
I have been signing people up through the back door with blocktrades but this cost me everytime, not only do I pay the 4.4 steem but I usually buy them 10 steempower because they can't even upload a profile picture with 4 steempower.
Its a joke and they need to sort it out, it's not as if it's a new problem.
Hey Mark,
Go here: https://v2.steemconnect.com/accounts/create
No fee to create the account. If you create an account with 3 steem it goes straight into the account and you can delegate SP at the time of creation so your friends can work straight away.
What? Can't upload profile pic with 4 SP? Come on.. if it's a cost vs performance issue on tight budget, then it's understandable. I hope it's not witnesses trying to cut too much corners. Maybe I'm sounding like an arse here xD
Edit: tbf, I think need to look into that 4 SP claim, I've never heard of this though, along with completely blanked accounts.
Yeah! I remember when I opened my second account with blocktrades a few months ago, I Upvoted a few people and made a comment, this destroyed my bandwidth and I couldn't do anything.
So I sent some SBD from this account but it wouldn't let me exchange it on the market, so I sent some steem, no, I couldn't even power up the Steem. So I went back to blocktrades and purchased some steempower, what a fucking mission and Ive been on steemit for nearly a year, can you imagine a newcomer having to go through all that? I'd give up and go back to Facebook.
Don't get me wrong, steemit has been good to me and It has a lot going for it, but it's not gonna go mainstream if they don't fix these issues.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, @kevinwong.
You make a number of important points, but I think we need to look at the greater "story" here, which seems to be that Steemit has lost focus; lost direction — maybe even lost its sense of identity.
What IS this place? It set itself up to be a social content site, but as of late it seems more like its a gateway for developers to build something SMT based. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but you can't drive the sort of traffic needed to become a top-250 site on the promise "this is a great place to develop an app!"
As a content creator, I'm not seeing much happen here. Mostly what I am seeing is that the "human greed gene" is alive and well and running rampant. And then I am seeing a bunch of "apps for Steem/Steemit."
That might "sell" if you're a developer of blockchainiac. However, I doubt it'll "sell" to a general social media user. Who cares? We have a cumbersome interface; it's 2018 and I'm hard coding pages ("posts") in HTML to get them to look nice. We have almost no filters to sort content, so finding anything is a mess. I have 3700 followers-- I just wish I could "organize" them into tiers, or by interest, or by frequency of visit... LIKE YOU CAN on twitter, Farcebook and elsewhere. Why can't we have something really simple like a photo album?
And then there are all these really worthy apps-- but why can't we drop them into a sort of "frame" so the user home page has buttons/links to Dtube, Zappl, Dsound, Steepshot-- to not only increase EASE OF USE, but to create some "cross-pollination?"
Why do I say all this?
Because it's an awesome idea to smooth out the onboarding process, but just WHAT are we onboarding all these newcomers INTO? Let's, for grins, say that we can suddenly onboard 50,000 people a day. That's AWESOME! BUT... what are they going to find here? An attractive, intuitive, easy to use social content and blogging site?
WHOMEVER is running this show-- be it STINC, a team of developers, the witnesses, or the community-- we need to do some serious "housecleaning."
Encourage Manual Curation Whether we need to go back to 50/50 rewards or not, I'm not sure. But something needs to be done to encourage interaction and engagement... to make it more attractive than automation and bots. On self-upvoting: a simple solution-- you're welcome to self-upvote, but self upvoting drains your voting power 5x faster than voting for someone else. On Upvote bots: don't outlaw them; simply CLEARLY label any post with a purchased vote "Promoted Content" or "Sponsored content" just like other social media sites do.
I think this place is awesome, but we need to KEEP it awesome! Think of it a bit like a garden: You can't make it better by just adding more and more plants-- you have to make sure the plants you ALREADY HAVE are thriving. And they are not-- judging by how few active users we have, we have a retention problem. THAT might be a good thing to work on. And if we're (hypothetically) going to sign on 50K new users a day? Let's START by giving them a REASON to want to STAY here and become loyal "pitch people" for Steemit!
Unlikely, although I wouldn't discount that it could be a possibility. With currency, the game is not as straight-forward as content sites like medium and aeon.co, but I guess anyone able to solve this will likely solve one of the biggest "problems" the steem ecosystem has.
I think plenty of these lack-of-hub problems will be solved with the upcoming steemconnect dashboard, for discovery, identity, etc.
Agreed. Curation activity should be promoted by supporting and replicating the @curie model, imo.
Don't think the act against self-upvoting is necessary, especially after changing the rewards-curve. As for bots, I'm right with you, there's just no way to outlaw or ban them anyway. Labelling makes sense.
By and large, community and interactions are what makes it stick, although we do need to encourage quality posts, especially those voted up into trending or find themselves in that position (either by buying votes or otherwise). It's a public shared space that represents the platform (and hopefully also reflective of the best it has to offer), so anyone there ought to step up and make it look good and participate socially for the rest.
Yeah steemit need more development..even after 2 years we don't have a good mobile friendly app. I told my cousin about steemit and he ready to join it but sign up process is not working ...OTP they are sending for mobile number verification is not arriving. Sign up process still take long to accomplish. They just change logo in two years. Steemit Inc and witnesses should consider your suggestions for steem success.
First, let's start with the song. You almost got me dozing off. The song is just beautiful, I felt bad when it ended, I never knew 3.31min could be that short.
Okay, music done. I don't have much to say as some of your suggestions are above my knowledge. But on the issue of new users onboarding, I believe that should be given priority attention. I almost lost interest after waiting for two weeks for approval. I have had friends who waited a whole month and nothing till I have to use Steeminvite to create an instant account for them. There's that spirit that comes when you first make up your mind about something and delay is a great motivation slayer. I hope this issue will be addressed soon.
Greta post, Kevin. One of the biggest challenges we face is recognizing how some actions impact multiple things. Onboarding done wrong could increase spam and bandwidth issues. Increased blocksizes with so much known spam going on could cause even more spam and not solve the bandwidth issue. The blockchain is already quite large, and we don’t want to hit physical hardware limitations for full nodes if we don’t take blockchain bloat seriously.
I could go on and on. More marketing now would mean more problems if we don’t solve them first and prepare for mass adoption. Rewards tweaking when much if the problems we see relate to content discovery which may actually be solved via communities is another example of a tweak we could make but we’re not clear yet if it will actually solve a problem or introduce a new one. This is challenging stuff, but I think many smart people are up for the challenge.
I’m still on vacarion, but even here I’m trying to follow this stuff so we can keep moving forward and be making progress. If that means learning C++ and submitting my own pull requests, I will, I’m just not super clear on exactly what the best path forward for some of these issues are other than the long-term core blockchain retooling Steemit is working on with appbase. From there, we can hopefully seriously tackle these other problems from a long-term thinking perspective and not quick bandaid fixes. It’s difficult stuff, for sure. If we don’t pull it off, we’ll lose out and rightfully so. Let’s work hard to avoid that fate.
How will content discovery be solved with communities? We need filters! We need to get rid of Trending and Hot channels. It is soo easy, and it takes so much time to get something in that area, but then I hear/read the magic word communities again! But nobody is able to tell what feature it will have; If even the Steemit UI will have features, or somebody else need to build the UI. With Trending and Hot in communities, we will have Steemit on smaller scale in the communities.
As Kevin pointed out, we need a changing in vote culture.
I don't want to scare people, but one thing is for sure: Steemit will get competition, and my gut feel says it is closer by in time than you want to believe.
In my mind, communities will be better for curation as people subscribe to their favourites, and anything out of scope wouldn't be considered. It's just like subreddits, but of course, with some difference due to bc implementation. The features can be checked on Github. But yeah, agree about the filters/search functions. Upvoted to get more opinions on it.
Indeed Communities may be a better way to bring likeminded together; But that in itself does not mean people are starting to distribute their votes better, or less automatic. It also doesn't mean post will be more visible; Assuming we will grow our community as a whole and communities will also be having quite a few members. It even doesnt mean a reduction in Spamming and self voting (direct and indirect).
It’s a great question. I have on my mental to do list a task to go through the hivemind github (“communities”) and do a post on the progress being made. I was told by @timcliff there are even some mock-up screenshots there which may be interesting for us to evaluate in order to get a better feel for what’s coming and how it may solve some issues we see now.
That would be great; A summary of what is on Github in language most of us can understand. In the end, most of us are not tech savy, but amongst them could be great ideas for feature enhancements and use cases.
Thanks for explaining the issues at hand @lukestokes. Complex problems indeed, and I still personally think they're not easily solvable. Steem's just facing them sooner than all blockchain apps out there. Even eth app devs recently pushed forward the idea of having tx fees charged through inflation instead of users upfront. What would be the best place to get devs looking into the problems and solutions for the stuff mentioned in the post? Thanks @lukestokes, I like your focus on long-term development instead of quick fixes. Seems like you're having a great time beaching out! Have a great time with the fam :)
From what I've seen, they already are, they are just prioritizing work that builds a long-term foundation to solve these problems from the ground up instead of just painting them over. To keep track of what they have going on, see this post where I talk about the various Github repos and how we can monitor them ourselves.
Absolutely! I don't want to go back to Nashville. :)
Hi Luke + Kevin, I totally agree with Your thoughts...
However, I'm just a low-level fish here at Steemit but...
Have suggested a number of times to a few current witnesses that they form a Round Table for say, the top 40 Witnesses every month and record their meeting to the blockchain... either in writing or better yet, their video recorded session...SO, we could move forward with the many ideas to improve upon Steemit and the various issues You've both mentioned.
Perhaps You guys could make this suggestion of a regular Round Table meeting so Steemit does not continue to stagnate.
Let me know what You think...
Thanks Kevin for Your Post and Thank You Luke for Your comments.
Cheers !!
@aggroed has been doing a great job of providing a regular witness panel discussion via MSP Waves on Discord, which I think is a good step forward. There is regular communication going on between witnesses but it's not on the blockchain and not public. I'd like more transparency, myself, but I understand how some security patches need to be responsibly rolled out to protect the integrity of the system and how the old saying of "too many cooks in the kitchen" can prove true when everyone has an opinion on something but few have done the hard work of deeply understanding the game theory dynamics, motivational incentives, psychological challenges, and historical programming limitations of what is being done here.
As I tried to explain here, I don't think Steemit is stagnating. I think the team is working on what makes the most sense to work on, though I get how we'd all like to see more progress on multiple fronts. If the focus was on Steemit instead of STEEM, I think we'd all be worse off because STEEM is more valuable that Steemit.
Hmm agreed that Steem is more valuable of course, but Steemit should leverage its position at the moment though since it's in top 1000 and they've the resources.. at least for the rest of 2018. Most users are going through Steemit at the moment anyway and the UI/UX should be way improved. The rest of the Steem ecosystem can benefit from Steemit's success later, or else, too many disparate elements atm and the little skirmishes wouldn't be enough achieving enough of their own network effects/critical mass.. just my 2cents..
The interesting thing to me is when we say “Steemit should...” we (in a sense) are claiming more knowledge then they have. If they were to focus on UX/UI (above current requirements) the net result could be more signups, more bandwidth issues, more spam/blockchain bloat, more frustrated people concerned with poor content discovery, etc. it might actually make the problems they are working on now more difficult. Having money to hire more developers doesn’t mean a project will move faster with more developers.
I might be wrong about all this and maybe they are just incompetent and not working on what matters. When I look at the github activity, that’s not the impression I get though.
The good thing, to me, is how passionate this community is to see it succeed. Many of us really care about this place and that’s a fantastic thing!
Good Idea!
Maybe an Official DLive session...
;)
"More marketing now would mean more problems if we don’t solve them first "
Very well said.
The Top 250 you speak of will be the result of better quality posts on Steemit rather than the quantity.
And I believe Steemit is being held back with duplicate content from the other Steem Interfaces such as Busy, eSteem, PeerQuery etc.
Fixing the Canonical Link issue must be a priority if we are to take the next step.
Alternatively, Steemit could begin to filter out other platforms content based on their primary tag and begin to look more like a Medium.
Does Zappl, chainbb, steepshot content really belong on Steemit?
Identity crisis I guess. Personally I'm into Medium-like / Aeon.co-like content. But then I also like the charm of well-thought out short content / curation as well. I'm not sure about SEO stuff, but duplicate content on the web will score worse?
Your Tragedy of the Commons example is PERFECT. It's great to see a REAL Steemit leader rise up to raise more attention to this.
I've been on Steemit for 7 months now and have seen so much change. There's so much profiteering now and it's ruining my experience/outlook.
Being realistic and honest, I've been so disappointed with how larger Steem Power holders have been centralizing their power in the form of delegation to upvote bots (or making their own). It feels like the ecosystem is forming a bunch of conglomerate banks. Isn't this what crypto is supposed to NOT be about?
These bots prey on minnows, who feel pressured to pay to compete, and ruin the natural balance I feel Steem Power was intended to have. It's stealing from the poor, for something they should get naturally if stakeholders cared to read material and curate manually more often. So many people cheerlead these initiatives under the guise that they're helping minnows, but they're killing the "Commons" in my view.
Steem Power is being passively shelved for daily stake payouts, yet these people continue to blog (take take take) without the power or priority/interest to reward people and help the ecosystem thrive. It really screams wrong-direction to me and has repeatedly talked me out of making investments in the platform as it seems to be getting worse. This is a great concern of mine for retention and adoption. If this trend doesn't reverse, then we're at risk of being a lame duck platform with no "users" to me and "customers" to them.
I've recently learned that JerryB. literally can't upvote manually per the terms/conditions to his stakeholders investing in his bot. Thats a tragedy to me, sets the wrong precedent, and frustrates me to no end as they continue to act as an evangelist. It's all business...
I'm glad you have the balls to speak up about the reality here. I feel that so many people are focused on XYZ, but we haven't even mastered the ABC's.
Hopefully people will adjust their priorities to GIVE instead of receive. That'll fix so much in the long game, and make everyone more money/create more well-being...
I'm still quite torn about total linear vs non-linear. Feels a bit dupey to have less of an influence with non-linear SP, but the problem is apparent now after about a year. n^2 is too much, so it'll be have to be something in between.
Have always been against vote trading. I can understand for those who have invested heavily, but for those who have been staked up by the community.. just seems kinda disappointing they've been staked up through curation just so they can start selling their votes that's been effectively given to them..
And yeah.. nobody's a damn minnow! We're all people lol.
You've explained what many of us are feeling.
Frank Approves this comment!
Complacency is a destroyer which we have seen time and time again in almost all industries. The community has been amazing and we've seen some great leaders pushing for this platform to become more innovative and user friendly but the looming presence of another competitive around the corner is certainly becoming stronger everyday.
We need more comms between the founders/influential players of steemit or this could very well be the start of the end. I think your concerns and feedback from other investors are all warranted. I believe its necessary to explore these pending concerns to ensure steemit is heading in the right direction for sustained growth (especially supercharging signups/onboarding!) and some direction on where the platform is heading.
I was skeptical about steemit but after 10 months being here, I'm trying to spread the word as much as I can because I truely believe steemit can be a solid house hold name in the social media space for years to come. I am just a fish in the ocean here but some of the people that I have introduced to steemit have said (Facebook, google, etcetc will come out with something like this and I'll use that). The possibility of another competitor on the horizon could be very real!
I had this small idea, more like a tweak, after talking to @nonameslefttouse:
How about we change people's perspective of Steemit from that of an 'earning machine' to an actual social network, by changing the sign-up message from, "get paid for your content" to, "get your content viewed and appreciated"?
This will cultivate an attitude that it's more about the will to post than the will to earn.
Sometimes it's the smallest of the details that play the biggest role in initiating change, so maybe that could help in increasing the quality of the posts in some way?
What do you think?
I like this idea, too-- and it's very much what I have been trying to impart since I started here.
"Steemit IS: A social content site where creators have the freedom to share what matters to them, and can be rewarded by their peers and become stake holders in the site."
Of course, everyone focused on "the economics" instead.
Which is common. People "get nervous" that things are not moving fast enough... "Yeah, but more people will sign up if we focus on the money."
Sure. But what KIND of people are they? At the moment, we are seeing that they are mostly the sorts of people who see Steemit as a giant "cash dispenser." They use upvote bots and botnets to reward themselves, and then drain their accounts on a regular basis. What's THAT good for?
Exactly! The importance to the quality of users being onboarded isn't being given.
I like it personally. It's the frame of mind that I came in here with my first post anyway. But can't say if it's what drives others? Probably a good move to get quality content-based users.
Yep, no wonder you're where you are. lol
Pretty sure the majority of people joining saw the 'get paid' part only and ignored the 'content' bit. xD
That's it mate , you get it.
Steemit is a blogging platform, not much more than that.
There's no money to be had here, only people.
Agreed. 💯
I think im still too new here to really know what changes need to be made to improve Steemit. I wish that I had joined sooner so I knew what it used to be like back when everything was manually curated. I do trust that the guys at Steemit inc are going to do their best to implement the changes we need to see here in order to be ready for Mass adoption. I am really hopefully that "communities" is going to be the game changer, I already have a few communities that I would like to start :)