Let’s bridge the gap between Steemians to Witnesses, they say.
I recently received a transfer from @witnesssurvey with a memo:
Thank you for supporting Steem by maintaining your witness. Steemians have created the first @witnesssurvey questionnaire that we'd like for you to participate in. Please respond to each question within a new Steem post and then leave a comment on this post for us to find your responses by 12/11/2018 so we can share your views with the community. https://steemit.com/witnesssurvey/@witnesssurvey/witnesssurveyv1-asqhhy51rj
By the way:
Witnesses were notified by a memo transfer that contained the following message:
I don’t think that’s the best way of letting users know. Many tend to ignore such messages due to the amount of spam from re-steem pseudo-services, or bit bots.
In my opinion, leaving a comment in reply to the most recent post of a witness that also tags their nickname is a better way to achieve this result.
Full HD video rendered exclusively for my witness updates
Here are my answers:
What is your position/stance on bid-bots (ownership/delegations/opinion)? - @abh12345, @ammonite
I don’t own, operate, use, or delegate my SP to any bid-bot or paid voting service.
I’m not a fan, but it’s up to users to decide how they use their SP.
What does the witness want to do to make the blockchain more user-friendly and help to on-board new users. What do THEY personally want to see done and what will they do to get it there? - @ericwilson
Everything is done on the UI/UX level. Users don’t need to know the inner workings of the platform’s mechanics. It’s all about how things are presented to them so they can learn as they go along.
Gamification is the key. As a witness, I’m really far away from the UI/UX level, but I endorse gamification whenever I can.
Shout-out to @arcange and @surfermarly.
I help newbies on the Steem.Chat (shout-out to #help’ful @timcliff and #general @apsu, you are awesome!)
Do you think votes for witnesses should last indefinitely or should they time out (or perhaps decay over time) so that periodically voters will need to reevaluate and affirm their positions by recasting their votes? - @harvhat
It some rare cases, maybe, yes, but I believe that this should happen only in the event of lost keys (or lives) and with an adequate delay (a year or two).
Features that I consider as prerequisites:
reset_account
Arhag's idea about Deadman switch / Will / Recovering accounts from lost passwords
Do you think the 30 witness votes each steemian gets is the correct number, especially in light of the fact there are only 20 top witnesses to be seated? - @harvhat
Thirty is the correct number.
As an SP holder, I want to have a choice and approve enough witnesses to protect the security and reliability of the network, so I believe that the number of voting slots needs to be at least 21. I’d rather increase the number of votes than decrease it. However, I can also see some valid arguments in favor of the opposite trend.
What is a concern or two that you have about the #steem blockchain? - @johnspalding
Performance at scale. Don’t get me wrong: we are fast, and we can grow a lot, but we need to think a few steps ahead in order not to be taken by surprise. It’s important especially now when we need to optimize our operational costs during bear market conditions without affecting user experience.
What are you hopeful about for the #steem blockchain? - @johnspalding
The people who use Steem. Just ask the SteemFest participants.
What is the monthly cost of equipment? - @abh12345
For beginner witnesses, it is equal to the cost of a decent, low latency storage (NVMe or SSD at least) with 48GB or 64GB of RAM. Then you add more pieces like a public seed node, a backup node or two, some helper resources, monitoring, security measures, redundancy (network uplinks, power supplies) and so on.
Infrastructure is my particular area of interest, so the infrastructure I have is not necessarily the same as what other witnesses use.
Where do your earnings go? - @abh12345
Nowhere. I’ve not powered down yet. But that’s meant to compensate for my involvement (both my time and my hardware resources)
[What are some of your] Current projects? - @abh12345
Supporting various service providers, exchanges, Steem.Chat. I wouldn’t even call them projects. It’s one big “being a witness” project. Powering up the Steem platform.
[Will you provide an] Alt accounts list? - @abh12345
@gandalf
It’s supposed to be an account for all of my non-witness activities.
What are the benefits associated with being a witness? - @klassic
Witnessing firsthand the development of an extraordinary platform.
How do I become a witness? - @steemingmark
The Steem platform’s decentralized nature means that all you need is to want hard. You set a signing key for your account and vote for yourself as a witness.
Theoretically, you are a witness, but this doesn’t mean yet that you give to the platform what witnesses are expected to give.
You need to contribute to the network with your infrastructure (at least a block producing node, but ideally more nodes, like public seed nodes, etc.)
You need to earn the trust of the community to get votes.
There are many tutorials on what witnesses are and what you need to do to become one.
I believe that everyone should read them, not only those who want to be witnesses, because they contain a lot of useful knowledge for every user of the platform.
What do you think the SBD [STEEM] price for a new account should be? - @harvhat
It’s reflected in the STEEM price. I tried to keep it relative to $3-5 before HF20. Now the registration fee is burned, so I believe that this value should be as low as possible (yet high enough to protect the namespace ). Also, please note that it’s possible to claim accounts for free when you have enough resource credits available.
What is a witness and how I become a good worker? - @rubaethsyed
You can find plenty of posts covering that subject all around Steem.
Have you implemented any new procedures for evaluating potential hardforks? - @patrickulrich
I learned from the previous HardForks, so I’m sure I can improve the process. Keyword: tests. A lot more tests.
How does a new user make the availability of his vote known to the cabal of witnesses wannabes trying to overthrow the current witness regime? - @grimgriz
Availability of votes is well known. It’s on the blockchain. Please learn more before casting your votes.
Should we have interest for SBD? - @patrickulrich
In the current economic conditions? No.
What takeaways do you have from the Hardfork 20 issues that occurred? - @patrickulrich
Such issues can happen even if we think that we’ve done enough tests. We have, however, a lot of skilled developers, witnesses, and community members to act quickly in case of emergencies, and we can handle them very well.
Do you think 20/21 top witnesses a good number or should there be more or less? - @harvhat
Yes. It’s a good balance between performance and decentralization.
Thank you for caring. The reliability and security of the Steem platform is in your hands votes.
If you have more questions, you can use the steem.chat ( #witness or #witness-social channels)
Steem On
@gtg, if Ned totally leaves does Steemit we have hope to continue?
If yes, why do you think so? Is it possible for Steemit to be off and that we may no longer have access to it at all? If not why? Are the top witnesses talking about what to do with Steemit in the near future? Are we getting a new captain?
Steem > SteemitSo don't worry about Steemit. There are plenty of alternatives:
https://busy.org
https://steempeak.com
https://esteem.app
https://partiko.app
and so on.
There was an idea from @noisy, to just shut down everything related to Steemit for a week and see how we are doing during that period :-)
With all due respect, Ned was never been a Steem's captain. He's a Steemit Inc's admiral. He's still sailing on our ocean. He has a big fleet of ships, a lot of cargo. He announced some changes to his fleet. That's all.
(Actually I would be more than happy if Steemit Inc would focus on the Blockchain development).
Steem is awesome, regardless.
'Admiral' - that's such a fitting analogy (rather than captain).
Especially if you consider how the two roles are represented in Star Trek, the the former typically being distant and ambiguos.
And he may be exploring new blockchain territory, but I can't quite imagine @Ned captaining The Enterprise. Despite the ever so slight resemblance to William Shatner.
I agree with you about the memo message. Great idea these Witness surveys, shame to have them limited by the means of distribution.
I didn't realise @gandalf was yr alt account!
Posted using Partiko Android
Very interesting, I like your creative comparative analogy to an admiral with a large fleet. Overall it sounds positive and hopeful.
As it is, I hardly ever use Steemit.com. I only do when I need to use Blocktrades. So, yes, we can still access everything :)
Thank you for taking part in the survey.
It still seems odd to me that steem doesn't have some private message system built in. Maybe it could use the memo system with filters to ignore spam. Having to use another program seems counterproductive.
Anyway, I'm glad you got the message and I enjoyed the frankness of your answers.
Posted using Partiko Android
It's all about UI/UX.
Keeping general purpose private messaging on chain is not the best idea, but I agree that it would be great to have some integrated solution.
There are some pretty nice ideas on how to do that, one of it is a better integration of Steem.Chat (there are some obstacles on our way that need to be solved first). The other is upcoming new version of busy (Shout-out to @ekitcho).
Thanks for your reply. I will be very interested to see what messaging options arrive.Thanks for your work as witness.
Posted using Partiko Android
^^ This! The people make this blockchain amazing. I'm glad you're here, Gandalf. Thank you for all you do for STEEM. I'm looking forward to the growth that comes next.
Hello, @gtg I'm voting for you for a long time and I wonder how can I promote my contest if not upvoting bot, because it seems that the dtube upvote is not enough and I'm making a contest and I want more people to participate in it. I'm still here, holding my steem and steem power, but I need some motivation from you I guess. Thanks for everything you are still doing for steem.
Community engagement is the key.
Paying for bots just to get on a trending page might bring you some visibility, but spreading the word through the community using various channels (steem.chat, discord, etc, etc.) should be much more effective, i.e. reaching actual people, not just pumping the value of post and pockets of vote selling services.
Of course that's not easy to achieve, because you can't get there by simply spamming with links. You need to actually connect with people and convince them to your cause.
Thanks for the advice, I will do that. Thanks for the support as well.
Ok i voted for you
Thank you for your trust.
Me too ;-)
Thanks @gtg for taking the time to answer these. Also thanks to those who asked the questions. Someone like myself still has a ton to learn but I’m trying daily to absorb as much as I can. Things like this help. You’ve had my vote for some time now though.
Excellent @gtg
Thanks for sharing.
I have to look for a lot of info about it. @exyle has left us some notes today about it.
I am a neophyte in this and these doubts arise:
what is necessary to have an active Full node?
Exyle said this?:
"Top-20 witness pay is $3,000 per month (approximately) based on the current feed price" this is because of the necessary machines?
What is the benefit of having a full node?
I hope to find the answers.
Great post! Thanks again!
I wrote a bit about that in my Steem Pressure series, it's just a Steem node, that runs with certain settings and plugins that allows to reply to full range of API queries. Thing is that some plugins, especially tags and follow, require much more resources than consensus (needed for a regular node). Currently account history plugin, which was also a big deal, is already moved to much more robust RocksDB solution.
Please note, that to provide decent API service, it's not enough to run just one server with steemd.
Thank you very much @gtg .I just read 4 episodes. Very clear.
So, if anyone can have a node, why do I need to be Witness or what difference does a Witness have with any other user?
By the way, this is you? : @"gandalfthewhite"
No, it's just another user.
You don't need to be a witness. Witnesses sign blocks with their witness nodes, they keep the network running.
API nodes are needed by developers, services, apps, and their users. API endpoints don't really need to run steemd. It might be hivemind, sbds, or some other microservices.
I really like your responses, which are grounded and grounding in a way...
Anyway, you wrote that you support whatever takes Steem platform futher. We as @steeveapp have started a bot that regularly upvotes content that it finds engaging based on data collected from user activity on Steeve. You can read more about in the announcement that went out just today. Perhaps you would find it meaningful to delegate some SP to the bot to support both Steeve and good content on Steem ;-)
In case I am like the 42nd person today to bother you with delegating SP today, I am sorry, but there are limited ways how to spread the word.
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
I'm not going to delegate my SP to any voting bot, but...
Maybe it would be a good idea to promote Steeve (and its ratings) by posting aggregated data (weekly?) about posts that are highly ranked (eligible for upvoting?)
Trouble is that one of the factors is number of views, which is specific to the front-end (i.e. views from steemit, busy or steempeak doesn't count).
We are preparing a section on Steeve with the highest ranked posts like you described. Making a post just with the list would be imo unnecessary blockchain bloating when we can do it off chain.
Edit: this section is already live.
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
Well, in a long run, you are right, but as a show case to present and describe how it works and why it's different it still can bring the value.
Yeah, I also has it on my mind to create posts like that. Thanks for reminding me :-)
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
We are also going to use the rating as one of the story sortings available in Steeve, but that is not the same as making weekly reports.
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
This sounds like you are against voting bots in principle. But I just found out you are delegating to @steem-ua. Can you explain?
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
Their concept of alternative reputation system was really promising, and that's not a vote selling service.
It was meant to be a support for development efforts to get some traction (I'm not taking part in a "Stake-Based Sponsor Rewards").
I think the goal was achieved, and I should remove that delegation quite some time ago, especially that in such cases utopian route should be a way to go.
Thanks for pointing that out. It's good time to clean things out.
Oops, my goal was not for you to remove the vote. I actually kind of like what they are doing, because we had a similar idea with the follows. But what they didn't realize is that the situation on Steem with the trending page and no other content discovery mechanism leads to people following every author that seems at least little bit interesting. That makes follow much less relevant than they probably think (see for example their regular upvotes to buildawhale).
Are you assuming Steeve is a vote-selling service? That might be a big misunderstanding. Steeve is more like an AI-enhanced curation guild. Steeve gives recommendations from outside of people's feeds, they decide whether they like it or not and SteeveBot then upvotes the most popular posts (overall, not just the recommendations). There is no way people can buy SteeveBot's vote and we took measures against its potential gaming.
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
I’m happy that i got to know you personally on SF3 and spent quite some time discussing all imaginable topics…it reassured me that my witness vote is in the right hands. Although i still have mixed feelings after i realized that you’re not the gandalf from VIT too:(:D...
I'l be honest, i'm not sure that I have a witness vote for you. However, this has been my favorite @witnesssurvey this far. Appreciate the authenticity and blunt reasons.
Posted using Partiko Android
The witness survey idea is awesome.
Thank you @gtg for taking the time to answer these questions. I would vote you for witness if I hadn't yet but you already have my vote for some time now.
Cheers.
Posted using Partiko Android
Thank you :-)
Hi, it is very good... Thanks for answering to the questions..
Thanks to you (all witness) steemians are safe...
Of course I have already witness vote to you...
Have a beautiful day...
I like your witness clip, @gtg.
great to see you take part in this :-)
Yes! I'm planning to read all of these starting tomorrow. Thanks for answering these questions and get some feel of where you stand on several 'issues'. Would love to see this repeated with different questions every few months or so. Now, from you I only need a tutorial on how to create those awesome animations you do :P
Hey @gtg, are you planning to run wss for your server for a long time? I do need it for my service.. And do you happen to know why steem deprecate websocket server?
Yes, I'm going to keep wss endpoint operational.
You mean: Steemit Inc. derecated it at their endpoint (
api.steemit.com)? They moved to jussi and JSON-RPC 2.0 for easier caching and load balancing.Unfortunately it brakes
cli_walletif you don't have your own, local, websocket enabled node and don't know public nodes with wss support.Out of curiosity: what is your use case? Change on their public servers is one year old, all libraries should have support for it.
good to see a post from you
Hi @gtg!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 8.545 which ranks you at #1 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has not changed in the last three days.
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 201 contributions, your post is ranked at #1. Congratulations!
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
It is good system ...also steemit good project
Posted using Partiko Android
@gtg, thank you for the update!
Posted using Partiko Android
Ho Ho Ho! @gtg, one of your Steem friend wished you a Merry Christmas and asked me to give you a new badge!
SteemitBoard wish you a Merry Christmas!
May you have good health, abundance and everlasting joy in your life.
To see who wanted you to receive this special gift, click here!
Click here to view your Board
Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:
https://steemd.com/@gaman
https://beempy.com/resource_costs
Currently you need somewhere around 5-6kSP
Yes. I was pointing out many times, that it was (pre-HF) an awesome feature. I have a mined account myself. I guess - priorities.
In fact current system is not that far from that with except of a one very important feature, with PoW based, you don't need third party at all.