Last week we had another new members spike, with one of the days over 8,000 accounts, if I remember well. This new wave of users started to interact with the platform quite heavily and very soon many of them ran into bandwidth problems. Which means they couldn't post, comment or upvote anymore.
You Do Have A Bandwidth Allocation On Steemit, You May Not Know About It
If you never ran into this problem, maybe it's time to know abut it. "Bandiwdth" is described in the Steem white-paper as a way to mitigate spam and network abuse. Every time you perform a transaction on the Steem blockchain, your bandwidth is affected. If you perform more transactions than your current bandwidth allows, you won't be able to access the system.
In layman terms, it goes like this: the more SP you have, the bigger your bandwidth allocation, hence, the more you can interact with the platform.
Since there is no message on the user account page about this, it may get really confusing for newcomers. So I opened a Github issue or Condenser (the UI on top of the Steem blockchain used by Steemit.com) suggesting a message for new users, here's how it looks:
If you think this will be useful, you can support it by upvoting it on Github, or sharing this post in your network, to raise awareness about it.
Steem on!
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
the more info, the better ;)
Yes, @dragosroua it was really helpful in understanding about Bandwidth .. I guess this issue would be faced most by members who have less than 100 SP in their account...
many users had this problem and for that i use to see my bandwidth on steemd it will be cool to see right in the steemit account nice suggestion that is
This issue is bad because it only affects new users who often time dont fully understand how Steem works. I encountered this when I was new (I was spamming a bit).
It definitely didnt feel good not to be able to do anything. I think the error message should have been more informative. Explaining why it happened and what to do. It jsut displayed the error message.....not enough for a newbie.
I had some problems with steemit loading recently but I don't think is to do with bandwidth. Also I guess the problem doesn't affect busy.org and other interfaces.
he he, it's not the internet bandwidth we're talking about, it's an intrinsic metric of Steem, as a blockchain. It's not at all visible at the moment in the UI, that's why it can get confusing to people.
Yes, I understand, I was referring to the fact that I should have enough SP to ensure that bandwith, I think.
Thank you for the post.I still had not face it.But this is useful for me
-cheers-
Question my friend ran into. He created an account almost a year ago and powered down all his steempower. Now when he tries to do anything on Steemit (even power up his power down bandwidth) it says he doesn't have enough bandwith (says it's 0 out of 0 on steemd.com) How can he power up steem without any bandwidth?
Would also love to see voting power on your account somewhere.
It needs somebody else to delegate some SP to him until he gets some on his own. You can see your voting power on steem.supply.
Yeah I realize this, but as a new "Steemian" you don't always know about these third-party support sites. You can see your bandwidth on https://steemd.com/@dragosroua
that's no good. will steem/ power be more limited as more users come onboard?
It will be quite difficult for people to earn?
I hope newcomers have an easy of a time as we do. :O
Nope, it's nothing like that. Bandiwdth works like this: when you first join, you can start spamming thousands of users with your comments, because your current bandwidth won't allow you. You first have to get some SP by receiving votes (or buying it).
It's a good thing. It's just that it's not communicated to the new users.
I remember encountering the problem during my early days here on steemit haha..
I will resteem this post for others to know.
Thanks.
Same here, i have never experienced it too. But i think it is a good mechanism. It gives users a sense of organisation. Any newbie who is a moderate user will not experience this.
Can you explain, why the total amount of bandwidth a user has, does vary?
Yesterday around 1800 UTC, I had 3 MB of total BW. now, 8:30 UTC I have over 300Mb.
This doesn't make sense to me
amazing one day 8000 account. very good social network . great original work steemit platform.
i always check my bandwidth using steemd.com since it displays it when you open your account, atleast i can see what am using from the allocated bandwidth
Very good information, for the steem account//
Very helpful information
thanks for the inportent information....
Hi dragosroua,
thanks for providing the information.
I'm not such an expert in this field. Was/is the collapse of the APP also related to this, or are we facing here different issues?
That's gonna be cool. At least facebook, Instagram, tweeter, snap chat etc can't do this. Let's me steemit the largest community ever to exist. Thank you for your suggestion. We need to improvement to the highest level. ✅
I had to face this several times for this week sir.. eventhough i tried to power up the steem power it was not even allowed.but today morning i could power up..thanks for the message sir..now only i understand the purpose of it :)
Well that's valuable information @dragosroua,
this issue also happened a one of new user (@salmanbukhari54) who joined steemit through me a few days ago. He is really a talented guy and has natural ability of writing. and due to Bandwidth problems he faces problems while commenting and also a little bit fed up of this.
Thanks for updating..
Those this problem has to do with trying to comment on a post and getting an error message that "you cannot post or comment until you trade sbd or power up steem"?
Wow, thank you for sharing this information with us. It helps a lot to understand how bandwidth here works.
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@ubiteo/introductory-post
Hello.. M kinda of a newbie here on steemit..
I would really appreciate ur upvote and comment..
I also promise to follow u as well as support ur future post n comments with my own upvote n comment..
Thanks
Pls also follow me
I always wondered what Bandwidth means... Thanks for clarifying it (recognise I did not read that part of the whitepaper :-))
I've had a problem with bandwidth. I think it's a big problem for those who are members
I had a 502 Bad Gateway Error yesterday for a couple of minutes or maybe an hour. Does this belong to the bandwidth problem you wrote about or was this a real server issue?
thank you sir for zthe information . Resteemed
I alway use https://steemd.com/@justinomora to compute my bandwith
Just change your UserName
Good one, resteeming it
I ran into this issue once actually. It freaked me out a bit. I didn't have any Steempower in my account so I had no idea what was going on. All the posts about it seemed to be from 6 months ago. I would love for this to be more transparent for new users.
never faced this problem only during august i think faced it