Luke, I greatly appreciate these types of posts as you are one of the few witnesses or anyone with an affiliation with Steemit Inc. willing to take a mediating position between users and the development side. Both critical and explanatory, not over-aggressive nor defensive. You're at least willing to be open and discuss the explicit concerns of the many who are struggling with all the faults of this current platform and community.
I agree with your approach of patience. Rome was not built in a day and any precedent technology to the Steem blockchain took closer to a decade to build out. I don't much care for the price, which exchanges Steem/SBD are listed on, or really much of the marketing concern that is brought up so often. These are all short-term issues to the larger vision of a global blockchain.
My increasing concern, and I believe many other long-timers share the same sentiments, is that the assumption that we should hold our breaths and everything will work out once the technology is polished is a very dangerous perspective that will ultimately harm the prospects and work against the ambitions of Steem. I am doubtful (and would love my mind changed on this) that the components that the Steem ecosystem has been seriously lacking until now - public education (more so than marketing), systematized feedback, a public presence and voice in the blockchain sector, scheduled and expected engagement and updates, more extensive resources for newcomers (including investors and institutional partners) to the Steem blockchain (not just developer tools), support for meaningful Steem-based projects with its own governance system, and so on - will suddenly get better once we're out of Beta. Old habits die hard and I'm concerned that if these facets are not worked upon or at least discussed at the top now, Steem will ultimately lose out to competitors who are covering some of the aforementioned bases very well.
I can't help but also share a bit of @schattenjaeger's sentiments here that somehow negligence (under the guise of 'priorities') on many fronts is permissible because the next 10 or 100 million users are what count. If a system isn't healthy at a small scale, it won't be healthy at a larger one. And many of Steemit's issues aren't tied to its scalability or underlying tech, they're very human issues.
Looking forward to any feedback.
Great comment, thank you.
I completely agree. So what do you think is the best thing we can do about it? My suggestion would be to get more developers involved providing issues and pull requests on Github. If there's a problem on Steemit, let's describe it accurately in an issue and start working on a code change to fix it. Yes, we can wait on Steemit inc to do everything, but, as you said, that's like just holding our breath. If we care, we should get involved. That might even mean having some witnesses hire some developers directly.
I agree to a point. Company culture matters, but I also want to move far away from Steemit, inc being the sole company that defines the culture of STEEM or Steemit. I've pointed out company culture issues in the past with Steemit, inc (and I think they are making improvements based on more open communication lately) and I agree, they should be working on this stuff now AND in the future.
Yep.
I completely agree. Ironically, this discussion was born out of me essentially defending my perspective that the witnesses should be involved in more things in the wider blockchain sector. They should be respected voices who are asked to speak at more conferences. We see some of this, but not enough. I'll be on a Panel at TulipCon next weekend and Discon in August not because I'm a STEEM witness, but because of my involvement with DPOS in general and more specifically EOS, eosDAC, and (yes) STEEM. In all cases, I'll be discussing the goal which is to increase human well-being and create a world we all want to live in. The tools we use to do that are just tools. If we want our voices heard outside of the STEEM community then we need to be deeply engaged outside the STEEM community.
I've read those previous posts regarding involvement in other blockchains and I think the tribalism is silly. One of the things Steemit really has going for it is its capacity to house information and development of all other blockchains. Facebook and Google and Amazon might compete on some fronts but they work in tandem in others and that makes for a more robust ecosystem. Putting on blinders and swearing loyalty oaths in an emerging sector isn't just silly but also poor self-preservation.
I'm all for non-witness non-Steemit Inc. stakeholders in picking up slack and spearheading what they respectively see as needed in this community. I try to do the same with @voronoi at @sndbox. The biggest obstacle is the lack of connectivity between individual efforts and administrative ones. I give lectures and workshops about Steem in New York and yea, we can tweet and post about it but it doesn't quite accumulate into broader publicity and education. We've also found that it reflects poorly on Steemit Inc. when we do major projects/activities and there isn't at least some degree of involvement from the top. The same goes for your talk and @stephenkendal's booths or @dlive's meetups. It often feels like a 1+1+1+1 = 0.5 type of situation as a grassroots momentum of activity doesn't resonate at the top and there isn't any structured mechanism for the top to leverage the groundswell of efforts. It should be a 1+1+1+1 = 20 type of momentum but individual efforts are drowned out by the next batch of bid-botted posts and just passed over by time in general.
Maybe there can be an endorsed account dedicated to publicity? Maybe some type of formal curation/resteeming by Steemit Inc.? Some way to accumulate the diverse activities of Steemians in a cohesive dialogue and archive that is also pushed by the team high above would be incredible.
Lots of good points here. I wonder sometimes if we're just going through a transition where people need to hear from a "representative" of an organization or they want to hear a company title or some form of "authority" they can trust instead of just a bunch of random people doing awesome stuff in a meritocracy (or, at least, an attempt at one) where value speaks for itself.
Meh, I don't think you can have it both ways - an infrastructure that supposedly relies on the autonomous workings of dedicated, decentralized individuals and at the same time have a governing organization that is largely indifferent and unable to leverage the cumulative momentum of said network.
But I guess we'll see where we end up.