Steemit Updates and Communication — Was There a Steemit Wallet Update?

Greetings all!

I'm going to take a moment to interrupt my usual flow of thought with a broader Steemit question:

What just happened to Steemit wallets?

No, no need to freak out... but read on!

When I logged in this morning, I noticed the appearance that I had no rewards to claim. Because I am an active curator, that hasn't happened in years.

As it turned out I did, of course, have rewards but it seemed that they were being claimed automatically on my behalf. It took me a little poking around — mostly using @steemchiller's excellent steemworld.org utility — to discover that at around midnight UTC, rewards started being claimed automatically.

Thinking that it was perhaps just me, I checked around a bit... and it seemed to be everyone.

The only reason this really bears commenting on is the fact that it is a little bit alarming when you don't know what's going on.

I thought perhaps I was a little bit "out of the loop" because I've been busy doing other things, so I looked around for some kind of announcement post saying that an update had been implemented and rewards would now be claimed automatically. I did not find such an announcement.

Then I thought perhaps there had been an update of the SteemAuto service on worldofxpilar.com, resulting in the ”auto claim” feature being turned on permanently. I checked… and no, that was not the case.

I suppose most people might read this and ask the question "why would/should I even care?"

Because it's Confusing, and Anxiety Inducing!

Well, to be honest, my first response when I logged in and saw no rewards to be claimed was that my account had been compromised and somebody was trying to steal my Steem and Steem power and was ready to start doing a reset on my account. After all, security is extremely important in the crypto industry!

I cannot imagine that I am the first regular user to have this experience!

Ultimately, the "problem" at hand isn't so much that an update happened but that there was no announcement whatsoever about an update. At least not that I have been able to find.

Of course, I could have missed something! DID I miss something?

The Importance of Communication!

Seems to me that such a change — regardless of whether we think it's good, bad or indifferent — should at least merit some kind of announcement post, preferably pinned at the top of people's feeds, along with the other @steemitblog posts... purely for the purpose of calming any unnecessary fears and anxieties.

Let’s not forget that there are hundreds — if not thousands — of people for whom Steemit provides a material part of their ability to pay for day-to-day life!

In what I call ”the old days,” one of the things people always complained about on Steemit was the fact that there were almost never any updates and communication from Steemit, Inc. whenever there were substantial changes made. The users always felt like they were completely in the dark and then all of a sudden something changed.

That is definitely an old habit it would behoove the ”new” Steemit to NOT follow!

On a more practical level, this also brings questions to my mind.

Is there some new place in wallet settings where we can toggle "auto claim" rewards on and off, or is this a permanent change?

Was this change result of witness consensus, or was it simply implemented as part of some minor (or not) update to the code base?

Or is the fact that my rewards are being auto claimed the result of some external permission from a third hand helper app, an app that also did not make any kind of announcement? (I don't think so!)

Just throwing this out there for consideration and discussion... because "pretending nothing happened" makes zero sense to me!

Finally... whereas I’m not fond of tagging people out of the blue, I am adding this ”cc” to a few key individuals who might have some inside knowledge:

@steemitblog
@steemcurator01
@steemcurator02
@xpilar
@the-gorilla
@steemchiller
@o1eh
@pennsif

And now, I shall get back to my regular style posting... but DO please leave your comments and thoughts below!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.07.09 15:22 PDT
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