Who knows what they were thinking but proper and fair distribution had no part in it. Maybe they were only going for short term profits. I just read that the Steem blockchain has grown 50% in size in the last 6 weeks. That can't last very long.
I'm glad you find the project interesting. I started working on it before I even knew of Steemit and it's a "learn by doing" -kind of a thing. The search is not working currently as I don't have "testing sandbox" and make changes directly to the live version and these changes are still somewhat underway. Clicking on tags however does work to some extent at least.
Yeah, how many GB is it now? I'm thinking the problem is in the RPC nodes index to the blockchain, this seems to be unstable unless it's in RAM (as @elfspice says), but does work to some extent using very fast swap with SSDs in RAID 1. I get the feeling it's not too hard to solve though to be honest, but I'm still learning about the infrastructure, and the information is hard to collate.
I've been considering working with Steem Connect soon too, I would have to convince myself the platform has a future, before I put more time into it!
From elfspice - "about 50% growth in under 6 weeks since I last saw the chain was 14gb, it is now 22gb"
I'm not that technical that I could provide any input on this issues. They however do make me worried since I care about the decentralization part in a big way.
My little project doesn't really need Steem, it posts all data to its own database and to Steem so it's fine even if it implodes. Sad, but fine.
I've seen his post now... it is pretty crazy!