SquareLink: Listener Review of the 2/24/2018 Steemit Witness Forum

SquareLink Coverage of 2/24/18 Steemit Witness Fourm

This is a SquareLink Listener Review of today's Steemit Witness Forum. I attended this event live and made notes on what struck me as important. (Disclaimer: This is from my notes and not intended to be a literally accurate record. If anything of substance is wrong, just leave a comment and I will correct the post.

For those who do not know about these events, the Steem Witness Panel discussion is a monthly held on the last Saturday of every month at 10am CST, 4pm UTC. These are hosted by @aggroed who runs the Peace Abundance and Liberty Discord as part of the Minnow Support Project. Now, I knew about the discord channel, but what I did not know that as part of this, they operate the MSP Waves internet radio station that plays great music as well as hosts a variety of great content.

---

Witness Forum Part I: Andres Levine

Yesterday, I had resteemed the announcement for this edition of the Steemit Witness Forum, which listed several top Witnesses as well as Andres Levine @andrarchy our new Director of Content. Adam was asked about the scope of his role and said that at a high level he wants to improve the leadership's communication with the community and to develop an effective content publication strategy.

Adam sees the Director of Content as being in charge of telling Steemit's story to the world including the Steemit community and the larger community outside our ecosystem.

Adam discussed working on Appbase, and the value it brings by
creating an additional layer of modules on top of the steem blockchain. This increases efficiency for tools that get information from the blockchain by creating refreshing cashes of frequently accessed data that make data queries faster while not taxing the blockchain.

When asked about what devs need to focus on, Adam replied that since they now have 35 developers and growing, the importing thing right now is to focus on Agile methodology, to make sure that sprints, stories, epics, are getting done and the people assigned to each item are making progress and using the methodology so that things are tracked, and resource and time estimates can be made from the data.

Finally, Adam was asked as Director of Content, what would he say is the 'core message' he would like to deliver. Adam responded that the broad idea is 'tokenize the web' which at a high level is what Steemit is all about. After this, then the content division needs to tell the story of WHY this tokenizing the web will make things better. That Stemit is not like for profit orgs, but actually intrested in increasing the value of Stee for everyone.

Adam suggested that we follow both the Steemit Blog and the Steemit Dev Blog.

This ended the first part with Adam, which I really liked, but might have hoped to include a couple of questions from the many folks in the discord chat. Of course there were time constraints on all the participants, so this might not have been possible.

Witness Forum Part II: Talking to Witnessess

First the four primary witnesses and two backup witnesses introduced themselves in order of the current Witness rank.

Witness Introductions

1. Tim Cliff (@timcliff). Tim as been a witness for 1 year and sees his job as identifying the most important things to focus on. He says that right now, he is working on a new mod for Steemit chat, has been spending a lot of time providing help to other folks, and working behind the scenes discussing protocol changes and helping with the Steem developers portal, and do ing app based testing.

2. @aggroed. Our host for today's show and originator of the PAL discord channel previously mentioned. This channel has seen tremendous growth, now past 14000 Stemians. He also spends his time hosting this radio show, and thinking about how to help folks, especially new minnows to grow this place in a sustainable way, such as with his Resteem Contest.

3. Carl Nash aka @goodkarma, is on representing Curie which is both a witness and a project desiged to enhance curation on Steemit so that good content is recognized and rewarded, thus increasing the value for the entire ecosystem.

4. @Furion who is a developer and n the last year has been working on a half dozen projects including steemdata, the database layer for the Steem Blockchain and has been working recently on the "technical debt" of doing required enhancements and maintenance to projects already in production. In addition he has been working on things like hive, which is a SQL based database for the Steem Blockchain. He announced that he also has 2 new apps planned for the next six months, so we will have to wait for more information to drop concerning these.

@aggroed noted that if you are working on an app or doing pretty much any development work that uses the Steem blockchain, then chances are you are relying on something @furian has contributed.

Backup Witnesses Introductions

1. Cervantes represented by @pgarcgo. Pablo comes from an engineering background and helps run this backup witness. This is a community witness interested in supporting the Spanish speaking community on Stemit that is currently around 15 to 16 thousand users. They currently have discord servers as well. They work on curation for Spanish content, and work with limpio to fight plagiarism as a collaborating cleaning group. This week Cervantes launched the 21st edition of Cervantes Magazine. They also host meetups of Spanish Steemians in various locations.

2. Block Brothers represented by @exyle. Of course @exyle needs no introduction, being one of the most prolific and popular Vloggers on Steemit/DTube. His Block Brothers Witness however is fairly new. They are mainly focusing on apps and tools such as Nozzle, a small rpc client, also a configurable voting bot, and the Steemify app which is already out for ios, and has an android version in development (sadly no eta yet). Steemify lets you get notified when friends post, comment ect. and is very configurable. I'll do a review as soon as I can get my hands on the android version! Block Brothers are also working on Steem Turbine (see the advanced notice of this early warning system for steem witness that will alert if they are out of sync and help prevent witnesses from missing blocks.

Witness Questions

@agrored asked all the Witnesss what the see the biggest problem is with the ecosystem currently and what they see happening if this challenge gets resolved.

Tim Cliff (@timcliff)

Tim says he is not loosing sleep about the problems he sees as they are being worked on. The present challenges he sees include having efficient sign-ups, scalability of the blockchian, fair distribution of rewards, and new users with good content being able to get noticed. To this end he is working on a new project refered to as a "shilling contest". Tim says that we need to convince peole that THIS s the platform that will take Blockchain to the masses.This is already happening per the Blocktivity Matrix.

@agrored adds that Steemit ecosystem is the "Entertainment Exporting Digital Nation). Now THAT is a tag line folks.

Carl Nash aka @goodkarma

Carl thinks that a big problem we are currently facing is that curation is not properly incentivised, and tools for curation are simply not there yet. One of the things that Curie is working on is a frontend with advanced filtering options that will help users discover good content. They want to enable everyone (not just coders who can write good SQL queries) to curate content. Curie has been operating on the Steemian platform, but is now developing their own front end for this purpose. Any curation org will be able to use this. The searching for content feature will be a take on the queries he developed for his own use, to sort through the massive volumes of Steemit posts.

@aggroed

One of his concerns presently is user retention. If users don't feel engaged and their posts go ignored they could leave out of frustration. His desire is to make improvements in user engagement, and to focus on community.

@furion

He wants to start on a positive note. He is very happy about the continuous improvement he is seeing, things are coming together. One of his concerns is how the block space is currently being used. Steemians can send $$ for free, but this is actually consuming block space, which is a finite resource. There needs to be some way to support paying for block space utilization, since the block space runs on real servers that cost real dollars to keep running and updating. One of the suggestions to consider is moving some content like images off the block chain using IPFS, and creating a hash that is stored in the block chain, so the content could not change. There was some dissent to this idea, but it is one that definitely needs to be discussed and @furion is forward thinking in this area.

@pgarcgo

One of the main problems right now on the current Steemit interface, is content discoverability. It would be nice to have an interface to know where you are joining and you can instantly see quality posts of your intrest. Cervantes is trying to create an interface like a Spanish Newspaper platform, where quality posts are shown on different topics. This project would consist of writers, editors, content selectors, and so fourth who are elected by community consensus.

@exyle

Exyle notes that we are in a very good place compared to the dark times of mid 2017, when most users ended up leaving in frustration. He sees a bit problem being curation, which is almost impossible to do by hand, as the new feed is running at around 10 posts per second. He is hopeful that the community feature coming soon might address part of this issue. Steemify also helps as you can be notified when someone you follow posts. He also mention that as a witness, he is concerned with how many gigabytes are needed to host the entire block chain, and at the pace that this demand will continue to grow.

General Question: Is Steemit leadership focused on the right priorities?

@exyle: The team is working on the right stuff, being able to scale the platform is crucially important.
Q. What about the SBD going at a market price as opposed to being pegged to the dollar?
A. Right now, Block Brothers like the market price, as it helps us to pay for servers!

@pgarcgo: For developers, he is very glad the Utopian project will help reward technical contributes who may never write blog posts, or make videos. He notes that for investors, Steem needs to go mainstream with online payment solution, and we need a good icon under android wallet.

Closing Thoughts

@timcliff: Great Panel, a lot of great ideas shared, and overall Steem platform

@goodkarma: I'm cautiously optimist about communities. Curies has been planning ahead for communities roll-out, we have supported sub communities a precursor to communities, we have enabled these sub communities by following behind the community selected content with some vote percentage. A vote for Curie as a witness is a vote to put the brain in proof of brain. Also, we just launched a full node yesterday, and are in the middle of upgrading our witness server, and continue to invest in server technology.

@aggroed; We have a growing community and I'm optimistic and looking forward to what the leadership is doing. The top 20 witnesses seem to have good alignment with what the company is doing. This feel like organic development and does not feel forced, but moving in the right direction to support the four type of stakeholders; content creators, merchants, developers, and investors.

@furion: Thanks for inviting me, I learned something new and it has been a very positive experience.
Thanks for inviting, I learned something new, positive experience.

@pgarcgo; Thanks and of course we backup witnesses also need your votes. Cervantes is important as it supports the Spanish speaking community, and help bring more quality Spanish content. In fact, everyone should learn salsa, or some other Latin dance because we are hopeful for some great Latin music to dance to at the next steemfest.

@exyle: Thanks for the invite, this is the first appearance of the Block Brothers witness. What you can expect to see from us in the future is Steemify for Android. We would like to ask for your witness vote as it really helps to fund the great projects we are working on and have planned.


That was a ton of great information and food for thought. I think it will take a separate post for me to go over all the ideas that listening in on this great discussion provided. If you did not get a chance to listen to today's program, @aggroed will post a link which I highly recommend listening to, and of course put March 31st on your calendar to catch the next edition of the Steemit Witness Forum.

@phaazer1 [SquareLink]
If you can Dream it, you can Steem it.

Please add any questions, comments, or other ideas below, I would love to hear from you.
Also, Your Up-votes are always appreciated if you appreciate the work! First comment gets an upvote as well.