How can we build healthy discussions to make steem a better platform? Steem needs a discussion platform. Will any witnesses bring back chainBB?
There are built in incentives to hype steem, when i first joined most of the trending page was full of whale worship. Badly drawn pictures of whales, poems about whales, songs about whales.... From the outside all a viewer of steemit.com would see is a fanatic group loving on giant sea mammals (and getting paid for it). There are more sinister looking cults and while this has a nice eco friendly tint to it, most people have been around the block enough times that this would make them pause and wonder "what is really going on here?"
The whale worship has gotten a bit more nuanced but it's still there deeply rooted in how steem works. So i find my self often playing devil's advocate about how this platform is really functioning. I think it's healthy for steem. It's a dog eat dog world out there and it's natural to be weary of something that presents itself as overly perfect. As a platform we need to be able to have more conversations about what is and isn't working. It's important to make critiques of the platform, raise awareness to it's failures and drawbacks. This allows newcomers who are looking more deeply to take something like steem a bit more seriously, even get excited to get involved as many people enjoy problem solving!
After a debate with my old steem friend @midlet about the state of, the future of, and the meaning of this platform, I realized I could be taking a more structured approach (read my original post here, and his response post here with a debate in the comments. I think we found ourselves talking over each other a bit but I appreciated his rebuttal, it's made me realize I need to do better at making better factual support for my claims, a procede with less negativity. I appreciate you @midlet, we've always had good conversations and i know you have a genuine excitement for all the new things that steem is doing well. @midlet although i know you took some of my positions a bit off putting, I hope you know that I just want what is best for the community of people that invest their heart and soul contributing here, no hard feelings brother.
Steem needs the infrastructure to have structured discussion.
I was really disappointed when @jesta stopped developing and took down his chainbb project. Steem is lacking a good active forum interface, even though i think this is one of the killer apps of a platform like steem. Incentivized discussion is a really powerful tool and a real legitimate form of "proof of brain". Instead discussions become fragmented between different posts, it becomes prohibitively hard to search for existing discussions on a particular topic and mental energy (and reward pool funds) gets wasted as people bring up the same issues over and over again ad nauseam.
@therealwolf posted an ad on the importance of voting on the platform
https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/your-vote-matters-the-future-of-steem
Voting is important but it's all just political theater unless there are real effective ways for a population to communicate with their hired representatives. A good democracy is only as good as the discussions and education between the people who are voting. Users need a better way to bring up issues to witnesses and ways to track the progress with projects. The more unified we can be as a community the more we will flourish and communication is at the base of this.
Are there any other discussion platform projects out there for steem? Where do you find the best discussions on the steem platform?
For anyone interested chainbb could be picked up by a competent developer. Last I used it it had some minor bugs but was working quite well.
Chainbb is open source:
https://github.com/aaroncox/chainbb
https://github.com/aaroncox/chainbb-frontend
Absolutely not, not hard feelings at all. I thought it was a great convo. The only thing that was disappointing to me was that more people didn't join in, which I suppose gets at what you're talking about in this post.
And with this I 100% agree with you. I know there have been a ton of initiatives to spark discussions and some that were even really good with lots of people participating, but the reality is they're almost all fruitless. The thing a centralized system is really good at is an organizational structure, but the truth is on this platform we really suck at converting enthusiasm into valuable work.
When someone like @therealwolf makes an awesome dapp like steemapps, that's great, but he did that by himself as far as I know. The real power of a community is being able to organize work, skills, incentives, and turn that into some common goals met that would be impossible with just one person.
A small startup might have 40 people all organized working on one thing, and being paid for it a fair amount to hold the structure together. I worry, is that even possible here? If we can figure out a way to do this it would be insanely powerful.
There are people here with money and wealth, there are people here with skills and experience in different areas, but the wild wild west nature of crypto makes it hard to create organizational structures I think. Anyway, that was rambling. I agree with all this :D
Yeah, this is the ultimate challenge of decentralization. Aargon and district0x are projects trying to tackle this problem, but as the whole crypto market is finding out these systems take many years to develop.
I think co-ops are a nice middle ground but they certainly come with their own set of issues.
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The @buildteam guys are working on something they call Tokenbb. Not a lot of details yet, but it's a Steem-powered forum.
Thanks for chiming in. I'll look out for updates on this.
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