Quite a while ago I came to Steem hoping to make a bit of money blogging. I figured it was probably easier than trying to run my own blog on a website and drive traffic there. If you've never tried to make money blogging before, it's not exactly easy. It's not exactly easy here either...but I have bought quite a few things with the help of my blogging income.
When I was actually making more than a few cents here or there on Steem, I thought this was the future of content creation online. This is way better than a tipping based system.
When Steem fell from $8 I thought people were insane and it was only a matter of time before it picked back up, because this place was truly undervalued.
In retrospect, the writing was on the wall even then.
The whole crypto market was extremely overvalued from a technical trading perspective. Of course, once it crashed it was extremely undervalued.
But that's not really what I'm talking about. I absolutely should have realized that the crash was coming if I hadn't bought so much into the hype, but there were signs for Steem and Steemit in particular that should have given me pause and caused me to fight tooth and nail against those that were clearly holding it back. Sadly, I didn't. Some did...and they failed. That's why we're here today.
Ned was utterly incompetent. Everyone that was complacent in the blatant suppression of the open source community around Steem caused this downfall. Maybe they fought a bit...some of them anyway...but not enough. I don't blame the ones that did try to help more open source development for not trying harder. That's stupid. Who is blame is those ones that went along with whoever was openly suppressing open source development, except in the form of shitty apps to run on top of the blockchain.
Do you really think a shitty clone of a 90's web based game is going to bring in people by the droves? Fuck no. Not unless it's got some unique hook.
I've ranted on several times about open source development on the Steem blockchain, and how much it utterly sucks.
It's like someone hands you a manuscript in a foreign language that you may or may not know a bit of, but are nowhere near fluent in, and then they ask you why you haven't read it yet, and blame you for not being able to do it.
Programming languages aren't like written languages for most of us. Even programmers that may or may not be really fucking good. They have to sit down and decipher them and write notes and it may take them hours to get through a small little section.
In retrospect, I wish I had done that.
A few times I looked through bits of various code, but never really sat down to learn it and see what I could do to modify it in what way.
Steemit never wanted open source development of their chain. They wanted an open source chain that they could get paid to maintain. When the bottom dropped out of the crypto market, that idea went tits up and eventually Ned decided to FUD off.
We were given this beautiful wonderful manuscript...and we had to motivate ourselves to decipher it and push changes on the maintainers that really didn't want our opinion, but had to pretend like they did.
So here we are on a chain that's actually pretty fucking cool...and could maybe still be the future of online content creation...except we've just be bought by someone that's taking that power that Steemit sequestered unto themselves, and abusing it.
The writing was on the wall. We knew there were issues with centralization on here. We knew we needed more developers outside of Steemit. But we didn't have the funding, or just didn't know where to start.
Really, we should have done what we're doing now with the fork a long time ago. It almost happened a few times.
We didn't really need to fork though...we just needed to get the developers together and create the open source tools and fund community development.
That whole thing with community development a while ago promised to kinda solve some of those issues...but it didn't. I kinda checked out a bit, so I'm not really sure what happened there.
So that brings us to today. Steem may or may not be worthless in it's current state. It could be an extreme gamble to buy it now or after it may or may not tank. It might be a worthwhile gamble, if Sun FUDs off just like Ned did, and then eventually Steem fixes it's issues, either through Steemit development, or adopting some Hive changes, or having the open source community take over eventually, or...something.
It really drives home the idea for me that crypto is what you make it though.
We aren't the first chain to have issues. We might be the first to undergo this insane hostile takeover. I don't believe I've ever read anything about anything even remotely similar to this before. But other chains have split for all manner of reasons. The chain will go on. We will go on.
But the chain will continue to be what we make it.
If Hive turns out to be what those pushing it promise, and they encourage open source development and make guides to the code and todo lists and all the usual open source crap, then it might thrive, and maybe Steem will go the way of the Dodo bird, while Steemit goes the way of Yahoo. Or maybe both chains will go on, just in slightly different directions. If they fail to encourage development, a lot of us could be on a chain doomed to languish. And if Sun FUD's off, and someone else takes over, maybe this could all be just a road bump in the Steem roadmap...that they never even fucking published.
There are a lot of uncertainties right now...and it all depends on us really. We have to work together and push those involved with Hive to do what Steemit never did, let us help them. That's it. They just have to make it easier for us to help them, and accept that help.
Steem is what Steemit made it...a failure that was fully reliant on a centralized company that was then bought by a tyrant that has decided to abuse that power.
Now, Hive will be what we make it.
Who wants to help me dive into that shit show of source code?
Western Honey Bee Hive by Andy Blackledge Taken on March 28, 2017 (source)
Used under CC BY 2.0 License
"Who wants to help me dive into that shit show of source code?"
I do!
I've never done any open source collaboration though. I'd like to get into it, but the on-ramps aren't totally obvious. I'm also not sure I have the requisite level of skill. I mean I can loop and test in a few languages, I know various tool chains and so forth, but I'm not sure how to leverage that into something helpful.
"...openly suppressing open source development..."
"...it utterly sucks."
"A few times I looked through bits of various code..."
I didn't know about any blatant suppression, but it lines up with my experience. For a while I did some hobby work on a java based application frontend for Steem. No browser, no servers, no funny business. It sounded great, and I was really motivated by being able to develop a tool for a social medium without any intellectual property nonsense. I found that documentation was scant, out of date, and largely unhelpful. Ultimately I've been basically frustrated out of that. I don't have the best track record of completing stuff though, so I can't blame it all on extrinsic factors.
Maybe if hive isn't awful I'll start up something similar there. It might be fun, but I'll have to find the time between writing a linux framebuffer graphics engine and image recognition AI training via evolutionary strategies.