Third Test Livestream; Steemit Update

Ned, I watched your livestream today. You should know that I've spent a year (officially a year in 10 days) sharing daily on Steem blockchain. I've invested my own money and time and kept up with the speed of the dApps released.

The video reminded me of a relationship where someone has been giving too much and is angry at the other person, but the odd thing is that the other person wasn't asking that you do it all. I think you think we expect Steemit Inc to do everything, yet we really don't. One of the reasons I'm here is because I'm fucking in love with this community -- and you've never even replied to any of my comments to you. I say this to help you see that my experience here is on Steemit Inc's blockchain, but it has nothing to do with you.

You have no reason to be mad and edgy at us. I understand that's a part of releasing tension- to be mad at the other person, yet we have sat back and patiently waited for your releases, your updates, your communication and we've gotten little in return.

I thank you for today you spoke real talk-- last week you were playing your guitar and there was no freakin' substance to anything you shared. I turned it off halfway through. What is this, I thought. Yet today, even with your edgy tone, you communicated SO MUCH of what we have been longing to hear.... Plz keep it up.

We don't expect you to do everything. But, as in a relationship, we do expect you to clearly state what is yours to do and what we shouldn't expect you to do. You started that process of honest transparency in this livestream today. Please keep it up.

I have a feeling that even if Steemit Inc throws in the towel or is too fatigued to continue, this community will not die. I have made dozens of friends here and many of them have not only invested their time and talents, but also their hard earned money. These people are everything to me and I can't imagine my life without them. That is Steem and I hope you realize that. The power of what is happening here rests on your blockchain, but we will take it from here and we can give you a breather if you need it. Keep up the honest communication. We're all better with it! I hope you get some much needed rest and can hear some of the words I've shared -- As someone who loves Steem and wants it to continue!!!

I keep saying that a hybrid system would be needed to allow mass adoption. A half-centralized system at least for new and small accounts. Because we know that a small account is useless, they are limited in everything, comments, votes, they earn nothing and these small accounts are only used for spam or to inflate the stats of dead accounts.

We need a system where people wouldn't even see that they don't have the ability to act on the network, we can do it with a front-end that does it.

We live here on Steem behind closed doors, articles with hundreds of thousands of views collect only 3 comments (I had the bitter experience) from Steemians and the others look but can't comment.

The keys are too complicated to manage they would have to be intended only for people who have an interest in using the blockchain and who will therefore pay attention to this and therefore the 4 keys (posting, active etc...) will no longer be a barrier for users.

In short, there are plenty of solutions and no problems, except those we invent for ourselves. For example, Steemit.com, which is ranked among the most visited sites in the world, does not benefit from advertising. While with a good organization they could have done it and with the profits bought from the Steem so raise the price and redistribute them to virtuous projects and we have tons on Steem with all the Dapps that exist today.

Unfortunately, the Steemians with whom I speak persist in the wrong direction and those who think like me need a way forward but they don't have them. I can't do anything because I don't have enough time and energy, but fortunately there is time and energy to do it and I'm sure that one day or another it's this kind of application/front-end that will make the network successful.

A simple example, Medium has launched its partner program. Those who wish to (and only those who wish to) can register and publish content that will be visible only to Medium subscribers. We must do the same with Steem, without charging (fees) anything. Because we have the technology to offer such a service. A Steem account should only be given to those who wish to do so and should not be a requirement for interaction with Steemians. Okay there will be spam but all social networks are doing fine today, right? It is up to us to think and act.

Sorry for my English I translated via Deepl.com

Great job on the live-stream today. I'm sure you probably already know, but these things go a long way in building confidence with the community. It was great to see publicly what some of the thought processes are behind the restructuring, and how Steemit will be shifting focus going forward.

I appreciate you taking as much time as you did on my (and smooth's) comments.

I wanted to respond to a few of the remarks you made in the video:

First of all, I think that it is excellent that you are trying to narrow Steemit's focus, and I agree 100% with the assessment that spreading yourselves too thin was one of the big problems. You are right, that my suggestions came with a lot of "expectations" on what Steemit, Inc. should/shouldn't do, and that maybe it is the expectations that should change. I'm 100% fine with that, although one thing that will help (not just with myself - but with the community as a whole) is if we continue to have the conversation on what those expectations should be. If we know for example (just a hypothetical example) that Steemit is not going to focus on marketing to investors, then it will be clear that the responsibility for that falls on us (the community) if we want anything to happen with it, and we can stop looking at Steemit, Inc. to make that happen. TLDR: It will be really beneficial for us to know what Steemit will and won't be focusing on, so we can align our expectations accordingly.
I think there was a slight misinterpretation in my comment about delivering changes that investors will be excited about. I definitely was not advocating for any type of "hype" where we are just performing gimmicks to attract investors without adding any real value. I was more getting at the fact that over the past ~2 years, there have been very few changes delivered that would cause people/investors to be interested in Steem. Part of this goes back to the spreading too thing argument, but I think part of it too has been to focus on very long term goals which have been taking literally years to deliver (Communities, SMTs, Mobile App, etc.) and there hasn't been much substance that shows we have really done much in the meantime.
Lastly, I would like to challenge the sentiment that was expressed in the video, which was it seemed you didn't care about investors. Sorry if I interpreted that wrong, but that is how it came off (i.e. it almost made you sick). I would argue that it is possible to still hold true to your core objective of bringing the benefits of cryptocurrency to more people, and at the same time have the expectations of investors in mind when deciding where to focus. It is not to say that we should make decisions solely for investors at the cost of sacrificing core principles, but I believe that evaluating what does and doesn't make Steem as a blockchain and STEEM as a cryptocurrency attractive for investors is a very important thing to be doing.

Nice livestream. Honestly, it’s about a year and a half overdue but I applaud you for finally being a little more direct and honest while addressing the entire community.

You’ve finally illustrated to content creators like me what steemit has been doing and why things are the way they are now. I’ve never been a huge fan of @ned bashing despite being pretty underwhelmed with the evolution of steem and steemit since I joined around a year and a half ago.

I am a bit confused about your statement that the fair distribution of rewards based on quality content was an afterthought. This sentiment certainly explains the overemphasis on dapps and lack of attention given to keeping a strong community of quality intent creators...but then what is proof of brain and why is it important? You say you wanted to help as many people as people get involved in this space, and start with an app like steemit...how did you originally envision the rewards being distributed then?

I appreciate your insistence that communities matter to you and after a year doubting this, I finally believe you. The only problem is that the fair distribution of rewards based on quality content was your greatest tool for gathering and empowering such communities and its fallen apart. Obviously what is fair and what is quality is flexible and algorithms are not perfect but if you really care about community you would have done a lot more to foster community by putting dapps and content creators at the same level.

If you want dapps to take on that role that’s fine, but then providing the dapps with massive delegation allowed them to create communities based on a sentiment of “oh, I’ll use this app cause they give me big upvotes if I use them”. This is not how you build community, this is how you appeal to opportunism and create a poor distribution of wealth. If you didn’t want a content based community, steemit.com was a mistake.

You had your best shot at building communities and empowering them with the promise of rewards for quality content, the communities (and dapps) would have formed naturally around that. You blew it. The way SP is distributed now leaves no room for the healthy growth of communities.

I think your proposed solutions aren’t the best chance you have but I don’t share the same kind of blind faith in the integrity of free market competition. Good luck. I’ll be spreading my attention to different blockchains (including Steem) and slowly focusing on the one that is distributing the reward pool in the most effective way to encourage quality development AND quality content.

I hope you pull things together. You’ve opened up a world of potential. It would suck to have it fall apart

We run a not-for-profit bot that cleans up the abuse on the platform and we actually believe that "fair rewards" is not an incredibly convoluted concept as you seemed to have suggested.

Here's a list of most of the categories that the @steemflagrewards bot uses to reward legit flags. We address these things and that improves the "fair rewards" you mention. I believe it is pretty cut and dry but just requires a bit of discretion from folks with some measure of integrity. These things ought not to be rewarded, right?

'bid bot abuse': You bought votes to increase the rewards of your post above the value of its content.
'collusive voting': Definition TBD
'comment self-vote violation': You left a comment favorable about the post, you didn't upvote the post, and upvoted your own comment.'
'comment spam': Your comment has been repeated multiple times without regard to the post.
'copy/paste': Your post mostly contains copied material from a source or stock content and is not your original work.'
'failure to tag nsfw': Your post should be tagged NSFW when it contains nudity, gore, extreme violence or anything inappropriate for general public viewing.'
'identity theft': You are pretending to be someone you are not.',
'manipulation': Definition TBD
'phishing': You are trying to steal account keys, password or credentials.
'plagiarism': You are posting content that is not yours by copying it without sourcing or manipulating it to pass plagiarism tools.',
'scam': This post is a scam, designed to trick or defraud others.
'spam': You are repetitively posting the same content or recycling contents after a period of time.'
'tag abuse': You used tags irrelevant to your content or used the introduceyourself tag more than twice.'
'testing for rewards': You claimed to be testing but did not decline rewards.'
'vote farming': You're churning out content (often low quality), in quick successions with abnormal number and/or upvote size.

I think we do more to address these things and we will thus encourage more talented users to participate in positive ways and be rewarded more fairly. I won't ever be perfect but we have much room for improvements.

Define unbiased.

Open debate must be allowed to flourish without the fear of your words being marked for a "call for a moderator".

If you honestly think that a committee can be formed to decide what content stays and what content goes on an IMMUTABLE PLATFORM you might be confused as to why people have been leaving FB in droves and why you hardly find a good debate even on Reddit or any other forum, and you must be really naive to think that there is any other venue on the Internet that has the same level of discussion and freedom of expression and the high intellectual concentration that makes up these discussions than steem. Take for example the numerous comments in this thread.

Those would be moderators and their safe spaces will never provide the incentives OR the environment to have the level of creative, critical and constructive exchanges because even if they have incentivez it will probability quickly manifest as an echo chamber where more and more dissent is simply marked, and erased, without anyone to challenge it or extend some forgiveness and gesture of a concern or that someone actually read it, even if they don't agree with it. That's why I don't think much of Oracles and SMT.

In essence, WHY are you not on facebook, so it seems when you have the option to flock to those successful spots, instead you come and expose the fundamental confusion you hold on why steem exists (no ADMINS/freedom of expression/no way to censor) and how (decentralized, immutable ledger) by your suggested "solution". There isn't a problem with expressing oneself on steem, there is only the false idea that if someone curates you or your account negatively it stops one from expressing themselves. Retaliation with negative curation for saying something unpopular or otherwise for saying anything challenging of the mainstream should almost be expected. Expecting that people will be unbiased on the other hand is naive, as is thinking that rewards alone, without punishment or reprisal from the community will encourage open debate, or that you can encourage open debate when the threat of having your remarks erased is looming with any "marked for summary extinction" call, or how you will solve the problem of the committee policing itself.

Posted using Partiko Android

Maybe you need to get out more. Disqus is one of the worlds largest suppliers of forum based discussions boards across the world, it works and flourishes based on that everyone has the opportunity to speak without fear of retribution. The forums have up to ten moderators that can be assigned, site owners or media outlets can assign mods, these are usually volunteers. Yes it's true a particular media outlet could pick all volunteers that fall in line with their views and potentially ban users who don't fall in line but that doesn't seem to be a problem on a whole as most will pick people who will balance out the equation. What basically has happened here is there are stuck with a low number of loyal based users, they are a mixed lot, you have those who genuinely respond on a intellectual level, like yourself to me, showing your disapproval of my idea....with some that could have gone an entirely different route and they could have just flagged me for even proposing such an idea, in others words they want me to fear even attempting to have such a debate about making such a change. That's where the problem lies. It happens way more often then people realize. Especially coming from those who have figured out that making a bunch of sock puppets that comment and upvotes themselves leads to a better profitable outcome to themselves then if they waste their upvote on someone else's comment....it's a win-win for them and a big loser for steemit. They upvote their sock puppets over and over again until people realize it's a waste of their time even reading this persons stuff because they upvote their socks not you. If you happen to come along and not agree with something they've written they didn't want anything to do with you to begin with let alone have to sit and argue with you, they don't have time for that they are to busy making money off themselves. It's one of the most silliest farces I've ever seen. Having a moderating team isn't going to "make them" upvote a comment from me but it sure will eliminate their ability to just destroy me or send me a message by flagging my blog post never to come back. Open debate must flourish, go over to Disqus.com and see what a flourishing community looks like, you will be hard pressed to find postings over there that have only half a dozen or less comments on them, most range into the hundreds. This concept based that each individual will monitor the community as whole for checks and balances doesn't work because in a money based system most individuals will chose that which benefits themselves over others, including the survival of Steemit as a whole when their behaviors send people packing off the site. Consider this if you take a peek at a thriving community....most of them over there know Steemit exist, there are very successful blog sites over there, most have a loyal following, most have been encouraged to bring their communities over here or create a branch community over here....and why do you think that doesn't happen? Because they try it out and find that the system is set up to punitive to opposing views.

One of the reasons I'm here is because I'm fucking in love with this community ...

Exactly.
It's great to create new DApps, hope for SMTs as a 'game changer' or to be 'proud' of having such a fast blockchain. Yes, technological progress does matter, BUT we schouldn't forget that the unique feature of STEEM in comparisen with all other crypto currencies is already existing: the community. The users who are building strong connections and friendships with each other, their dedication to STEEM, their investments of time and money and their skills!
Are popularity and high value of facebook resulting from any especially advanced technology? No! Only the huge amount of users being connected there with friends and family are the value!

Thus our main aim should be to allure (and retain!) new users!

And concerning this 'we' are simply just too 'arrogant' in my opinion!
Do potential users need us (STEEM) more or do we need the users? I think we need them, not reversed. So we should care more about that succeeding here as a newbie will be somewhat easier in future.
For example we should make the effort to seek more, read more, comment more (not only send bots) and upvote more manually!

Also, aren't there just enough STEEM to make it possible for smaller accounts to earn some decent money? As long as the user with the highest reputation in the whole STEEM cosmos earns more than 20000 dollar per month by self-voting (and he is not the only one), and as long as there are no serious efforts to restrict that kind of behavior (I have made many suggestions how one could do to do that ... but never ever got any reply from any Steemit Inc. member), I think we shouldn't tell newbies there were just not enough STEEM to reward them somewhat better ...

I think there is a similar discussion when it comes to the inability of new users to upvote and comment more than a few times per day. "They simply should understand that every transaction is eating resources."
Yes, maybe, but we should understand that new users simply don't need us. :)
If they are having problems to create a STEEM account, they will create one elsewhere. If they cannot comment here, they comment under their friends posts in facebook - simple like that.

Rename steemit Inc to steem Inc. Change the name to match the focus.

Migrate steemit.com to steemit.org, make it open source and let the community decide what to do with it.

Focus on the Blockchain, it's usability and access to it.

DOCUMENT THE SHIT out of the steem blockchain to the point that it's so clear my Grandma could setup and run a full node or build a dapp. This will increase the adoption and development massively.

FOCUS on the blockchain and helping dapps get connected to it. Be attentive to what THEY need. For that take a cut of the proceeds.

Your market is not the public, your market is the the dapp developers.
Their market is the public.

Don't worry about the Marketing or Advertising side of it. This is social media. A good idea has a tenancy to spread at the speed of light.
Word of Mouth is the best and cheapest advertising anyway.

I herd you mention "Currency" several times. I hope you understand how BIG the possibilities are at this time in history. What we know as "Money" is about to change completely. And if the solution is not Distributed, in other words, if it gets centralized or a "group" gets control over it, it's game over for the rest of us.

If we are to be free we have to free our Money first.

I just finished reading "What has Government done to our Money" by Murray N. Rothbard.

Great place to get a good understanding of the true meaning of Money and Currency.
I mention this because I cant help but notice that this Cryptocurrency thing resembles the Money or Monetary system a few hundred years ago.

Every "Joe" was allowed to "Print" or "Coin" his own Gold Coins. These coins were accepted at the local "Grocery Store" because they were made of Gold a.k.a. had known value. Some were more valuable than others because they were heavier or of purer content.

You "steem inc" are the "Head Coiner" you "Stamp" the coins. We the dedicated community of developers are the people who "Polish up" the coins and make them more useful thus more valuable.

The more useful the coins are to the Public the more value they have and the more they will be used.

Make a tool that is super useful.
Make it easy for anyone to use.
Let the free market decide what they want to do with it.

Then sit back, drink a beer and Let a truly FREE MARKET TAKE YOU FOR THE RIDE OF YOUR LIFE.

There is no way to show that this system could ever be more abusive than a centralized system that removes content and otherwise censors. It doesn't follow that people should only be allowed to rate certain things, especially not if we consider freedom of expression and freedom of opinion.

My alternative to someone autoflagging me, as I did so each time it has happened to me, is to embrace their ratings and the mystique they give me and it has worked in the past to the point that people invalidated those autoflags. It could be worse but ultimately it's not stopping me or anyone else from expressing ourselves.

Steem cleaners still, unlike a moderator, cannot remove anything or alter it.

If you compromise the integrity of censorship resistance by introducing centralized control over what others can and can't do, it will be only a matter of time before the people that remain will fall under the thumb of the moderators, because not only will most if not all who joined directly because why and how this place works as it does end up on a mass exodus to other decentralized platforms, but those in the committee will never be able to scale with the traffic that they have to face should this be mainstream but before they have to do that, they will probably never agree on the definitions of terms for the guidelines let alone the guidelines themselves and once they have an agreement there is no way to challenge their authority which affords them immunity and if not at the very least if they're not compensated well will probably result in bad, and very biased calls, and excusing those that pay them, and if they're paid too much they could simply grow fat and unconcerned and worry only about making more.

You didn't really consider anything I said as far as why steem exists and how it functions, and you didn't offer any solutions that could work in that framework. You can claim that steem is worse than blatant censorship and shadow banning elsewhere because people have the freedom to reward as they wish but those that truly value why and how steem is working and what it means to keep those reasons and methods integral in everything will recognize that while they can flag you, remove rewards and otherwise rate you negatively, they can never shadow ban, they can never remove your worse or your ability to speak and those that recognize that generally have zero issues with what others think of them or how they rate them because those things they have no control over and they shouldn't.

You might consider your solution as imperative to steem but it goes counter to everything that steem was built for.

Posted using Partiko Android

This info given to me by fellow member of the steeminati @richatvns

ebay is the largest because they cheated. They bought out there competitors, bidbay , bestbay, and then dangled a buy out in front of yahoo. Which made them change their auction listings from free and commission only at time of sale to charging a listing fee.
Then after the negative affect of the change destroyed the community, they pulled there offer back.

They did the same practice that Microsoft did with IBM related to OS2 and Windows 2.0.

Not to mention what Microsoft did with Windows 3.x/386 screwing over Lotus and WordPerfect.

I have been in the industry at the time of what was really going on.

The point is not that people use it, not because it was better, but because the management made smart moves to move the product line forward and they aggressively supported the User Base.

Ned does not understand that! The best asset he could have is his user base, they would champion his product and the underlying technology, the SteemIt Platfotm is the way to spread the word. He should drop every developer except a maintence staff for the Block chain. Then go out the community and offer future locked up spd's (version 2 and very small stipends) to programmers, designers and project leaders to work in an agile Open Source Group to improve SteemIt and the Steem Blockchain. I'm sorry but being a witness in most cases are admins, not programmers, social media experts, system archs and developers, qa and documentation writers.

Groups of stakeholders could easily be created to oversee the spec and direction of both STEEM the blockchain and SteemIt the community app. The same way android, OSA, Ansi, Mozilla, and are all done.

Then way later (many years) the Mozilla team could give up on Netscape which the took over from AOL, and then a couple years later the Netscape. Because of the Existance of versions which use it's engine that exceed the user basis and capabilities like firefox, chrome, and safari.

But the team at Mozilla never said they were going to drop Netscape as the other browsers were starting to use the database, they partnered and built a strong vibrant community.

Instead of the FUD he has done, This is a path of a CEO

You are wrong on what centralized and decentralized is, when all control and decisions made are controlled by the top that is centralized. You evidently think that a person's ability to up vote and down vote make it a decentralized platform....if that's what makes a decentralized platform it's only in your mind, decentralized would mean the site overall, as inclusive of everybody participating in every aspect of the site as a whole not just up voting or down voting. No body on here would be waking up to surprises springing forth out of HF's they'd all be aware prior to every aspect and had been given an opportunity to vote on changes, that is a decentralized platform, hell this site doesn't even allow it's members to vote on a representative to participate with management and witnesses let alone give people an individual say.

You keep putting forward an inconsiderable suggestion that was designed to be rendered OBSOLETE by the premise steem is built on.

It may have well been based on a good intention but that good intention wasn't well thought out when it pertains to people who would and could abuse what that intention was meant for, it was never meant to be able to retaliate or carry on a grudge because you made a comment they didn't like on a post. You ask me to prove well I very well can. You go to my blog and everything, absolutely everything you see on there that is flagged was done so out of revenge for making a comment or statement those people didn't like on something they posted. It wasn't good enough fo them to just flag my comments on their post they had to carry it off into flagging whatever I had available showing in rewards on my blog. I had one happen just last week. Kafkanarchy was mad because of statements in a blog post concerning Adam Kokesh, it wasn't good enough for him to just flag those comments he had to run over and see what pending rewards I had and take those and flag them to. Like I said he hasn't been the first. This site is the most restrictive punitive anti free speech site on the planet and until they change that nasty habit of people being able to strike down every available resource you have coming to you it remain as such.

COME VISIT MY PAGE AND TUNE IN

Nice presentation of @smooth TOP-500 thoughts and proposals !!!

Censorship Styles.