I want to try to lay out the problems and flaws I see with Steem to the best of my ability from the various hats I wear within this , and make some educated guesses at the other roles. My goal is to talk through this a little bit, and then hopefully come up with solutions that can help us going into the new year.
This is my home and I'm doing my best as a business owner for Steem Monsters, a community leader for PALnet, and the number 2 witness on the platform to fulfill my mission: Spread the values of peace, abundance, and liberty; help grow the Steem ecosystem; and train and retain new members on the platform.
Investor - a large holder of steem stake
Steemit Inc - a blockchain coding company led by Ned
Business/Dapp operator - Somone building a business on the Steem blockchain
Blockchain Dev - someone who can code in C++ and make core code changes to steemd
Web Dev - someone who can contibute to website development
Content Creator - Someone who is making viewable content on the Steem platform
Content Consumer - Someone viewing a steem portal
Leadership - Steemit employee, witness, whale, and/or community leader
As an investor there's obviously some negative perception out there to deal with. There's other coins and other projects that could be as worthy or more as a place to park money than Steem is as a straight investment. We're in a competitive space and still very much building in all categories of community, dapps, DAU (daily active users), and number of stakeholders. There's not much word of mouth happening outside of our own community so all people know is that Steem was ninja mined and is centralized, we have 100% inflation (no longer true), we're a scam, 70% of Steemit employees are gone, and they have no idea how many apps or how much development is happening on the platform.
The Steem ecosystem needs to generate some buzz regarding the number of (D)Apps being built on the platform, and attract investors to the coin. Investors need to get the sense their money will be put to work for them while parked at Steem rather than slowly drained out.
I guess I don't see Steemit as the giant disaster that some others do. They have a mostly non voting stake. They do sell, which is putting downward pressure on price, but the market is doing plenty of that on it's own. I think they're working on the right things. I think they're horrible at communicating and often tone def, but I think the vision is mostly right.
The current vision as I understand it is:
Convert more plugins to rocksdb to lower the cost of operating Steem nodes from $600+ a month to less than $20 a month.
Lower the operating costs of running the Steemit Inc website and nodes.
SMT-lite development - unknown
RC Delegation pools - unknown
My primary suggestion for communicating would be to put out a roadmap and give a major update to it every 3 months to let folks know how it's going. In truth they did the update part a few weeks ago for the short term objectives. So, kudos on that. What I'm interested to see now is reporting on that plan. I think it matters less if you're hitting every part of the roadmap and more about having what looks like a plan and communicating about its general execution.
Ned skipping out on his livestream and not saying anything about it looks unprofessional and doesn't help us. That said we need less emphasis on one dude and more emphasis on this whole community.
The devs aren't perfect, but the immediate roadmap has been implemented once already for account history and should be doable in a few months. I trust they will have something before May of 2019. What they implement should make it cheaper and easier for any dapp/app to start here, which should spur growth and help decentralize the platform. It seems like a noble project.
Lastly, they're still there working on stuff even with the large amount of shit tossed at them. They aren't evil. They seem well intentioned but introverted to the point of xenophobic. All that said, if my options were: have Steemit Inc., or have a completely burned account, I'd still take having a Steemit, warts and all.
The code is good though not amazing. It has to be cheaper to run. Faster to replay, RC pools need to be delegatable, and UIA (simple tokens) enabled to get to great, and we'll need SMTs for amazing.
I don't think we're done with the signup challenges. HF20 seemed to help, but we're still missing an easy interface for some dude to come along and get themselves an instant account easily. We as a community need to figure out a simple way to make this happen.
The ability to build on it is A+ for crypto. I don't need C++ I just need web development. That's amazing! C++ guys are more expensive than attorneys and great devs C++ devs willing to work on any specific blockchain are about as rare as unicorns.
The community is active and findable. This is a big draw because you need people to buy your products and if you can't find people or tap into it then it's going to be hard to sell anything! As I'm recruiting other companies and tokens to work with Steem Monsters I'm looking for other communities to mine for players and sponsers. I'm not running into massive well organized communities that are extremely active. I'm struggling to find where other crypto communities live. I still feel like Steem is ahead in the category I think is the most crucial for building a successful Dapp.
I still like my chances of building a successful app on Steem more than any of the other chains I routinely encounter. I am concerned that if I needed any changes to the core code to make something happen there's currently a 0% chance it would happen.
This would actually be one of my worst scores. There are 4 people routinely contributing to the steemd github. 4. That's terrible. If there's a place where "Steem is centralized" is most true it's here. At a bare minimum I would suggest having open conversations between Steemit and the public once a month (ideally once a week). Figuring out a way to get more members of the community into the discussion and coding away on behalf of the block should be a high priority. Others have stated this is a distraction and not worth the time or effort. So are hardforks that halt the chain. I'm confidant that with more exposure and the team attempting to break the fourth wall and interact with the community there can be more eyes on projects and more development.
Steemit inc. exists to code the block, but they have their own agenda and keep it close to the chest. More recently it's become extremely clear they have zero intention to organize the community.
Witnesses run servers, but it's essentially herding cats. There's practically zero structure to the role and really no way or good reason to enforce it. I'm not sure it's necessary as the key here is witnessing blocks on schedule.
Community groups exist like Steemspeak and PALnet, but even while large they don't represent the platform.
If I go to Dash or BTS there's some organization around the place. It might not be lively at all times, but at least it exists. Steem has essentially none.
Despite it costing some money to run servers and a few rough hard forks Steem has an excellent blockchain.
3 second transactions
free transactions
you can store custom json data on chain giving (d)apps a data storage place on chain
reward distribution mechanisms
lots of room for growth
The number of active accounts on Steemit.com, the largest Dapp, is 40-50k per day. We can get 300-400 people together in a single meeting in Discord. There are passionate fans who are cranky as fuck, but it's a sign that they care deeply (otherwise they'd just leave). The community is generally crypto savvy and incentivized towards kindness. There are a handful of obnoxious characters and leaches, but it's blockchain. They will exist.
So far I greatly prefer the people I've met in the Steem ecosystem compared to those outside of it, and think the community is one of the best features of this place.
Putting on my witness hat- I'm of the opinion that much of this can be fixed by having the community take organized ownership of many aspects of the platform and ecosystem. We form some committees. Issue ourselves tokens to fund voluntary Steem Governance and try to steer the platform towards doing the work that's necessary for growth.
If we show success it would be my hope that Steemit would support it, but given their history of supporting community endeavors I'm not counting on it.
No matter what, it can't hurt to have this community organized and working on building/recruiting apps or trying to organize around community driven core code development.
So, in short I think there's a lot going well, a few things going ok, and a few glaring holes. I think the giant organizational problem is something this community can tackle. I'm going to prioritize this in 2019, and if we rally and are successful then we'll be well positioned for a bull run in 2019. I'll try to get a plan together early in the New Year and see who is interested in growing the Steem ecosystem in an organized community fashion.
Decentralized, but not disorganized!
