The Plan:

After some sleep, I have concocted a cunning plan. I vaguely recalled reading something to the effect that it was entirely permissible to fork the steemit.com interface, which lives here: https://github.com/steemit/condenser The licence permits everything except removing the licence!

So, I am going to do like I do under the cold shower - hold my breath, and blast it in my face. I look down my nose at javascript, because it is such a sloppy programming language, but all these changes I have been campaigning for? Most can be done at interface level, without having to get the attention of the sleeping giant, Steemit, Inc.

https://github.com/l0k1-smirenski/condenser is where you will find the forked version that I am working on. These are the features that are first cab off the rank:

• 25% increment on a minnow slider - This will allow minnows to spread their votes around 4x as much but should not result in exceeding transaction bandwidth limits

• WSIWYG editor. Why this does not already exist is a mystery to me. There is some 10 or more viable node.js options that can be easily integrated and are free to use in this way

• Self Voting is disabled completely on the interface side.

• Instead of flags and the little up arrow, use the busy/reddit style up/down thumbs or arrow, not sure which.

• A self-vote indicator

• A witness voting interface that is much more visible and accessible, perhaps even added to the user menubar, and the interface properly integrated as the wallet and other feeds, and all elegible witnesses will be listed, not just the ones who get paid the most (top 50).

I only need to come up with a good name, rent a new monster mothership server, build an RPC instance on it, then install condenser and its required dependencies, and I will have always available on the subdomain prefix test.(whatever I call it).com that will be the live testing version that I push my code changes to first before commits to the github.

So, down to business!

See below for the original post I made when I was feeling sulky

It's always frustrating when you go along for even just a few days with some picture in your mind, and then you discover that reality has changed since then. The central principle of this #project-smackdown was being able to put a tiny mark, indicating something, but to do this...

Was this abuse of the flagging system? Well, it seems to me that it might have been.

Walking along, eyes on the imaginary thing you believe you are heading for, and then you fall in a hole, and the sky above you, seems further away than it has ever been.

This is life. Move on. We don't have the power, the Steem Power, to start this fight.

The sense of confidence is gone, because the central objective has proven to be irrelevant and impossible on the primary window into the Steem blockchain.

I know that I have a lot of support from my fellow meek people here on the platform, but the floor is still 45 degrees uphill and I am on the wrong side of the slope. It's easier to just turn around, throw the cardboard under my butt, and go somewhere closer to the earth from this place.

I cannot do the things that my small group of supporters also would like to see. I apologise to you all. I was wrong.