I just finished watching Ned's live stream, and I wanted to unpack what I got out of it.
Since they called it a test, I won't spend much time critiquing the overall presentation (smile more, look the audience in the eye by looking at the camera, let the production team do their job without micro-managing, run tests beforehand to remove background noise, don't schedule when you have a flight to catch, answer more than 3 peoples' questions in an hour, etc). Instead, I will focus on what was said and what I think it could mean.
For my thoughts before the stream, see my previous post: Will Steemit, Inc's Struggles Lead to Steem's Decentralized Success?.
Ned seemed to indicate the original goal of Steemit was distribution of currency and becoming one of the best blockchain development companies out there. In a sense, this would imply that Steemit.com was never originally intended to be anything more than a fancy cryptocurrency faucet. Later, he said, the ideas of 1) censorship resistant social media and 2) fairly rewarding content creators based on the quality of their work were added later. In this sense, we expanded the scope of what Steem was originally trying to do in a potentially unsustainable way.
Where does last year's goal of "tokenizing the web" shared at Steemfest2 fit in? I'm not really sure.
He called these expanded scopes "false narratives" and not part of the original plan. He did say:
"Steemit.com a good flame for showing the world how to get cryptocurrency in the hands of a lot of people."
He didn't give a clear "SMTs are completely on hold" statement, but said things like they are "being discussed" and called them a "thriving thing" while they are currently focused on surviving.
As part of that survival and cutting costs, there's talk of moving to the RocksDB implementation which should reduce the cost of running full nodes allowing more people in the community including witnesses and application developers to use, operate, and maintain their own nodes. This will most likely take many months to complete. Thankfully, he also said the core blockchain developers that were with the company last week are still here today. That, to me, was one of the most important things to hear.
Unfortunately, my questions posted here were not addressed. I appreciate the responses given to Tim, Smooth, and Noisy, though they did seem a bit vague. I didn't hear a clear direction as much as a "Yeah, we're looking at all the options available to us" which I guess is fair enough.
Overall, my perspective is unchanged from my previous post. I think the future for the Steem blockchain is more decentralization and community ownership/responsibility. For that to happen, we'll need governance mechanisms to handle community funds to pay for services and developers the blockchain needs. I'm hoping the work I and others have been putting into creating @eosdac will result in tools we as a community might some day take advantage of.
I think the future for Steem is a decentralized community owned and operated by the members who give it value. I think it will get there by points of centralization becoming less important. That includes Steemit, Inc and the main API node cluster they currently run on behalf of the community.
Maybe the future is less about a centralized website (steemit, busy, steempeak) and more about decentralized clients like eSteem Surfer? I saw the latest while at Steemfest3, and I just downloaded it today. It seems to work great!
In fact, I'm using eSteem Surfer to create this post.
We're at a crossroads as a community. Are we going to take responsibly (including the costs) of maintaining and developing this blockchain? Do we have the skills and resources required to accomplish this? Can we move away from relying on central points of failure like Steemit.com or the Steemit, Inc APIs?
Time will tell. If the goal is a fully-decentralized blockchain community, then we may be moving in the right direction with less focus on one company.
Still though, I would like to have my questions answered to better understand the role Steemit, Inc (and their stake of Steem Power) will play in the future.
Great to see you give it a try Luke! We just moved out of alpha and in process of implementing remaining features from legacy v1. We are also considering adding Testnet support to bootstrap testnet usage in times of HFs or test other blockchain changes before changes accepted on mainnet.
Compare to last year, I would say we have much more frontends and much more resilient even if steemit.com is to sunset as @smooth suggests, quite confident we can handle the load.
Fantastic! That's nice to hear. One feature request I'll ask for is two settings:
I plan to use eSteem a lot more and will provide feedback and input as I can. Congrats on releasing such a great product so far!
Thanks, will look forward to hear your experience. Note that updates are coming weekly and app will offer alert you when update is available to update directly within app.
@lucestokes you have a new follower .. I am glad you are onboard with using #esteem.
Thanks for this luke. I have one suggestion which is to allow for delegation of resource credits seperately from mana. This would allow us to give others with no SP a way to engage more. I think the inability of most users to comment much is a bit out of balance since those with a bit of SP will never use theirs up. This would allow us to empower the right people to engage with us whilst still holding back spam etc..
@good-karma .. just updated to the latest version and love it.
I see others and myself suggesting people switch over to #esteem. Great job!
@good-karma i've been fan of esteem for some time now. and i've always wanted to ask you what your direction/goal is with the curation team. are you looking to stay neutral and embrace censorship-resistance where no individual should have enough power to dictate which content should be banned or rewarded? or do you have certain topics and criteria in mind that determine which post has quality?
i think this is a good opportunity for esteem to grow. and if SMTs somehow get launched, could you share your vision on what esteem tokens would be like? what they would be used for? and why/what kinda of value it's going to have?
Hey @roundbeargames, thanks for the comment.
eSteem Curation team focuses on content written by eSteem users and their only job is to check so that no spam or plagiarism gets voted by our team.
We are finalizing our eSteem Token metrics/usages that we will share with community, soon.
Ok thanks for the reply! 👍
That clears up a lot of things for me.
Cant wait to hear about esteem tokens.
Seems consistent with other things written at the time for example: https://steemit.com/steem/@dan/steemit-s-evil-plan-for-cryptocurrency-world-domination
The original plan was sound, but somehow it got sidetracked by the focus shifting to getting paid to blog, and then curation, communities, etc. rather than that all being a means to an end. I must admit that despite paying more attention to Steem/it than most, I really had no idea until recently that cryptocurrency bootstrapping was still even part of Ned's plans or goals at all, although really it does make a lot of sense when you view steemit.com and the various other apps as being a lot more noob/user-friendly and broader-reaching than most other things going on in cryptoland.
This was a serious failure of leadership and communication, but failures are nothing if not an opportunity to learn to do better. Let's hope for improvement and do what we can to help make it happen.
That post of Dan's is one of my all-time favorite posts. It's a big part of what got me so excited about STEEM and SBD to begin with.
During the "fireside chat" at Steemfest2, Ned was asked about this, and he (from my perspective) basically said it's a waste of time and will not happen any time soon. He talked about how far reaching cryptocurrency has to be before you get mass adoption or can be a currency and cited bitcoin and others as examples that have been trying for years and have so far failed. He was all about "tokenizing the web" (no mention of that recently) and hasn't been a fan of SBD from the beginning (or putting in any development effort to fix the peg in both directions).
I agree, failure isn't final. It's a path towards learning and doing better. If we get back on track with this original vision of Dan's, I'd be really excited. I tried for many years to get people to accept BTC via our FoxyCart stores and it never worked out. I hoped STEEM and SBD would be different.
I still do.
Maybe SteemMonsters is an example we can look to of a real business which can help bootstrap this currency. I recently got my two oldest kids playing and they love it.
SteemMonsters is an example of one sure. It is built on the foundation of having a decent size community of users already bootstrapped, and can indeed as you say hopefully help bootstrap even more. But the idea should really be to build many of these, not rely on any one (I don't think you were implying that).
Maybe it isn't identical but I would say Ned's comments about the core mission being distributing cryptocurrency and the rest (social, blogging, content, even SMTs, etc.) being a means to an end are at least a variation on that theme. I for one am pleased with even this small degree of economic sense (as opposed to what I perceive as a lot of previous nonsense around here) reasserting itself. Let's take the small wins when and where we can get them.
I am glad to hear you are still involved. I have used esteem for some time to create posts. Yesterday it began to really cause me problems on my mac laptop. I plan to reload it later today. :)
You know I am just relieved what I intuitively knew all along. Let's get everything out in the open and begin to take care of it.
I missed Ned's call so I really enjoyed you take on it. Thanks!
I'm glad you found it useful, thanks.
I watched and was happy to hear him say that eSteem is running independently of Steemit. @esteemapp and eSteem Surfer are the best!
Very interesting read. Seems we need to decentralize our decentralized network ;)
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Great post Luke. Lots of information I wasn't aware of.
I completely agree with you but worry about the SP stake held by Steemit. If we moved to a decenralised community owned model, in my mind, the main Steemit account and accounts like Mr Delegation would need to be transferred to the community somehow.
I have no idea if this could happen or how but I think there is huge potential for the model you advocate if it can be made a reality.
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Yeah, I'm concerned about the token distribution as well which is why I included that in my list of questions. I hope it gets addressed at some point.
If steem inc has abandoned steemit do you think it's worth us putting in effort to onboard new 'ordinary' users via @steemonboarding - by ordinary I just mean people looking for an alternative social media site to comnect with communities and make a few extra tokens, rather than the businesses/ developers steeminc now seems focused* on attracting.
I don't like to see the personal abusive comments a handful of people direct at @ned but ever since that braces moment at SF3 and 2 hrs of livestream, I can see why certain people might get irritated with him.
There's actually quite a lot of scope for doing a management speak parody sketch on the back of that livestream.
I think my positive takeaway is that I'm hopeful - managing a phased roll back of operations isn't that difficult in the grand scheme of things.
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RocksDB?
You can read a bit about that in one of their previous updates.
I didn't know surfer was decentralized compared to the other 3, interesting. I use it on my home laptop.
It is decentralized in a way that it is opensource (you can build it on your machine) and you can connect to any rpc node (or connect to your local node) to get content from Steem.
We do have additional services on top, like drafts, bookmarks, scheduling, image upload, notifications, etc.
You did get a shout out during the stream for running your own API node as well. Thank you for that.
cool, i'll have to look into that ... thanks a bunch
I vote fully decentralized... not knowing exactly what the entails. (-:
thanks for your thoughts and updates
Can all the dApps on Steemit function without Steemit, Inc APIs?
Not unless those apps run their own nodes (which, honestly, they should if they are a real company with a real plan for revenue and eventually profit). Also, we should be careful using the "dapp" term when it's really not a decentralized application. @anyx has done some great posts on that point I highly recommend:
Thanks for the links, will read them over. Has Ned released any statements on what it costs to run these nodes?
There was mention of a spreadsheet during the live stream, but it wasn't shown or published as far as I know.
Those spreadsheets should be released so the community can start brainstorming on possible technical and fund-raising solutions. I would love to see the exact figures.
In some previous comments he stated it costs $2 million per year.
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👆 Love this!
& thankfully there was no guitar concert this time 🤦♂️
Based on what I heard about the previous two streams (did he really try to play the guitar with his teeth?), I didn't bother tuning in to them.
Music is great, but there’s a time & place for it. Watching a Dinosaur hoodie wearing ceo sing cover songs about bitcoin really made me want to park what little I have here somewhere else
Yes, and he got a note or two as well! 🙉
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Good point od SP held by Steemit Inc.
They didn't gave up from it, but made 70% cut on man power.
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Steemit Inc has to let go, and others (multiple) have to step in and run the damn thing
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Answering smooth is answering original devs questions, those are not like answering real questions from real members of the community. He has done like any good politician does, ned for president next? smooth was 1 original members of the devs in March 2016 so yeh, big pat on the back @ned.............. noisy was in here may 10th 2016 so likely one of his devs or buddies also.
I was never a Steem/Steemit dev, never worked for Steemit, and was neither part of the founding team nor had any prior relationship with any of the original founders. I showed up here on my own just like every other community member, it just happened that I did so earlier than most.
But I agree with you that taking questions only from me, timcliff and noisy was a bit elitist, and also just not answering questions from enough people period. Luke is right, it would have been better to answer more questions (including his).
Thank you for the information, I stand corrected. How did you manage to get in pre alpha? That intrigues me as I can not find any information as to the initial phase on here, as there is nothing on the web, an no wiki page.
I saw the post on bitcointalk inviting people to mine it.
Original post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1408726.0
Second post for relaunch: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.0
I mined both times. In fact I was one of the people whose original chain coins were invalidated by the devs deciding to relaunch. I probably had more on the original chain than I ended up with on the surviving chain.
Any idea who freedom is?
As a general rule I don't like to get involved with doxing people so I wouldn't comment whether I do or not. @freedom is free to identify him- or her-self or not.
Okay, many thanks for your time.
Can you look into what fire stick did to golos?
He is trying to do it to us, too.
I havent used golos since they started taking a cut of the rewards.
He brought us bid bots, too.
Sure, as soon as I have finished with this mess bro.
You know me, enquiring minds got to know.
we just need to get people on board, I think that is all. the value of Steem will be growing and unless we get some promotion and a bigger user base, then the tech behind, no matter how amazing it is, it will be useless...
Also, decentralization and moving away from only a few entry points to this blockchain's API, that would be great!
I am so sorry that I lacked motivation lately to work for this blockchain anymore, I wasn't in a such good mental (or more likely emotional) state...
@lukestokes This is pretty much the same conclusion I came to. I feel like the sentiment is here when we look at the community. People want to help, they want to contribute, but to aid in the decentralization of actual work I think we'll need tools to aid in organizational structure. Doing that for a decentralized community is an interesting problem to solve.
^^^^
that was very frustrating to watch ,
question 1 - 15 minutes rant
question 2 - 20 minutes rant
question 3- 20 minutes rant
I mean , plan and prepare , pick you questions and talking points !!
I am glad that @ned is on top of things for steemit and it is nice to see steemit going in the right direction. More power to steemit community. I like to see a some added features soon like private messaging @lukestokes and I am also optimistic what the future will bring to us, it is just all so bright.
I cannot disagree with your conclusions. They say chaos is a ladder, and we shall see what climbs up and such effects as that has. I remain strongly confident in the potential of Steem to positively impact society. We'll see if folks with the ability to counter predation will. It would be sad if banksters were able to wrest this potential from us, though the fact that the code is open source would only delay and distract from the eventual consequences of Steem technology.
The power remains to effect those positive changes good people will, no matter what, or who, seeks to prevent it from being used.
Thanks!
This was incredibly helpful. Makes sense out of some things that weren't quite making sense. It did always seem odd that management had so little interest in making this work for new users when that's the core of social media. Some of us suspected that was due to caring more about SMTs and just being a platform, but now it seems to go even further than that. It's about being a means of distributing crypto, and it's a side note that the primary mechanism has been by providing a social media platform!