RE: https://peakd.com/hive-184437/@justineh/re-travelfeed-q8j6j7
Dear @justineh,
I have dedicated the past two years of my life and large amounts of my personal funds to building one of the largest social apps on Steem: TravelFeed - a travel platform for independent travellers. Since August last year, I have been working full-time on developing TravelFeed.io and while there still is lots of work to be done, we have been making tremendous progress and have seen a decent user growth, considering that we are still at an early stage of where we want to go with our platform. I enjoy working with a team of talented people who believe in the same vision: Building a platform for independent travellers that is easy to use while sharing revenue with users, providing them with a fair compensation for their work.
If, like many of your peers, you do not know much about TravelFeed yet, I recommend you to watch my talk at the previous Steemfest to get an idea of what our platform is about and what our business plan is.
As you are aware, we announced our TravelFeed 3.0 upgrade 3 days ago, where we explained why we currently see neither Steem not Hive as fit to build our business and decided to make our platform largely independent of both chains, but support optional cross-posting to both or either blockchain while at the same continuing our curation of high-quality travel content, which we have been known for since February 2018. We were hoping for a professional and constructive conversation on what could be done to address our concerns about Hive to possibly establish the fundaments for us building closer to Hive at a future point, but instead experienced an irrational discussion with severe verbal attacks and accusations thrown at us as a business as well as at me personally by a large group of Hive stakeholders, including yourself.
Your attempt to make me look bad by sharing excerpts of conversations from the private Hive Developers Slack along with twisting my words is making me laugh. It is a sad laugh though, since I was very disappointed to be treated like this in what is supposed to be a professional environment for businesses and developers (or in other words: the people who can bring value to Hive). I stand by every word I wrote, but I would appreciate if you could put the whole conversation here since, as you are probably aware of, I no longer have access to the Hive Developer Slack and therefore have to provide any context missing from your excerpts in writing.
As anyone with technical knowledge can see from the excerpts you posted, you clearly don't have the technical skills required to understand a conversation with a developer. While this applies to most people, my problem with you is that you pretend to do and are constantly insulting me without understanding what you are talking about.
Since your first excerpt doesn't show the full context, let me explain that I never "blamed" @anyx directly for the technical issues TravelFeed experienced in the weeks before our 3.0 release. I met him at Steemfest and he is a very smart guy who is extremely knowledgeable about blockchain technology. I was honestly a bit surprised to see him and a few others who I considered to be crypto idealists supporting the 23.0 hard fork that removed funds from a list of users accounts (no, the distribution of Hive was not an airdrop, at least from a technical perspective), some of whom were included in the so-called "airdrop exclusion list" by mistake apparently, but I am sure that he had good reasons to do so, be it just supporting the lesser evil until there is a better alternative or that he - like some others - did not agree with the list, but saw it as a Gordian Knot dilemma where the circumstances of the hard fork would excuse to look over core principles. Of course I respect anyx decision to move his infrastructure to Hive.
In the conversation that you took this excerpt from, I was explaining that we were experiencing problems due to our reliance on third-parties. In TravelFeed 2.0 we wanted to give our user the option to keep full control of their private keys by implementing full Keychain support for client-side signing. To guarantee decentralisation and enable participation from other frontends, all transactions went (in most cases client-side through Keychain/Steemconnect) from the client through a node to the blockchain, from blockchain nodes to our own Hivemind node and from there back to the user through our API. That meant not only relying on the blockchain itself to work, but also relying on a lot of third-party services and nodes.
I blame myself to be so naive to rely this heavily on third-party services rather than wanting to put any blame on Steem Keychain for not updating their extension with a list of new nodes in time, or on anyx for pointing his node to Hive, since, as you are pointing out correctly, those were free services. However, both did cause problems for us due to our reliance on them. We were actually not using anyx' node for TravelFeed, but the minnowsupport node that had announced to keep supporting Steem for some more time (we did read node announcements). However, while we were mostly able to keep our Hivemind node in sync, we are not in control of client-side settings for Keychain or Steemconnect and after the hard fork, many of our users experienced the issue that their posts were not showing up on TravelFeed after posting since they had accidentally posted to Hive because they had selected a wrong node like anyx' on Steem Keychain. Our users were also affected by outages of third-party nodes that they had selected or were pre-selected in Steem Keychain or Steemconnect. To a non-technical user, this seems like TravelFeed is the cause of the issues they are experiencing, and obviously as a platform we are responsible for any outages, if they are caused by third-parties or not.
I was explaining that we had learned from that, that the price we had to pay for supporting decentralisation and client-signing is high and that we realised that we had to remove dependencies on third-party services, not primarily because also Hive nodes were experiencing problems, but mostly since we never want to be in a situation again where we see our platform rendered useless, unable to fix it since the problem lies with third-party services. This is why in 3.0 we require the users to give us posting authority. All posts go directly to our centralised database that powers all posts on TravelFeed and additionally to a transaction queue for Steem and Hive, if enabled by the user. This queue is processed by a separate microservice to push these transactions to the blockchain using the posting authority given by the user. We have the choice which node to use (or even to use our own node) and if there are outages, transactions remain in the queue and are processed at a later point. Less decentralised, but a lot more reliable since we are in control ourselves and actually a similarly centralised structure to what most topic-specific social "dApps" on Steem/Hive are using.
Even more than the rest of our delightful conversation, your second point shows that you do not understand software development. In some fields of work hiring a second knowledgeable worker might work, e.g. if you are constructing a wall, hiring a second mason might almost half the construction time. However, in software development writing code maybe takes 20% of the time, the rest is conception and dealing with bugs, but - especially when working in a team on complex projects - most time goes towards understanding existing code.
I have written all TravelFeed code by myself over the past 20 months and have been working on the TravelFeed 3.0 upgrade since February and have been rewriting large parts of our code base, working without a break for 10 days in a row to accommodate for the new changes in order to launch a new, more reliable version of TravelFeed as soon as possible. As much as I appreciate your gesture, given the possibility anyone with JavaScript coding experience would have offered us free assistance, this would have helped in the medium and long term, but not in the short term to accelerate implementing Hive support. In a complex app like TravelFeed a migration is not as easy as just changing node URLs, apart from the fact that we were sceptical that Hive could provide us the platform we were looking for. That, unlike some other apps, nobody cared to inform us of the Hive hard fork and we had to learn about it from the public announcement did not inspire confidence either.
By the way, we did get some help by @emrebeyler who provided us free access to his Hivemind node for our 3.0 migration since we were experiencing issues with ours not having indexed all tags. A big thanks to him, at least that's one thing being part of the "Hive Developer Slack" was good for.
While you may not understand my technical points, you are also constantly accusing us of disliking Hive because we did not get a delegation. I brought up the topic of delegations in our conversation since we were criticised for applying for the community delegator program by Steemit Inc. As a now independent platform, we are aiming to support users on any platform and if there was a similar program on Hive, we would have applied as well since our goal has always been to maximise rewards for our users. Over the past two years on Steem, especially when we were still "just" a curation project, we got used to almost no large stakeholder giving a sh*t about us or our efforts and we have been struggling to attract delegations to reward our users until we launch our own token that will have "real" demand among other things backed by demand for our advertising system contrary to an unsustainable inflation system. We are one of the few projects that managed to thrive on Steem without large delegations and we will continue to do so, however, while rewards have never been the only motivation for users to use TravelFeed, being able to give higher rewards to our users helps us to accelerate user growth and increase user retention, which is also great for the blockchain our users are posting to. And yes, if Steemit would give us a delegation which helps us to support our users who decide to post on Steem, it is hard to deny that they would be acting a lot more smart than you and your peers from the Hive Slack who are doing everything to make us not want to have anything to do with Hive and who are announcing to cease any support for our users, who have nothing to do with this whole discussion. I used to respect you for your work as a curator in several projects, working towards a better distribution of rewards in a broken system, are you now really supporting pushing one of the largest communities of quality content creators away from Hive?
While I used to believe in Steem due to its technology that enabled us to leverage blockchain technology fast and free while rewarding users, I have been sceptical about the marketing hype for a while. Almost like in a cult, users were conditioned with rewards to constantly praise Steem to the skies. Understandably, with an inflation-based economic system as unsustainable as the one on Steem/Hive, the only way to not let the token value go to nothing is constantly telling users to power up, not sell their funds and onboard new users to the cult who bring in new money. I fell for that as well and never sold any of my STEEM earned through posting, while even investing in STEEM in order to support TravelFeed with my delegation. The constant hype of Steem lead to many concerns being never voiced nor being addressed and while since @elipowell took over, Steemit Inc.'s skilled employees actually did a good job with releases of software like Mira, Hivemind/Communities and their work on SMTs considering the limited resources they had, with the exception of a few, technically skilled individuals, governance discussions in the community were usually long and without any result. Now, the same people are praising Hive while bashing Steem. Are you expecting me to believe that the people I had the pleasure of getting to know on the "Hive Developers Slack" are capable of developing Hive?
You and many of your peers seem to fit every criterion of extremism - Hive extremism. Extremists are unable to accept any contrary opinions or facts that don't fit in their limited field of view and are convinced that they are right since they are constantly encouraged by their peers. A constructive discussion is not possible since non-rational arguments are constantly brought forward by the extremists, without addressing the points brought forward by the discussion partner. Considering that some of these extremists are the same people that operate Hive witnesses and nodes, it makes me wonder when Hive will implement API-level censorship to prevent posts like this one from being seen or if a decision will be made to remove my funds, like it has previously been done in the Hive hard fork for accounts who had different an opinion different to the one embraced by the Hive extremists, be it just aiming for a compromise or being included by mistake.
As much as I want to believe the fairy tale that Hive is the solution to all of Steem's problems, you and your peers have shown me that Hive's issues are more severe than I had ever imagined and I have lost any belief that these will be addressed or fixed, at least not with the group of people currently in charge. There are a few skilled individuals left in the Hive Slack some of whom like me were considering building a business on Hive, please threat them with more respect than me - I still want to get a few Satoshis when I dump my HIVE.
Best,
JP
Respect is earned. Just another thing you failed at...
Respect is earned. That´s right. Now I don´t know what happened between the TF team and those who are criticizing them as both sides, naturally, have their own perspectives but I do know what TF was doing over the past two years. They were working really hard to make their project one of the best applications ever made on Steem/Hive and tirelessly and selflessly supporting the travel community, manually curating up to hundreds of posts per day sometimes. And obviously, this is something nobody cares about here anymore. So let me pay my respect to them because they did earn it for all this hard work.
Thank you guys @travelfeed for everything you have done for our community. It was always pleasure to use your app and hang around with other fellow travelers of the TF community. I am sure am I not the only one to feel it like this but I don´t know how many other members of the community would dare to say it aloud seeing the hostile reactions and downvoting going on here...
Thank you for recognizing the work we put it ... But hey .. it's not over yet, this is opening new doors, hope you continue to stick around :)
Well considering (in your own words) you are smarter than everyone else, would think you would figure out a way to make your business model work without crying you didn't get a massive free delegation.
Delegations have been given and taken from us but we still motored on. Instead of crying we moved on and took matters in our own hands. The only people crying, well you can see for yourself.
I saw the conversation where JP said he was the smartest person in the room and he was pissed no one gave him free delegation. It was amusing I got to say.
I always considered you to be a smart person and I appreciate your support in the past. This discussion went on for a long time and I was attacked by several individuals for several different things. As I explained in my post above, it was never just about getting "free delegations" as your impression might be from a small excerpt. I invite you to read the full conversation before making up your mind.
Since you are a top witness who might have some influence over what is going on there, let me give you one piece of advice: The Hive leadership should be very selective about the people invited to the Slack if you don't want to see businesses and developers interested in building on Hive running away screaming. I am not the only one looking for a professional working environment, the Hive Slack is nothing like that.
I still don't understand why your original post didn't just say.
I wondered why you were so keen to purposefully throw hive under the bus and burn bridges in your announcement post and this one as well. It seemed like such an interesting business practice. But i guess you were upset with certain Hive users that lead on several fronts? Not sure how it benefited your users to create bad blood with whales/developers and spokespeople of hive.
Again seems like you could just describe travelfeed 3.0 as an upgrade to being cross-chain compatible as well as non-chain compatible and how you guys were wanting to be self-sufficient and less reliant on other organizations while giving users the ability to continue to use their favorite blockchain. I doubt many people would have any issues with this.
Myself and @asgarth will miss you (and @for91days) and your voices and pictures on the blockchain and I'll miss seeing you at the events but it appears you feel offended and that's too bad and perhaps understandable there is plenty of opportunities to feel offended in the world of blockchain it is hard to deal with systems that require interacting with lots of varied individuals DPOS itself means there are people you may have to deal with you don't always want to and in other environments you wouldn't have to deal with. Other users and even ones in position of power tend to get offended and burn bridges as well pretty easily. Should users in positions of power be less prone to offense and more diplomatic in their interactions. Yes of course. But there has been a lot of times when they have felt very burned by many different projects that have scammed people and broken trust... even steemit inc has broken trust in very large ways (NED) so we have seen it's hard for many people to not be very sensitive... specially right now. So timing couldn't have been more tenuous.
However I would have suggested looking for a way forward instead of a further burning of bridges? Makes me sad.
We're where we are because we're looking forward. We did reach out, we did ask question and tried to work things work out for 2 years. But then comes the time you realize one or two things and you need to do what's best. Taking matters into our own hands, being responsible and stop being dependent.
All wonderful things.
Just saying maybe should have done it without burning bridges. But i guess sometimes burning the bridge behind you motivates you to move forward on the other side of the river.
Also I understand it's hard to "work things out" when you're dealing with a decentralized group, specially one that are all busy doing other things and many who aren't interested in the same things. You kind of have to be self-sufficient.
I read all the remarks and comments up to the point of starting mine.
I wish you and your users luck in what ever direction you decide to take your project, I do enjoy seeing locales and location from around the world through the eyes of normal people and not staged photo-shopped cleaned up approved by the local government or magazine editor pictures and stories.
i just appreciate that none of this is censored, and i can clearly see what is going on. Governance is really messy.
It's all good until things are getting twisted and presented out of context.
Dear @jpphotography
Very mature and polite words. I never knew you before and friend of mine shared this post with me a moment ago. You surely got my respect right away.
Unfortunatelly @justineh is one of those very aggressive users and I had misfortune dealing with her in the past. It surely is challenging and require loads of patience. And it require understanding, that any disagreement with her will look like an open war. That's my unfortunate experience.
Sorry to hear, that you had to experience those "severe verbal attacks and accusations thrown at you as a business".
Im sorry to hear that you were openly criticised. I'm expecting to be criticised as well, since I will be also applying for this support to my project.
unfortunatelly I share your experience. I've tried to reach out to several witnesses and large accounts on hive and I couldn't find any support to our efforts on hive. I'm not sure what other choice people like us do have.
Hopefully your project will receive support from some large accounts (either on steem or hive). You surely deserve that.
Yours, Piotr
I’m glad you guys can bond on not getting support for a project.. which is weird as I personally have supported the TF project.. just not your spam 👍🏼
I’m still waiting to see what vicious verbal attacks I directed at JP though.
Thanks for the tag! Have a lovely day!!!
You just took the conversation to a whole next level!
Indeed.
Honest question. How often did this happen? Even still, you must be aware that a witness and node operator is free to run any software they want on their own hardware. By opting into use of Steem Keychain, you are opting into this behavior, potentially.
Should they have delayed the Hive launch so that a distinct
chain_idexisted when the chains split? Personally, I think so. But that's not what happened. And what was the real damage anyway, now that we're actually through that phase?I agree - You are basically repeating what I wrote above and this is the reason why we are no longer supporting Keychain. A few posts ended up on Hive, but much more we were affected by node outages - our user numbers dropped by almost 50% since the hard fork and are now rising sharply again.
Great. And @justineh is specifically and fundamentally involved in Steem Keychain and node outages how?
Great, More Drama😒 Ain't this some BS... Can't we all just get along?aarrghh
I'm sorry but NO.
Users have the right to express their opinions. "Can't we all just get along" types of comments do not bring any value to conversations and solve nothing.
This is not some sort of new agish hippy chain where we should all just get along regardless if someone is hostile, aggressive, abuser, scammer, etc.
I am tired of seeing these repeated comments "Can't we just all get along" around. People have the right to debate and criticize :-/
I never said said they can't express their opinion, as you were.
You are right. But that could be concluded from it as it sounds dismissive.
Exactly... very frustrating to see people you like fighting each other :(
Many are just working. Those who have enough time to make posts all over the place apparently don’t have enough to do 🤷♀️
Personally I’d like to see the focus change to more positive and work towards making Hive what we all know it can be. I look forward to that.
Currently many are still working on base infrastructure, exchange listings, integration etc.. I am hoping once that is further along individuals can take the time to motivate the community and show them the work being done. I think we all could use a bit of inspiration.
At least you took the time to write an actual reply instead of just downvoting... I appreciate it. I always prefer a positive approach but unfortunately, this whole thing is full of negativity. Like I said above, I don´t know what happened between you now but I do know what they did before. Same with some other people who worked hard for our community in the past and are now hated and insulted for opinion disagreements. People tend to forget easily and fail at the very basic respectfulness for each other. It makes me sad.
Is there any way to DM you @jpphotography?
How could I find you on Discord?
This is the TravelFeed discord: https://discord.gg/jWWu73H There you can find JPP
thanks for replying to my comment (posted from @project.hope account). However I cannot find JPP at your server (perhaps Im simply blind :)
TravelFeed made a diplomatic announcement and it was quiet and there were no issues until someone in the Hive slack started accusing TravelFeed of supporting JS when TravelFeed is independent. If you want to analyze the conversation, go back to where it started, and what was the motive behind that. From that trigger, a number of people (not everyone) attacked @jpphotography and he has to defend TravelFeed from the wrongful accusations. And from there, things blew out of proportion.
TravelFeed always meant well for our travel bloggers and that is why there were requests for support whether it is in Steem or Hive as users have this freedom to choose.
I am doing an onboarding presentation to travelers I am stranded with here in India. Despite the hurtful words thrown at TravelFeed and the team and the actions made, I will remain neutral and will mention the cross posting service to BOTH Steem and Hive. I just hope that from here on, our users will not be punished due to this misunderstanding.
Congratulations @jpphotography! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your board and compare to others on the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPVote for us as a witness to get one more badge and upvotes from us with more power!