The issues that led to my initial support of @elfspice and Calibrae were centered around the lack/manner of communication between steemit.inc and the steem community, steemit.inc's massive stake and the problems created by the massive disparity of stake influence and all that comes from it.
It was always my preference that Steem succeed and I have been given new hope that is possible because @ned has clearly indicated he's heard my concerns. I believe genuine steps are already being taken to address those concerns that many of us share. This is fantastic.
I still believe steem forks have the potential to be a good thing for Steem and could be very valuable in and of themselves. However, I no longer believe that Calibrae is a fork I can support. In my opinion, elfspice does not have enough support to make a serious attempt and is haphazardly attempting to solve many issues that steem currently has all at once. At the outset, the idea was to remove stake mined before the steemit app existed and to copy across everyone else's account attributes like stake and rep whilst also addressing the scalability issues....an experiment that I think would have been very interesting. Unfortunately, both presented extremely difficult technical challenges. It is very hard to follow and unpick where all the stake is. I think the latest idea is to give everyone the same stake, potentially also an interesting experiment, but interested Steemians with something worth protecting in steem would no longer have a safety blanket under which to choose where to spend their time and other resource. The risk profile is significantly changed away from Calibrae.....at least in my opinion.
I sent @elfspice a donation for his work because he has added value to Steem simply by acting as a crucible for debate and I wanted to give him the chance to explore his ideas. He may be technically gifted, I don't know. But what I do know from what I have seen is that his approach is haphazard at best. I do know that the scalability issues are extremely challenging. He needs a great deal of support around him, a solid foundation and a constant pressure towards discipline in order to get the best out. I cannot see that kind of support forming around him any time soon and I fear it will sadly lead to frustration and a tendency to veer into less constructive activities, communications and ultimately a failure to deliver.
If you read this elfspice, I think until you have a solid team around you and have a firm strategy for a new steem-fork experiment, that you should bury the hatchet and start afresh on steemit. The current approach cannot possibly work, there are too many things you are trying to change at once whilst re-designing the architecture. It is an extremely daunting task for anyone. You have done a great service to steem and you've inspired debate, support for your ideas and hopefully some changes in steemit.inc's approach. That is amazing and very valuable. Come back to steem unencumbered and with an open heart, I'll follow you as would many others I'm sure.
All of us must understand that if we want steem to survive, we have to set higher standards for ourselves and expect more from each other. We have to expect more from steemit.inc, from our witnesses, from those with significant stake, from businesses exploiting the steem pool, from everyone.
What is the intent behind steemit? It's a tool for protecting life, liberty and property. Can you see anything else in the whole world, in the whole of history working as well as steem does in reaching for that goal? I can't. What does that mean? It means we are on the cutting edge, everything every single steemian does takes us closer or further away from our chances of succeeding in achieving those goals. Aren't they goals literally everyone can agree upon?!
So every time you do something on steemit......and hell, we are all gonna make mistakes and put our feet in our mouths or misunderstand something or get upset or have a bad day.....just try at least to think, is this helping toward those lofty goals or or not? If enough of us care for long enough, then we can make steem work and change the world for the better for everyone.
Happy Steeming
This is a nice and sincere post.Like you address elfspice brough a real and interesting debate to the table. Protecting life liberty and poberty sounds beutiful really, but there are also economic incentives for many people, especially whales and founders which is understood. Having huge whales at the begining brings economic interests and attention at first, but later on just like in the real world they can build and create selfish pressure against the common interest. We need more people like elfspice with strong technical background that discuss real issues.That is how this community will grow in a strong and healthy way without naive nice intentions. By the way, I just saw tha ALL Calibrae post have been flaged, that is not good, debates and forks are there to improve the NOW for a better tomorrow, really sad those flags
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True it is a huge overhaul, but isn't that the same thing that initiated the spark of STEEMit in the first place? The need for change and freedom. The hope to escape the soothsayers and cons of FACEBOOK. A place that we all could finally call 'home'.
I still support @calibrae.
Obviously I still love this place from the gentle @canadian-coconut to the lovable yet important @berniesanders.
I like new ideas, wouldn't have been great to be the person who bankrolled DISNEY, MSFT, APPLE...FACEBOOK? Think about it. I like money you like money. Let's be honest with each other we want more out of life and the freedom to do it. If I get to make more money with another asset on the market so be it.
I get to be there, in the beginning, when it first started. I get to see its first users post their first posts and comments. I will be there if anything just to say I was.
In closing I would like to say if you believe in something water it and watch it grow. Reap the fruit it bears. But most of all, believe.
Thank you for your time and feedback.
Peace, Love and Keystrokes, Folks! :)
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My question would be whether or not this is the catalyst that causes the issues everyone was concerned about to begin being addressed.
Has there been better communication from Steemit Inc?
Or did elfspice merely commit the Steemit version of seppuku?
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Thanks @benjojo for sharing this perspective.
In a sense, it seems like elfspice's ambitious project really is-- as much as anything-- a "wake-up call" to the Steemit community: We need to pay a little less attention to just griping about what's wrong, and actually start tending our garden here... rather than look around for "greener pastures."
Slightly related/slightly tangential, I don't know if you caught @timcliff's piece from a couple of days ago... the subtext of which was that a lot of people here seem like they are "sitting around, waiting for something to happen;" when, in all truth, WE are the ones who need to make things happen. In a sense, perhaps elfspice was inadvertently responding to that sensation that Steemit seems a little bit in the doldrums.
As I said, it's only "somewhat" related, but if you're interested in Tim's post, it's here: https://steemit.com/condenser/@timcliff/calling-community-developers-let-s-polish-the-steemit-com-mothership
Personally, I would maintain that part of our "issue" here is that there seems to be very little in the way of a cohesive long-term plan. Sure, there's the White Paper, and there's the "road map" but these read more like a series of "course corrections" than a cohesive vision... which may be one of the challenges/limitations of a decentralized project... there's no central repository, just a swirling cloud of ideas. I keep thinking of a situation where everyone knows (and agrees) that "we need to paint the house" but without planning, 43 people go to the paint store and come back with 43 colors of paint and an array of brushes and rollers many of which are not even suitable.... and then people end up butthurt because THEIR version isn't what's chosen. But I am no expert on that... and I'm barely out of minnowhood, in a Steemit context.
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I completely agree with you. We all need to try harder and to challenge what, how and when things are happening. Because of their stake, Steemit.inc must lead the way but we need to help them.
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Great Post, We found the Calibrae project earlier this morning through one of the Steemians. We must say that it looks like a very ambitious project. However, I don't think you guys have the Resources that Steemit Inc. is Backed with.
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That is what I concluded. Great ambition, great passion, but worryingly lacking in the support and possibly expertise necessary to carry it out. Steemit.inc have everything going for them....just a few not insignificant adjustments, and boy will this place be singing then.
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Happy steeming... for now :)
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Lol. Indeed ;)
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Hi @benjojo I have read the post before this one too and about this I specially understand your words. But let me tell you something that I can see it directly from my real position as a Minnow that is just involved with the concept of STARTING in here. Because even being new in Steemit, I know very well the words Life, Liberty and Property and when someone see how Steemit is from my side can see all in a different way (nor better nor worst, different) . Because the involved % is not so personal and the view can be more objetive. I mean...in two weeks i fell in love with Steemit....
I think that a change should be made a lot of time ago, because the platform is not prepared to deal with growing in a any way.
So a platform when REAL liberty could be reached, must be done. Because Steemit in not a Liberty platform for all. Is a Liberty platfomr for those with POWER and I saw how a vote of thousand of dollar can just intimidate hundred on users. And how a content creator with no support suffers in trying not make money, no no... in trying to someone just a lleast watch their content. Anyway..the only I felt is a bit of Angry by one side because of the chance that the Steemits owners had and why just left it die in this way... Anyway I'll bein here waiting for the best. And again as I said in the other post... really great t oread your kind words to that ones that want to make a change for good! Peace for all!
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The challenge steemit has for mass adoption as I see it is in the new user experience. For sake of this discussion we assume there are no technical issues, and there are 300 whales and 300,000 users.
Steemit has a pretty hefty learning curve. A new user has to search and read a ton of various opinions to learn how to maneuver the platform. There is no organization, it's a needle in a haystack.
A minnow can post and post and post and not be seen, or make anything. No eyeballs on your post alone is discouraging, add to that a .05 post payout and only the tenacious stick.
So some whales try to help and out of the blue a newbs post gets hit with upvote bots, encouraging right? So the newb sticks around a little longer and the sincere tries to engage and develop relationships. In addition to talking to other newbs, who are generally chatty, the minnow reaches out to whales and dolphins, many of which don't engage a bunch in their comments, many do, but many don't.
From the whales perspective, they've got 270,000 people vying for their attention.
Add to the mix spam like there's no tomorrow, flag wars, controversy about the "services" that would help a minnow get noticed and you have a recipe for mass exodus, not adoption.
I'm sure I've left some holes in this analogy, but it's hard to write on my phone.
Point is, if steemit goes mainstream with these challenges, it could leave a bad taste in a lot if people's mouths.
I don't have answers, just offering a perspective that complicates any technical challenges there may be,
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All of the issues you raise are totally valid and I agree with the lot. I think it's important to remember that if you take all the voting rewards away, steem still has incredible utility as a network and as a token. In many ways, those properties and the way of thinking that gives you that perspective requires you to labor through all the challenges you mention before you can get to that.....despite it being there in plain sight. Once scalability is resolved along with onboarding, I hope a lot of attention is given to the issues you raise. I also hope people can look beyond the money and see the other incredible utility that steem has to give hope.
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I think you're right. Unfortunately it takes an education and tenacity, which is an obstacle for the average person.
Facebook killed MySpace because it was so easy even grandma could do it and MySpace dealt with HTML, which only tenacious grandmas would do.
Not the same I know, but similar enough to learn from. And as long as it's presented to new people as a way to make money, that's what they'll expect. Maybe it would be wise to re-examine the initial exposure given when people evangelize for steemit?
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I wholeheartedly agree that we should re-examine the marketing completely and emphasise the attributes like free to tx, global reach, possibility ofdecentralised architecture, no censorship etc
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Lol, too bad we can't solve all the problems right here in the comments :)
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There is a lack of communication, and there is no place where to provide feedback to make steemit greater. Also the way steemit works, where the Money rules on everything, on the quality of posts, on the witnesses, on reputation etc is very discouraging. I wrote a post about what I think how Steem should work: https://steemit.com/steemit/@emble/will-steem-succeed-or-commit-suicide
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I totally aggre with you :- we have to set higher standards for ourselves and expect more from each other.
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Hear! Hear! Re: What is the intent behind steemit? COuldn't have put it any better myself. I do believe the true value of Steemit, or anything else for that matter, lies entirely with the people who use it. The people are the value, not the currency.
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Yes and building trust through utility, function, security, distribution is what keeps the people (or value.)
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Whilst he has good intentions, and when in the right frame of mind, probably also the necessary skills, I think elfspice has struggled to properly frame the problem he seeks to address, or at least to articulate it clearly and consistently. He's made no secret of his issues with drink, which might have some bearing on some of these things.
I don't share his opinion about the 'pre-mining' issue, I can't judge, either legally or morally, whether the founders and friends should have their huge stakes.
I am concerned about the impact of self-voting and would like to see the curation percentage increase to 50%, as that would significantly reduce it. I wasn't around when it was previously at that level though, so don't have that experience to draw on. I'd also like to see the power-down period extended as it once was, but again, I'm not sure why it was changed. I'm guessing it was to attract more investment, and raise the Steem price in the short-term.
Recent technical development and plans from Steemit have slightly eased my worries about scalability, at least until the whole thing migrates to EOS, in a structure where the comment data is moved out of the blockchain into more efficient storage ;)
I wish elfspice the best with his project if he decides to pursue it, and if he does rejoin this community, to the interesting and open technical discussion he adds to the platform, from which I've already learnt quite a lot.
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Thank you so much for adding your balanced perspective, I really appreciate it.
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??? Just choose a reward mechanism, choose some way to initialize balances (0.001 SP at account creation?), and replay the blockchain. Done. Why is that hard?
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Well you just made it sound extremely easy. If that is all it takes, I stand corrected. Perhaps the decision to change was more ideological than technical and I misunderstood.
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Maybe I should chat with our low-rep friend about it, hehe.
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I'm not sure that would help at this stage.....but who knows :)
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Elfspice initially wanted to just remove the so called 'premined' accounts, which he thinks are immoral and illegal. he wanted to preserve other account stakes and rep. It became obvious, this was going to be very difficult to accomplish, so he proposed fixed stakes for those opting in. Then realised there was no easy way to prevent the faction he wanted to exclude from entering this way either. So concluded that just resetting balances was the way forward.
This in my mind reduced the likelihood of adoption, as it undermined the incentive for existing users to join the fork.
He also wanted to improve scalability, by moving the comments data out of the chain, into a more appropriate data store, and ultimately with a rewrite, but I think he realised this was a huge amount of work, so for expediency proposed curtailing transactions with a hard (stake-weighted) limit per user per day, but again this raised questions about how it would affect the user experience and distort economic incentives.
I could go on, but in short, I think choosing an appropriate reward mechanism is far from simple, and in my opinion, once the seed is planted, it's hard to change the type of plant that grows. Really I would like to see some kind of agent-based modelling be carried out in advance of changes. These aren't simple systems, and it reaffirms the genius of Dan Larimer, in going as far as he has in the right general direction.
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Yeah, I read his writeup on the GitHub and it became clear pretty quickly that he was filling in old holes by digging new ones. I really hope he manages to get this off the ground for the sake of the natural experiment it would give us, but he's got a lot of work to do.
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If steem is going to succeed with widespread adoption I think that new user experience needs to be a very strong focus. Imagine if you were reading a post on reddit or any other social media site and you went to comment and after you hit sign up you had to wait up to a few days to be approved.
I completely understand why it is done the way it is but there has to be a better solution. I am posting this as part of a comment because it was talked about here but also because you have enough SP that perhaps you can push the idea up the ladder some.
Make account creation instant with steemit delegating power. Make a change in the rewards calculation so that if an account spams and has their delegation pulled their votes become worthless and any of their own posts have any rewards redistributed to the reward pool. If this was implemented the same verification that is done now could actually still be done but after the user is already able to join and not wait a couple days to try the platform.
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EDIT: deleted this comment because it seemed I antagonized him last time I tried to give him some advice. I'm just going to keep my distance.
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A 100% verified set of real users with equal stake would be interesting.
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Yes, but there are issues that are not trivial......proving individual identity whilst enabling privacy. Also, it wouldn't be long before disparities in stake would occur through buying and also people collaborating to build stake. So in some ways, what's the point? You would still end up with Whales, Dolphins and Minnows. The trouble with Steem is that the effects of the distribution, given the degree of centralisation, were so bad that the issue was highlighted. In the end steem would eventually reach a far more acceptable distribution as long as we can preserve the community for long enough.
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I think the two: privacy and an identity confirmation system, where one person can have only one identity is impossible over the Internet.
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We'll just have to be happy having golos for a backup.
I was sure hoping loki could deliver, but I wasn't holding my breath.
Maybe he will still come through,....
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Verified by whom, exactly?
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I leave that open as a problem to solve.
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As I have read more these past couple of days I to am with benjojo on this one. I think Steemit is still in it's infancy and there are bound to be growing pains. I think I will give them that room to grow.
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Good point!
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Thanks bud! :)
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😊😊😊
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this is great @benjojo, steemit is still at its infancy and there are bound to be a lot of issues to overcome before it can stand tall. dividing the house now will do either parties no good. dialogue is always the best option. united we stand and stand we will. i would also like to join in and becon to @elfspice to try and dialogue with steemit inc once again just as i also would like to call on steemit inc to sort out the pertinent issues raised and lets move steem and steemit ahead. we should be competing with already established networks not within ourselves because we have the potential to be the largest network with real values.
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I completely agree in a unity of purpose and that steem has incredible potential. However, the possibility of losing trust and community migration to alternatives is a valuable part of the feedback loop that helps to maintain integrity. Forks may also be able to innovate faster than a live network and could provide valuable insight so should not be feared. It's the people that matter and they can choose and form trust around what makes sense for them, an important pressure on existing projects to stay relevant.
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"A tool for protecting life, liberty and property" that's a really difficult tasks. Is important to set meaningful goals but we shouldn't forget we are not flawless and as steemit is built by people, the system will follow the behaviour of the mood of the people that build it. Is not good or bad, is just impossible for 3 people to have the same views upon life, liberty and property so no chance for 20 to meet an agreement. I guess the choice you have made is a very good one and make sense if you believe a core value is not in line anymore with your views upon the system. If you cannot change either you can debate or step out and look for something more appealing. Perfection is a tare rather than a quality because doesn't exist. I would still try if I was you :)
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I think if you asked everyone if they would rather live in a world where their life, liberty and property were protected or a world where those things were not protected (like the world we live in now,) the majority would choose the former. I agree, the HOW is very much up for debate. Which is why innovations, adaptability, transparency, discussion and all the other things that cut the bull, reveal the truth and enable innovation are so important. We need to find the most efficient path. Time is very much a factor and as things currently stand with the world of today, a matter of life and death for millions.
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Каждому своё))
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Thanks for the update. Honestly, seeing all of this strife and drama lately has left me a little nervous. Glad to hear that Steemit is moving forward and is going to fix the problems associated with it.
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I understand. Humans are masters of strife and disharmony because we are all operating in our own little worlds where the availability and analysis of information, overlaid by our biases lead to diverse opinions. That is why ideas that we can unify around are so valuable. The points where all our interests intersect are very rare but they do exist! That is so marvellous because if there is just a few things we can agree upon, like protection for our property, then there is a foundation on which to build. Try not to worry about the occasional hiccup. Watch for the general trend towards realising those central goals and use that measure for peace of mind! :) This technology is moving in a positive direction at light speed from where I'm sitting :)
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When I first came on this platform, I saw nothing but positivity. Glad to see that coming back again! Regardless of what happens, I'm here for the long run. I've got high hopes for Steemit. :)
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Steemit definitely needs an overhaul. There are definitely problems.
As I have said before, Steemit may be the first blockchain based social network, but it won't be the last. Whether Steemit does last is an question that can only be answered in time.
The clock is ticking. Especially since it is increasingly facing automated abuses.
Read the post from @sherlockholmes on this issue.
raping the reward pool with 1700+ accounts - things are getting serious!
It would seem this is the tip of iceberg, and unless solved quickly, others will so the same.
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ah damn I missed that one....
So @elfspice is building a communist version of Steemit? That would be so funny, I don't really think it would work either, but I am very interested to see a final product there.
I have to diagree on your notion of "support" though. I don't think humans or ideas should be judged on that basis. The argument of support is the only thing that keeps mainstream media relevant.
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I wish you the best of luck bud, I really do. I support anyone who sees a problem and wants to fix it with integrity. Your message here gives me hope because whilst I understand the passion you were incited to from being, in many ways, under attack, it was too unrestrained, hot and ill disciplined. Your passion to mend an experimental tool which frankly has many issues remains inspirational to me. I genuinely hope you succeed. I really don't care what tool ends up doing the job in the end, I just hope as many as possible who have earned stake honourably can protect it and that the tool ends up being an unassailable means of setting humanity free. You deserved that donation and I don't regret sending it to you for a second. Stay cool bud. If anything will make you succeed, it's love.
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