Steemit Update
Dear Steemians,
Steemit, Inc. is currently undergoing a structural reorganization which I believe is important to share with the community. Steemit Inc., is a private company that runs the open-source steemit.com, a decentralized app on the Steem blockchain. Steemit Inc., also uses some of its resources and engineers to contribute code updates to the Steem blockchain. In addition, we provide APIs to third party developers at our own expense to help grow the developer ecosystem.
Given the weakness of the cryptocurrency market, the fiat returns on our automated selling of STEEM diminishing, and the growing costs of running full Steem nodes, we have been forced to layoff close to 70% of the team. The remainder of the team is staying on to focus primarily on reducing the costs of the infrastructure running steemit.com and our public APIs, and ensuring that the community can remain informed of developments.
We have conducted our first all-hands meeting and are prioritizing all the cost reduction solutions we can accomplish in the near term, including replacing steemd plugins with hivemind, pitchforking Steem to prune the chain state size from 160gb to 0gb, AWS usage projections, DevOps solutions, reduction of Staging and Testing nodes, and eliminating redundancies.
We still believe that Steem can be by far the best, and lowest cost, blockchain protocol for applications and that the improvements that will result from this new direction will make it far better for application sustainability. However, in order to ensure that we can continue to improve Steem, we need to first get costs under control to remain economically sustainable. There’s nothing that I want more now than to survive, to keep steemit.com operating, and keep the mission alive, to make great communities.
There are two reasons I’m in cryptocurrency: first, I came in because I believed in the potential of cryptocurrency to give us greater freedom through unrestricted value transfer, value store and all the financial tools that come along with that, which can empower us like few technological innovations have. The second reason I stay in cryptocurrency, is because it has the potential to spawn the next killer application that can rival the Instagrams and Reddits of the world, and that fuels the mission to make great communities, which need unrestricted access to financial tools.
Over the last many months, along with a hyper-talented team, I have gone back to the drawing board and figured out the remaining challenges that are acting as barriers in the way of that killer application and making great communities. In that time we have created many assets that will help us accomplish this mission. Over the next several weeks, despite our course for bringing these products to the world being changed, I hope to share the assets we have created with you, including showing you how their success would be a benefit to Steem and cryptocurrency in general.
I would like to thank all of our employees and contractors for their months and years of dedication and hard work. It is incredibly difficult to part with these great people who I have gotten to know well and respect. I am deeply grateful to the many contributions to our mission. In order to minimize the impact on these people, we are doing as much as we can to smooth their employment transitions. Everyone who has assisted us are outstanding individuals that any organization would be lucky to have.
Best regards,
Ned Scott
Founder and CEO of Steemit, Inc
Have you guys thought much about leveraging a more decentralized back-end? I recently launched a full node, and have been talking a lot about the decentralization of APIs with people. Notably, my node is quite underutilized -- I'd be happy to help by drawing some traffic.
On a bigger scale, I feel like if we convince witnesses to offer more API support, we could extend this to a fully decentralized scale. I'm sure many other witnesses would be on board providing Devops and infrastructure. We'd need to improve things like jussi, and get some better lines of communication with whomever is currently doing devops for Steemit, but I know in the long run we can do a lot better than AWS.
Changing the culture towards this seems logical to me: decentralized the source of the data, and decentralize the costs.
I'm in favour of Witnesses taking more responsibilities regarding APIs.
However, just a side note: Steemit Inc.'s API & infrastructure costs are in the millions of dollars per year. A "normal" API node costs max 1000€ per month, so roughly 12,000€ per year. If we really take this approach seriously, this will require a lot of funds, which might be difficult to come by in this bear market.
12,000€ (CAN$18,000) per year is more than @anyx paid to buy a 512 Gb full node server with an Xeon Gold CPU!!
Why would you pay more per year than the total capital cost of the item?!
Not to mention my server was absolute overkill.
However, it does have a monthly cost for collocation hosting, but this is a fixed cost of only a couple hundred/mo, but that also buys things like redundant power, cooling, etc. But indeed, in the long run, purchased assets are the way to go.
The last 5 items are only necessary because of huge centralized data centers. They are not needed when running less than 10 machines as part of a decentralized system. Redundant internet is easy and cheap to add and redundant power supply is only necessary in places with regular power outages. Once in ten years is typical for central Tel Aviv where I live. 24 hour monitoring is automatic if server is in your home and you also work from there.
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Well, I have around 120 desktop (in my office), software routers instead of hardware routers etc. All of them custom made - so I tend to agree to what you say. But with these expensive hardware and network speeds (read QoS, BGP poisoning avoidance, DDoS protection) etc, its not quite possible to handle them the servers in our home. For example @anyx I am sure can handle most of the hard ware/CPU/memory related aspects. I can't. But I can handle lot of the network aspects - which others may not be able to. The witnesses are a mix of sysadmins, researchers, programmers and marketers - so we can't expect them to run the 17 + 2 + 2 servers in their home office. Even if everything including BGP is taken care of, I don't think DDoS is something we can monitor and retaliate that easily (unless we have a OpenBSD box and we are very handy with firewall rules).
Being said all this, I don't think we need to really host all the witness nodes in our backyard to save costs. Proper AWS cost optimizations can save a lot of costs. Personally I don't see any reason why the full nodes are on AWS where every disk access is billed. Once the development is done, those instances can be moved to data centers. AWS and cloud as we know is for elastic needs (CAPEX) and in the case of steem full nodes that kind of "elastic scaling" is not possible. (due the architecture.) May be sharding like NEAR protocol ( https://nearprotocol.com) is the way to reach there - but its not in the near term.
To conclude, its very much possible to run the infrastructure in traditional data centers at much lower costs than AWS. Steemit.com's workload is not something that needs cloud computing.
If Steem Monsters was able to run a successful crowdfunding campaign, both on Kickstarter and Fundition, why wouldn't that be possible for Steemit? They can easily give out delegations as rewards, which wouldn't have too big of an impact of the Steem price.
Also, won't Steem receive around 20 million USD in funding from Global Blockchain Technologies? Source
Look, I obviously haven't spent that much time thinking about this, it just seems that budget problems are somewhat easy to solve in this day and age.
Yeah.... A small part of me wants to believe that firing 70% of the team was done because they realized they hired the wrong people and the low market cap was just a good excuse.
This is insane and I guarantee you it's due to massive inefficiency. No website with this level of interaction costs that much. Yes -- we need to improve second layer (and primary layer) solutions to take the load off actual steem machines, but it's really not that hard.
The problem is the high cost of a single node, and the fact you need lots for scalability and redundancy, then you need a few that do nothing but create state files for the active ones and you need backups and staging ones. It adds up quickly.
It would be far Simpler if it was just a typical database.
Not even. The problem is poor first and second layer solutions on top of a full node.
Yeah, full nodes also suck. A lot. But the whole stack is worse.
No Arguments here. I hope this crypto drought encourages some good innovation that handles this. Sometimes loss is required to kickstart innovation.
Agreed - though maybe it depends on where the line is drawn around what is and isn't classed as infrastructure.. Or maybe someone is misleading ned.
Few mis configured EBS volumes with crazy IOPS values, Cloudfront, heavy usage of Docker based builds etc can be the reason for the high costs. AWS is not the right solution for something like steemit.com which has no per-visitor or per-user revenue model or challenges with capacity.
i'm in favor too. and eventually maybe more than APIs.
What do you have in mind?
nothing specific lol i'm just a gamedeveloper.
as for the cost of running a node i have no idea i'm sorry. but maybe that cost should've been steemit inc's only priority instead of trying to do everything on their own.
I very much agree with you @anyx that there needs to be more decentralisation of the back end and I congratulate you for launching a full node.
I also think that witnesses need to be owning their own hardware for witness nodes rather than renting it on the centralised "cloud". While @anyx's Xeon server with 512 Gb cost you CAN$16,000, its is possible to create a 128Gb witness & API server using HEDT motherboard and sub $500 CPU for around US$2000.
Owning your own witness server is somewhat problematic.
Other than bandwidth issues, (unless you have fiber based internet).
A power outage, internet issues (which I'm sure are common not only in Israel) and even a piece of hardware that stops working can make you miss far too many blocks, and cause small malfunctions all across the blockchain, not so small if you're in the top 20.
Maybe it would be best if different witnesses would host their server on different server providers, but it seems there are many providers to begin with.
Those are my 2 cents on the issue.
Thanks. I've addressed these issues in more detail here. https://steempeak.com/@apshamilton/properly-decentralising-steem-and-cutting-costs-by-witnesses-running-their-own-servers-and-apis
All these things can happen at a centralised hosted solution which is fundamentally more vulnerable because of its centralisation.
The whole point of decentralisation and having 20 witnesses and 100+ backups is that there is a quick failover to the next witness.
Also, for each witness having HEDT servers each with a once off capital cost of $2000 rather than an annual cost of $2000 forever means you can have more backup nodes and more redundancy.
It simply does not make sense to be renting when you can buy for around 1 year's rent.
A server provider usually operates in several countries, so unless someone is cutting an underwater internet cable, a witness can reactivate their server within 24 hours (much less if he/she is more experienced).
While a server in their home/office can easily be shut down for 3+ days, if their ISP is shitty in their area.
If there was an infrustrcture to allow witnesses to share their servers with each other (if that's even possible), to could allow more decentralisation without the drawbacks I meantioned. But I don't know how feasible such a project is.
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I’m not suggesting no redundancy. A witness should obviously have their backup server node in another location with another internet provider. Also it’s easy to have have a backup internet provider at your home or office. Everything an outsourced provider can do can be done for much less cost yourself when you are talking about single digit number of servers, which is what decentralized solutions involve.
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That's unless we have someone as huge as YouTube's Linus Tech Tips on @dtube who runs servers themselves...
ned would have to give up most of his steem for any real whale to come in and start dealing with the costs ;)
While you're right, you can have redundancies like a UPS(duh), a generator for back-up power and do the same thing for internet connections.
Witnesses typically scale up over time. If you're a backup, you can front a fixed cost of less than $1000 and run it on your home internet. This is reasonably stable enough nowadays. When you get higher in the witness ranks you can deploy more nodes and improve redundancy and performance.
Missed blocks from one entity on the network won't impact things significantly anyways, we have built in redundancy at the system layer (the blockchain itself) so it really isn't a practical concern.
HEDT are a great way to go for limited API support (you can't fit all the api's, but you can serve a large amount of requests locally and route the ones you can't serve appropriately).
Notably, you can also build a consensus machine (e.g. 'witness node') for less than 1000$. My purchase price for a full api was overkill -- we can bring the costs down by optimizing for tasks rather than "do it all super fast on the same giant machine".
It's great if you can use different API endpoints; basically this is what a decentralized infrastructure should offer, anyway. However, when it comes to running API endpoints and other services reliably and at scale - so that other (professional) services can depend on them - it's not a simple operational task and it certainly isn't cheap.
I suppose it's important that we start stressing actual business models on top of Steem. If anybody is running an actual business that doesn't take its revenues from the reward pool, that person or organization would have an intrinsic motivation to have its own infrastructure under control, therefore could run it and potentially offer to outsiders, as well. Is anybody out there?
The next question then is: would anybody be willing to pay for API services to access and interact with the Steem blockchain? Would that make a business model of its own?
Hi @grintsch! We're building @dstors and I can tell you that our revenue model is not based on taking out of the reward pool. On the contrary, the objective is to distribute the existing reward pool to those on the blockchain who perform any and all economic activities related to their sales through their own @dstors. You can peruse the executive summary of the whitepaper that was released a few days ago on our blog. Yes, we're out there! Focused exclusively on giving back to the users as much as possible while introducing new models of interaction with the blockchain beyond what steemit.com initially offered through blogging.
Right, thanks for pointing that out. Great to see that, and I'll definitely check out your site and material.
Would witnesses really want to subsidize operations of Steemit.com? Steemit.com remains the central pillar for Steem, drawing in the vast majority of actual users and usage, so there's some argument to be made for it. However, Steemit.com itself has proven to be unsustainable. I remain skeptical that a large scale social network will ever be sustainable on a blockchain without centralized layers. This entire post and all of Ned's comments below are firm evidence.
PS: Before someone says it - no, speculation is not a sustainable financial model.
just because steemit inc/steemit.com is unsustainable it doesn't mean steem is. ned is the biggest whale here but one man's opinions has got nothing to do with a social network being sustainable or not.
if a central body is absolutely necessary for social, we should ditch steem and stick to facebook. but i thought people (especially crypto lovers and steemians) were so sick of it?
this is more like an opportunity for witnesses to actually step up and start making changes for more decentralization. it could be one of many solutions to come that shows steem's potential is not restricted to steemit.com or steemit inc or ned.
Never said anything about "central body being absolutely necessary for social". Furthermore, it's counterproductive to cite extreme and irrelevant examples such as Facebook.
The world doesn't work in extreme blacks and whites. The reality is more nuanced. To make Steem sustainable, we need centralized layers like Hivemind. This will retain the decentralized nature of the Steem blockchain, whilst streamlining computing resources required and thus greatly reducing costs. It's not just Steem, top blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are also working on centralized layers of some kind for scalability and sustainability. It is clear this is the future of public blockchains, and does not mean "central body is absolutely necessary".
PS: I'm not interested in arguing semantics of "centralized layer", so don't bother.
if that's not what you meant then i stand corrected. facebook is not extreme and irrelevant because if this community remains dependent on one individual who owns a private company, it's just as extreme.
to say that we need centralized layers like hivemind is probably more black and white than anything i said. it could be one of many possible solutions. i'm guessing when you say the reality is nuanced we shouldn't look at hivemind as the only choice for sustainability. but sustanable for who?
ps. i think i understand what you mean by a 'centralized layer'. the only thing i wanna point out is that it doesn't have to come from steemit inc. and one company being unsustainable doesn't prove its necessity either.
Sure, there can be other solutions, but Hivemind is our best option that can be implemented in the near term for significantly improving sustainability. For whom? For everyone that runs an app or service on Steem, and requires Steem API nodes. Thus, eventually, for the end user. We want Steem to survive and thrive, and for that, improved scalability is essential. I understand you don't like centralized bodies, but almost all of Steem exists today, as it is, because of Steemit Inc. It has been two and a half years, and precious little has been contributed to Steem outside of Steemit Inc. Sure, it doesn't have to be that way, but that's the base reality. Till the time that other organisations and individuals start contributing significantly to Steem, Steemit Inc's survival is important to Steem.
yes steemit inc was the creator. but it doesn't mean they should hang on to control or should have any more weight in deciding where to go from here. it's a sad reality that after 2 and a half years this supposed 'decentralized' and 'censorship-resistant' platform still requires a central body/layer/whatever to stay running. if ned never used those words then everything i said would be irrelevant.
i have to disagree with you because steemit inc's survival is no longer important. even if steemit.com and api.steemit.com suddenly disappeared we'd still have other full nodes run by witnesses (or anybody who thinks the cost is worth it?). a lot of people will be confused and there'll be chaos. and i guess prices would drop too. (believe me i wouldn't like it. dan gave me a 100% downvote for saying most people would be locked out if steemit.com disappeared)
but the blockchain will stay and devs would simply switch servers. if steem breaks down due to one company/one man, then it doesn't deserve to stay. but i almost know that wouldn't be the case. or hope.. :)
I don't see it as being specifically for Steemit Inc., I see it as a path towards providing a decentralized data backbone for all of steem, which any app can use. Steemit is just one app on the steem platform.
Sure, but realistically, it's not "just one app". It's the vast majority of Steem - that was my concern. Ned says it costs $2 million per year to sustain Steemit Inc's infrastructure. Whilst some of it is the frontend, it's implied much of it is running Steem API nodes - their primary focus now is to reduce costs on them. I don't have numbers, but judging by activity, witnesses will have to take up an order of magnitude or more greater load. At the current prices, all top witnesses combined well have witness revenues of under $750k. How will we support a $2 million infrastructure? Yes, witnesses can go for cheaper infrastructure than AWS, streamline things considerably etc., but the sustainability seems very questionable. Not to mention, Steem is tiny now. We'll need to scale 100x to be relevant to the mainstream, and 1000x to compete with Reddit.
It's not adding up.
Yes, the price may increase, and it likely will, but history has showed us that price does not scale with activity - it is its own speculative bubble, and not a sustainable revenue model.
To be clear - I'm all for witnesses co-operating for the betterment of Steem, but I'm concerned about the harsh realities of the situation. Is it even feasible?
This screams inefficiency. Very few database providers require costs in this range. It's time we take a serious look at providing infrastructure instead of just "buying more AWS instances" because they have cash to blow.
I've been digging into the API flow of steem recently and quite frankly I'm shocked at how poorly maintained things are. My rough estimates are at least one order of magnitude improvement with relatively minimal changes. This isn't theoretical, I have actionable plans for improvements.
So is it feasible? Yes, absolutely. Sure, we have to encourage development and deprecate old API formats, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Lets take our heads out of the bull-market induced sands. They call the period after a market bubble the "plateau of productivity"... lets embrace that, and buckle down and work.
@anyx us investors also have skills and connections, I and probably other stakeholders would be willing to use our many skills and connections to help @ned with getting the liabilities down and the assets up etc etc.
@ned has earned reputation and goodwill from Fyrstikken Inc. So all we need to do is to get together virtually and talk and do things like a scheduled team/external board members & advisors.
I normally charge a lot for this important service, but because of Goodwill, I will give @Steemit Inc. or @ned personal an ONE-year agreement for ONE DOLLAR for ONE dedicated hour per week over 52 weeks.
May I suggest Sundays since that is the day most leaders sit alone in their home offices and plan for the battles of the week a day before the non-leaders arrive on Mondays, so Sundays it is a good day to meet with very little distractions, 100% focused & 100% dedicated like stakeholders/co-owners of the STEEM blockchain.
You game?
Thanks for the insight, much appreciated. Like I mentioned, I had figured things could be streamlined significantly, but didn't expect 10x overspending from Steemit Inc. It doesn't sound possible, but then again, laying off 70% of your workforce months after going on a hiring spree seems far fetched too.
All the best, I hope both Steemit Inc. and fellow top witnesses pay attention to your plan and implement them.
I full support that mentality!
Logic isn't everything. You need a good heart, too. The question is: Where can you buy one?
like that idea! I am in!
Fully agree with this
This is along the lines of what I was thinking.
This, 1000%. Steem blockchain is really not decentralized at all in actual practice if everything grinds to a halt when there are issues with the steemit api nodes. Many top witnesses already run full nodes and most if not all are barely utilized at all.
My contact details
Telegram @nathanmars
WhatsApp +447901003594
Discord @nathanmars#2708
Twitter @nathanmars7
Holy Sh@t ! As soon as I get down about Steem and these layoffs it's people like @nathanmars that make me realize that I am here for the long term and ain't going nowhere.Matter of fact Iam investing more today and powering up .
And Iam right with you brother @nathanmars. Iam no whale but Iam a dolphin who takes pride in creating high quality Content.
@ned....damn, take @nathanmars up on his offer. PLEASE !! We need more like him. This guy's the real deal !!
I agree, if theres anyone who can make a massive impact it’s @nathanmars
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I truly appreciate your kind words brother and I really mean it !!!
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Steem is incredibly powerful. I 100% agree that DTube is the killer app. More development and better user experiences/education will ensure that in in the coming months.
Quite ironic people use youtube on this page...
P.S. Quick question - are older videos deleted from dtube and just thumb / image left?
Just tried to re-watch some videos uploaded ~6 months ago. They do not start. Is it a time limit or something for videos to play?
Thanks for a wonderful question and feedback.
What makes a killer app ? The community and people then the how innovative the platform itself.
Dtube is nowhere near YouTube. We’re constantly working on improving the platform by bringing new developers, designers and investors. And also by collaborating with other projects and DApps.
If you see the potential of dtube becoming the killer app then please contribute what you can.
As we’re building the decentralised video sharing platform we want to creators to own their data and content. And you can purchase a unlimited storage from
https://uploader.oneloved.tube/
So that you can watch your older videos forever.
We’re working on giving creators the option to upload the videos that stored permanently and even if that option is paid option.
Thanks for feedback and if you’ve any other questions then please let’s talk.
Thanks for a feedback.
Well, there is no such thing as a free dinner ;)
it is not stated what you get for $10 subscription - 10MB, 10GB upload space?
Are $ USD or SBD?
Thanks for your encouraging comment.
If most people who involved with STEEM feel powerful then we can take STEEM to the next level!
Also I do want to lie and say Dtube is killer app at the moment in time and we’ve so many aspects that we need to improve. As we continue to focus on making Dtube Revolution, my focus to build the strong community and create the strong foundation to build the innovative features and make Dtube a innovative platform.
Ps. I talked with Jon yesterday and I’m excited what OneloveDtube going to come up with :)
I appreciate your valuable comment and your time to writing this comment.
Glad to hear that you’re powering up. This is a great time to invest more of your time and energy to show your quality of work and contribution to our community.
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@nathanmars, thank you for sharing this video with us! I've read almost all of the comments and have been thinking about the current situation... Your comments are great. You are a nice and positive person.
Have a gread and productive day, bro!
Thanks your lovely words brother !!
I'm super super excited about the current situation and it's huge huge opportunity for people who think long term.
Warren Buffett thinks in investing time frames of at least 5 years. But his holding period is preferably much longer… “Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
I am very happy that you are thinking like this, I believe that the basis of steemit is in us and we should help in a positive way
Thanks for your encouragement!!
If people do something rather than just forming opinions then steem will move forward faster.
Let’s do something and contribute what we can to make this place better for others.
If I am a friend from Venezuela I do not stop working to keep people on the platform and I believe in steem, I am willing to help in the area of neuromarketing for the promotion
if anyone is feeling fear right now, when this is the reaction from people who are big inside our community, you are not opening your eyes!
:)
Exactly. And I'm just going to leave this here:
Musk: Tesla was near death during Model 3 ramp-up
Nathanmars : 77.7% chance I'll go to Mars
Sorry but Ned is not Elon Musk, not even close.
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I don’t have these two words in my dictionary.
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Hi @nathanmars
I hope Ned will get in touch with you and that you exfoliate positive thoughts about the platform and the
way forward with Steemit
We all love this platform and it must only be here for the future
Thanks for your support my friend!!
Let's choose LOVE over FEAR and move forward with STEEM :)
What a great encouraging video response from you @nathanmars. We need more whales like you speaking out to build Killer Apps with Steemit.inc together! I hope @ned will take this chance to come together with you! Good to have you here in this hard times!
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I truly appreciate your loving words.
I’m more excited than ever in my short but 5 months full time steem journey.
Prices down and people who only came for money are leaving, Fake entrepreneurs are leaving. What an amazing time to BUILD killer DApp and simultaneously build global inter connected community!!
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you know what i think bro. i support you 100000%.
great offer you made and steem would only grow with you helping even more.
appreciate you.
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I truly appreciate from bottom of my heart brother!!
Thank you for your continuous encouragement :)
Let's win together !!!
Super strong positivity - I love it!
Very heartfelt @nathanmars, I hope @ned takes you up on your offer! Thanks for all the support this year!
Thanks a lot brother!!!
We always appreciate your continuous efforts in building a strong dtube community.
Let’s encourage others to be BOLD
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Nathan that was a good move from you and a very true community act with all of your possibilities and man power. I highly appreciate your video response and the awesome positive message within it.
Thank you for being such a good motivator and thank you for being a part of that community!
Peace!
Norman BIG Thanks to YOU for being part of our amazing dtube community!!!
You contributions and efforts are much appreciated.
Let's build strong global community together :)
And I love you man for the generous and always positive involvement in this community! I hope Ned considers your offer.
We love you too brother!!!
Let's keep on building the community and support the killer Dapps building or let's build our own killer dApps!
Have a lovely day :)
I wish you the best. You look confident, smart, capable. I've done some web design. It's good that people around the world share in common vision, in all of this. Good video.
Thank you so much from bottom of my heart!!
Let’s change the world together :)
Good to know your Web designing skills and Please get in touch to discuss any collaborations with Dtube and other steem based DApps.
I’m planning to do weekly virtual meet-ups to bring all the developers and designers and community leaders together.
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I’m only just studying a degree in graphic design at the moment (1st year) but I’d still be interested in helping in any projects there are 😀😀
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I knew that you’re studying in China but I didn’t know what are you studying..
Now I’m know and thanks for bringing that to my attention.
I’ll keep you updated with my plans for weekly virtual meet-ups for extra ordinary people :)
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Awesome! I’d be glad to help wherever I can 😀😀
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Awesome.
Hey Nathan I just want to say you are building a great community of content creators that believe in your vision. I really appreciate your heartfelt video response and I hope Ned does as well. If we had a few more folks at Steemit Inc like you, this platform would be really rocking right now!!!
I truly appreciate your full support in building strong community !!
Let's take ownership and responsibility and BUILD the FUTURE :)
I will also come to Austin and work for free for Steemit Inc.
Awesome buddy!!! I would love to work with you brother:)
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Legend! We need more builders like @nathanmars and fewer bag holders who either suck the reward pool dry or dump their coins at the first sign of trouble.
I truly appreciate your words brother!!!
Entrepreneurs and Business minded people love opportunities. This is the huge opportunity to BUILD the future.
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Much respect for this man! Great to see someone doing instead of saying.
I’m a doer !!
Hope you’re a doer too my friend:)
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I like to think of my self as someone who is a doer on the block chain. @canna-curate is a project that has untied the cannabis community here. You build the apps, and Ill help build the user base, how does this sound?
I like to connect with Doers :)
Contact me directly.
Talk to you soon!!
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This is how a true believer looks like in real person. Hats off for the free service you've proposed in the vid. All the best buddy.
Thanks for the comment buddy !
Yes I truly believe in my ability and my vision!!!
Hope you’re a true believer in your own talent and your potential:)
Enjoy your day ahead:)
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cheers brother, love you man!
Thanks buddy!
We love you too :)))
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Dtube is the killer app!
The more You Tube, twitter, and even PayPal and Stripe censor, the more decentralized apps built on a distributed blockchain are needed!
Thank you so much for your comment!
Dtube community is the killer community in the entire Steem Blockchain and we’re more than like a family.
Dtube is not a killer app yet and we’re building the foundation to make new innovation and features. We put quality people before quality contents! It’s all about community in Dtube.
Plenty of new opportunities to entrepreneurs who see this potential to BUILD many variety of killer DApps!
Future looks bright for TRUE believers of STEEM :)
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Minutes after watching this video I didn't waste much time, you came out nicely and politely to ask for a chance to help. Just to show my support that @ned should hire you, I made a post titled "hire him!" with a picture written nathanmars just to show my support. You need to be recognized and I am happy for what your doing here and our desire is that @ned should hire you, we will say Ned hired him because of his hardwork.
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Thank you so much for your efforts and I truly appreciate it.
It's not about me and it's about everyone. If somebody who is willing to put in the work and persevere then not just @ned and all the people want hire.
Let's be so good that they can't ignore us!!
True Believers in the Ecosystem... you said!
Thanks buddy!
It’s easy to score goals when the opposition has 9 players and the score 3-0 and we’re winning.
True believers and great players make their team win when tran is loosing 0-3 by coming on as substitute.
This is the time for great players to come out and score goal for STEEM
Well, Cavani, Suárez, Forlan are from my town... so Goal is the only thing I know to shout!
Let's go for that ball... again!
Peace V!
You rock Nathan. I hope @ned sees and appreciates the gold he has in his hands when he can just simply tap into the community and all the talents and ideas and skills we have to offer him - most are willing to put in a few hours a week at least, can you imagine what would happen if we started to build with Steemit Inc, all of us?
I’m appreciate your lovely comment!!
It takes special kind of person to understand the long term vision of an True entrepreneurs.
I started watching his recent YouTube live-streaming and we can all join him in the next show and share our ideas and skills.
I’ll rephrase this question to everyone. What if everyone in Steem ecosystem behave and act like they own the STEEM Blockchain? What if we can take responsibilities and ownership of our platform?
I’m not @ned but I behave and bring value to our ecosystem like imagining that I’ve the same power as he does to take STEEM to the moon
Hope it makes sense and I’m looking forward to seeing you on Dtube :)
Awesome. Hope ned considers this
Posted using Partiko Android
Thank you so much.
He know this option is on the table. And I’ve zero expectations from others. I’m self-made to contribute to others!
I am so touched with your message with good heart and love in steem blockchain and the community @nathanmars . I salute you and Respect you even More.
Thank you so much encouraging words and I truly appreciate it !!
I’m so happy to have you with our DtubeFamily777!
Let’s respect everyone and love others :)
Hire @nathanmars, @ned!
You the man @nathanmars! You always steppin' up! :)
Cheers brother!!
I get bored playing in the same level.
Posted using Partiko iOS
I don't know anyone better to help grow this community we have all loved becoming.
Thanks for you efforts towards Steem Natahan
Posted using Partiko Android
Truly appreciate your kind words brother!!
We're all in this together :)
Great response Nathan. I'm sure he will reach out. 👍
Thanks a lot buddy !!
Happy Steeming:)
Posted using Partiko iOS
Woot woot! Keep Steeming. This is dtube revolution and Steemit-pillar-building.
@nathanmars, thank you.
Thanks darling!!!
Posted using Partiko iOS
Sell ads, Ned.
All options are on the table. Thanks for your support.
How about try listening to your customers (users)? Maybe the attrition rate wouldn't have been so high and all the newcomers exiting so fast if you paid them some attention to understand why they showed up in the first place... I've given you many messages myself, but you ignore them. Sad for all the people involved, but until you realize that in any business you must learn what your customers want, then this place will not turn around. I gave it a solid year and made 500 steem ($150) and spent many many hours a day.
Here's a perfect example:
I wrote a post for @abh12345's contest on why Steemit is so good and my post was in the top 3... But you didn't comment it, or upvote it... nor did you take the time to comment or mention the winner either.... You were friends with one of the girls and managed to give her a $1 or $2 upvote, so obviously you saw the contest, but didn't take the time to comment on people actually trying to help YOU and YOUR COMPANY... Pretty sad in so many respect...
I doubt you will listen to this, and I certainly don't care about any upvotes anymore. I just thought maybe someone telling you the truth might one day get through. You are a young guy, but you have put yourself in surroundings that you a) get told what they think you want to hear or b) get complete hate negativity thrown in your direction. I would suggest that listening to either of those groups has put you and Steemit in the position it is today. I would also suggest that you "search" for people that will tell you the truth.
One last thing, if you're going to run a "social" platform, you should try to let people have more than 10 comments a day... If you think there is any way in hell people are going to pay you to talk, then you have no idea what motivates the common man/woman. A social site that restricts its users to a point that is noticeable, will die a quick death (as I'm sure you've seen in the numbers). And by the way, I (and many others) tried to tell you this when HF20 came out, but for some reason whoever's instincts its was to go forth and see if people would accept it was dead wrong. I can only hope that person is in the 70% because they really did a disservice to you and the company.
Take care and good luck, I truly hope Steemit succeeds and steem goes up in value. I have many friends that I've met here and I also see the potential. But until there is a leader at the top that "gets it", then it won't ever come close to that potential. I do hope if you stay in that role, that you develop the skills. I myself learned them over a long career. It doesn't happen overnight, but you are capable of fixing this and if you do, then everyone will put this moment in time behind them.
Cheers!
You're saying that people come to Steemit to get attention from the founder? I came to Steemit and I've never ever even hoped for Ned's answer to any of my comments or posts. He doesn't have to do that imo, but if he does, it's just the cherry on top.
People shouldn't expect an upvote or a comment from the founder imho. People should focus on building their community.
no he's saying a leader shouldn't be so biased :)
votes was one of the signs. disabling the comments for a video where he wants to emphasize transparency is another.
Thank you for explaining this without getting mad. : )
With all due respect that is one of the worst conclusions someone could come up with from my comment. The lack of his attention in the situation described was an example to illustrate where @ned is failing and has nothing to do with me "wanting an upvote". You should read things a little better before you try to dismiss the argument with such a shallow argument.
And I know of many people that focused on building the community, but many of them felt they were working against management. If you are afraid of the truth being stated online, then I'm the wrong person to speak to. Steemit is failing not due to any sentiments of any users, but because they are currently failing to listen to the users. The ones that are trying to give them advice on how to fix that are "helping them".
And please don't insult me again by twisting words to make me look shallow.
I'm sorry if you feel insulted by my conclusions, but I don't think it's anything to get mad over. I didn't try or want to insult you or anyone so maybe you shouldn't feel insulted so easily. Maybe you were just in a bad mood a bit? IDK You just could've opened a further discussion and explain without getting arrogant. < Didn't deserve this imho. :/
I get what you're saying with your second paragraph though, because as a community builder, I've felt the same. I mean I like to build a community on Steem, but then again I've felt a thousand times that why doesn't Steemit do it themself or am I even allowed to do that on my own.
As I've understood, decentralization stands for community running things and therefore Steemit has let us do that, not doing much themself. At one hand, that makes Steem decentralized, no? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I fully am fine with Steemit letting us build our own community and don't care if they ever market things or spend resources on helping make the community vibrant. I do however care that they make rules that make it almost impossible for people to stay. The implementation of HF20 and the introduction of RCs (which limited certain functions based on what THEY deemed important) was a disaster. People that sign up now have limits of 10 (or less) comments a day. I know some people think that's perfectly ok, but they essentially killed making this a mass adoption social platform. If that's what they want, they should just tell us. I have spent a year trying to get people to stay involved because of the "potential" to go viral, but that one decision makes it an impossibility. NOTE: for those that claim there is a cost to running the blockchain, my answer to that is these limits on any particular function are purely arbitrary. Why limit the thing new users care most about unless you are either 1) trying to kill it or 2) so out of touch that you have no idea what its like to be a new member that's learning for the first time how this place works.
ps... I don't want to argue with you about the point where you say I felt insulted. Its not important.
!!!
This! This right here!!
Very well said. There is a reason people came to steemit, there is a reason people stay on steemit, now it looks like there is a reason for Ned and Steemit Inc to figure out why.
Exactly @bashadow... And if I were @ned, I'd get in contact with YOU first... You are the epitome of a great Steemian that just shows up and tries to make everyone's life better on a daily basis!
He just needs to look back on his own companies reason for steemit, like they advertise on their home pages, why did he start the company, what did he want from the company, and what change did he want to bring about. From Steem.io front page, (he should look at it every now and then:
Well put and succinct. Your points are exactly the reason I created an account, but haven't really used the platform yet. Another huge problem is the power structure and how rewards are distributed. We need equality, not an Oligarchy. Then the social aspect needs to be well, more social. I am not interested in having to use another platform like Discord for a truly interactive experience.
You should post sometime. I'm sure you have something of value to say, and it is a decent way to build Steem Power to a point where your votes cross the dust threshold and you no longer need to count your comments
I may just use another UI and If I do, cross-posting is frowned upon...So, do I choose Steemit, Whaleshares or WeKu? I'm still in the fence.
I’m loving whaleshares right now there is also ONO
Hahahahahahaha. What are you like Ultraviolet 😂😂
Thank you very much @mineyourmind! I have really enjoyed my 1 year here (despite the lack of management's good decisions). Everything isn't good or bad only, there are many things that are awesome here, and of course many that are not so awesome... On balance I keep coming back for the people I've met... some really good ones that make any of the bad things tolerable.
And yes I totally agree that if they could integrate some of the functionality on Discord somehow, it would be a killer app that would certainly help me... Right now I spend almost 99% of my time on Discord now, and that is where they also lose business to competitiors... I have had many friends try to "steal me away" from Steemit! :P
Nice to meet you and again, thank you for the nice compliment!
ned needs to take this comment seriously. there'll always be dick suckers and haters but he's not listening to the modest people who just wanna speak the truth. i think the current rc budget is actually less than 10 comments a day for a new user, which shows how disconnected he might be.
if steem can't go for decentralization, at least let some else with a little more humility take over.
When a job opens up for someone to tell you the truth I am in line right behind Dave. Seriously though you should let people like @davemccoy and @abh12345 help. They are good people.
lol... Yes I know you would be there for sure DDC! And it would be great if they actually took the time to learn what we know, they are missing out on a treasure trove of some seriously smart people from all walks of life!
Some people are not able to think outside the box. Like my teachers in school used to tell me " you won't have a calcualtor with you all the time in life" . Oh really? Like the one I am typing this reply on and then going to make call on? That calculator? I have been telling them to make trending for actual trending posts and put the bid bot garbage in the promoted section and put a 5% tax/Beneficiaries on it for a long time now. The Beneficiaries would go back to steemit for operating costs. Then trending wouldn't fucking suck and steemit could make some $ off this dumpster fire they have going on. I have tried to get people to come on here and got them accounts set up and stuff and they always bail in onder 2 weeks.
Are you giving up on Steem which is much better than Gab, Minds, Bitchute, Brighteon, MeWe, Utterz, etc? Making money with cryptocurrencies, including Steem, is a long-term investment, and it is a gamble that may or may not work. There are a lot of variables that we should consider and we live in historical times. You should hang on and wait another ten years or more for all of this to work out. We need a lot more time to get all of this to work. It's not as easy as we all may want it to be.
No I'm not giving up on Steem, I was just giving @ned some advice... Whether he takes it or not is up to him. I have no intentions of selling my steem to buy anything other than steem monsters (which is also a variable that I think might even save the platform!) ... Thanks for the optimistic view though, that is a very nice thing for you to try and do (convince me to stay patient!) ;)
Great. Good advice. Can we mine or seed Steem like we can with Bitcoin, BitTorrent, etc?
That I don't know, I'm sure there are others here that would know!
Definitely one of the best replies I've ever seen in Steemit.
Thank you very much for the compliment @glory7!
hi @davemccoy
would you mind sharing with me link to your mentioned post ? I failed to find it and I would really like to have a look
Sure I'm happy to do that... Here you go!
https://steemit.com/welcometosteemit/@davemccoy/the-party-is-just-getting-started-welcome-to-steemit-everyone
And if you go to the same date on @abh12345's page, you will see his wonderful attempt to get a positive message out! And you can see the other entries too!
Thanks for checking on this, its nice to know :)
Im very sorry for such a late reply @davemccoy
Thank you for being so responsive. I noticed that you have enormous follower base. CRAZY!
You're one of the most popular blogger here on Steemit, arent you?
yours
Piotr
That option should be on the table along with others. I appreciate the move toward sustainability in a market that's tougher than most of us thought it would be, but it's disappointing the organization was that far from sustainability and didn't anticipate some market swings.
My suggestion would be to manage your site, which I have not seen done yet. Moderate it like other social media sites. Bring in some revenue. I thought we had a revenue model here, which is posting and voting? I don't think anyone will begrudge you guys for voting the master account on these updates if that means you can pay for development. Or run some ads. Or find a some entity you can partner with to run the site or operate the communities if you guys don't want to oversee it yourselves.
Agree. I hope the Promoted section becomes an initial place for Ads and that becomes a generating revenue for Steemit Inc. to shoulder the costs.
I've been waiting for ads for more than 2 years now. I remember you @ned hinting the possibility of ads back then which got me excited. But hopefully this could be a reality now.
When did he hint at ads? Last I spoke with him on the topic (spring 2017), he had zero interest in it.
Pretty sure it was around the end of 2016 when he spoke at a conference and talked about the possibility of including ads on Steemit and possibly setting up a non-profit for this. I think this was before the ‘Promote’ function on Steemit, so probably Q3 2016. I remember several people writing about it too.
I remember him hinting at adding adds back in 2016. He suggested having it be optional for each user and keeping it small at the bottom of your post, like a footer link. He even mentioned sharing the revenue with the user.
You sure that wasn’t me?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ats-david/advertising-revenue-and-distributions-on-the-steem-blockchain
At that time, in private chat discussions, Ned made it very clear that he had no intentions of working on anything to do with advertising at either the blockchain or interface level. And he certainly was not in favor of sharing any ad revenue with users.
I'm pretty sure I heard him talking about it during a podcast or video somewhere. I'll see if I can find it and shoot you a link.
Here's one video where he's talking about adding advertising that I have cued for you where he touches on it. There's also another video interview somewhere where he goes into it in more detail.
Keep in mind though, that he never said he or Steemit Inc. was going to work on this specifically, but only alludes to the possibility of it being a revenue generating business model for some unspecified application. At least that's how I understood it.
Regardless of what he said publicly, in his private conversations with me, he explicitly stated that relying on speculation was the much better bet rather than attempting to create revenue streams via his interface or attempting anything at the blockchain protocol level.
Three main points taken away from that conversation were:
Steem was in a unique position to truly innovate in both the blockchain and social media space. Our “leadership” - the people who assumed control of blockchain development and its messaging - not only failed to acknowledge their assumption of leadership, but also failed to produce anything attractive for users and investors while assuming that role.
Advertising was always an obvious option for any social media business (which is what Steemit was supposed to be) that wanted to be healthy. Other blockchains have developed these capabilities at the protocol level. But it was mercilessly shot down for a variety of piss-poor reasons and other nonsensical ideas were focused on instead...most of which will never be delivered.
Meanwhile, Ned is claiming that speculative profits have failed for his company (I told him that it was not a good strategy) and now he is claiming that advertising is on the table. It may be a little too late for his failed company, but there may still be hope for the blockchain if anyone is willing to actually work on these kind of worthwhile concepts, as opposed to SMTs, which will either never be delivered or will just end up creating a bigger infrastructural and legal mess.
I can share the conversation with you, if you’d like to read it yourself.
I think if you were to ask any of the social people that are on steemit here for the social atmosphere, you would find that they left youtube, facebook, reddit because of intrusive advertisement. Advertisements are already on steemit. What do you think all those steemhunt, dlike, actifit, dlike post are all about? It is people advertising products to people. I myself do not upvote or even look at any of those tags. I do not like advertising that much. I have no problem with people wanting to become non-paid sales men for products but at least I can easily ignore 90+% of them all on steemit. Ads would drive people like myself away.
Think adds for visitors only that reward authors would be very a mega boost to the platform. It could attract top content providers to the platform while allowing us to spent our adds budget right here on this platform.
Today, if you link your blog post on Twitter or FB and it ends up getting massive amounts of visits from non-users, chances are you make $0.10 or less on a massively successfully post. Not the way to attract top content providers. Now consider the, what?, $0.30 or so per click you pay for an add campaign on Amazon. Wouldn't it be cool if you could run that campaign on Steemit for a fraction of that? You could make the platform add free for authenticated users, make adds opt in for authors, draw in establihed top content providers with add revenues and allow people to spent their advertising budget with the blockchain as one and only middle man. I think adds, if done right and front end independent, could be a massive win for everyone.
For making money that is fine. For people that want to see ads that is fine. For people like myself, who quit TV because of ads, who rarely looks at you tube videos because of ads, who will click news stories off I am interested in because they want to put a cookie tracker on me, or have excessive ads, not fine. There is no opt out for advertisements. People on steemit are advertising for free all the time as I mentioned above, they get a payout from the people they work for, I do not vote on nor even open any page that has the first tag as one mentioned above.
Advertising banners and plugins get added I will do like I have in the past, find something else. I know people want to monetize all their content, I even vote on their content to help the monetization of their content.
I have yet to go out in a serious search for how to convert my steem into spendable monies. I have found a way to semi sort of buy steem, and that is to buy stemm monster cards. But I am enjoying the game. If I had to wade through a bunch of advertisements to play, I would just go back to other games I like that are add free.
Advertising money is not the end all be all of everything internet wise. If the internet needs advertisers to subsidise the internet then the internet is in big trouble and will die of natural causes, or it will be bailed out by well meaning idiots, like the american automobile industry. The american banking industry, and the american this and that industry that has been bailed out by the American tax payers ever since FDR.
If advertising is the only solution to steemit's problems then steemit will have a problem, as they currently do, retaining users. If Steemit still dreams of being something new in the world of social media then they must not repeat the problems of the current social media.
For myself, like I said, if they bring advertisements on board then odds are very likely I will leave and go elsewhere.
I think the value of the platform, first and foremost is determined by its content, and as such a huge problem standing in the way of growth for steemit lies in the fact that there is negative incitement for established top content providers to switch to the platform.
The reality is: established content providers make money from advertising and their established followers that they will lose the moment they move to steemit. Basically they start from scratch on the platform, hoping they can build a new following to make up for the old one no longer generating profits. The old following is used to adds, the potential new following, as you so rightfully point out is unlikely to even tolerate them. But I think this doesn't need to be a problem. What I think would be the solution to make these two wolds connect is actually pretty straight forward.
By doing it this way, none of the regular steemit users should even notice there are adds. Someone however who is an established content provider on an other platform however will draw visitors who aren't steemit users (yet), visitors that, coming in from FB/Twitter/etc links will get presented with advertising that would provide the content provider with hopefully a competitive revenue stream.
Note, I'm not in any way suggesting any of the revenues from advertising should go to Steemit Inc. I am suggesting the feature of allowing established top content providers to migrate without loss of advertising revenues will end up improving the monetary value of STEEM, what in turn will fix things for Steemit Inc.
Without Steemit INC or any other third party getting in between the person running the add campaign and the established top content providers, in theory steemit should have a competitive edge from the perspective of both the content provider and the person buying click throughs.
Hope I'm makeing sense here.
Good riddance! Apart from ads or paid promotion the only solution is pay-to-play. Reality is setting in and speculative money is dwindling. It's time for Steem to start earning!
There are billions of social media users out there who don't mind ads at all. Have you ever read the Steem white paper? The value proposition of Steem is to get as many of those people to come on board or to consume the content as possible.
If the Steem community rejects paid promotion, then the platform is certain to die.
Sorry to disappoint you but it was stated in the Steem whitepaper that the value proposition of Steem was the attention of the crowds. The way to monetize that is through ads and paid promotion.
Did you seriously think a game of Greater Fool was going to pay the bills forever?
Like I said I have no problem if people, steem, or steemit, want to monetize, as I said if the only way forward for the internet is through advertisements and subsidies, at some point people are not going to continue to subsidize it. Then the internet will get to be back where it started out as a tool for researchers in Military Industrial Complex. How many industries must be subsidized before it all becomes owned by the state. We have seen how well that has worked out in other countries.
When flashing ads start to appear on steemit in every available pixel of white space, then I will be leaving steemit, as I have left a lot of other media that relies on advertisements.
If that was the original intent, then waiting two and a half years to explore and find a ways and means of that paid advertisement has been a complete and utter failure and with that then steemit will go the way of Compuserve, AOL, genie, netscape, and a lot of other early internet companies and die an ignoble death due to the inability of its leaders to look ahead and see where they and their company are headed.
I, and the other users of steemit are not the ones that caused the failure. Attracting Advertising, and advertisers is not the answer to everything that is wrong with steemit.
It keeps getting pointed out the immutability of the blockchain, and the security of it. There are a lot of of tax preparers in the United States, that have records they must maintain for 7 years or more. Same with accounting companies, and tax laws have been changed to where digital copies are valid for use.
The failure of steem.io company is it's inability to reach out to the people that would benefit from their technology. They seem to be to focused in one direction, and not paying attention to what is going on in and around their blockchain.
Look at what Steem Monsters has done. Look at the shear amount of information they must save and process for their silly little game to work. 90% of what they have done can be so easily translated into other fields and industries, yet where is the Vision?
Yes I cave to all the masses drinking kool-aid, the answer to everything on the internet is ADVERTISEMENTS
What you're describing is pay-to-play. And that's a perfectly fine way to bring in revenue. That can exist alongside with advertising revenue as a source of income.
You have stated your personal distaste for ads but the vast majority of Internet users do not share it. Social media is still a growing business and it's funded to an overwhelming degree by advertisers. All the Internet giants, including Google, get the vast majority of their revenue from ads. Gargantuan value is supported by ad revenue. It is nothing to scoff at. (And, no, it doesn't have to be 1990's style blinking banner ads on a white background. And there is much more to paid promotion than banner ads.)
All options need to be on the table and tried. We should also consider a referral program. It's time.
Take your blog and go home then. Those of us who intend to stay and build an ecosystem will have to be economically sustainable. Bloggers have been feeling the pain for months and it's time to actually solve the monetiztion problem. Ads need to exist also because currently people are paying bots to upvote when they could just buy promotion the right way.
And ads aren't bad if done right. Make it op-in, and do things right.
That would solve so so many problems would it not if everyone just went home!
If you read back a few comments in this trail you will see that I am NOT your kind of blogger. I did not come to steemit to monetize myself. If you did look back you will see that I am a user of steemit.
After one and almost a half years I have still not bothered to look into how to buy, sell trade steem and make it into "REAL" money. It was only through playing steemmonsters that I was able to buy some steem. But the truth is I was not buying steem, I was buying digital cards to play a game.
So ads are going to do away with the vote bots, as a user I do not see that happening.
All options, as long as those options and opinions of the non-blog user, (such as myself), are not on the table. There are several types of people on steemit. There are those that are strictly investors, they do not blog, they may on occasion make a Post. There are the people that are using the blockchain as a means to develop programs and software, they are not bloggers, they may on occasion make a post about what they are doing and developing. There are the business owners, those that run bots for profit, steem style banks for profit, and games for profit. They do advertise to their customers via Post. Then there are the people like me, the social poster, the reader of your Blog content. The people YOU just said to Take your blog and go home then. I am not a blogger as I have, I thought, made it clear in my comments. I am the type of person that YOU as a blogger are trying to get to follow you and give you money, and you want me to "GO HOME"
So all options as long as they do not involve the targeted audience. I hope you understand now that I am not a Blogger, that I am a user. The price of steem has one effect for me right now, it governs how much content I can give a valuable vote to. One day I may learn and jump through all the hoops and loops to convert steem into fiat money so that I can go buy things from the local store down the street. Until that happens I will continue to be a poster, reader and voter of content that I find to be of value to me, and hopefully the value will return to steem so that my vote can give be of value to people.
There are very few people that are concerned about the value of their vote toward other people. I am. So the price of steem does effect me.
You are a part of the ecosystem but Steem Monsters is very new and also very niche. It's contributing to the growth of Steem so I support it but I do not know enough to know how it works.
As a blogger the demand for upvote bots is due to the fact that we cannot promote our content in any more legitimate means. So if we want our content on the trending page then we have to pay the bots. It's a broken system because the bots are essentially a cartel. I would rather just pay the Steem blockchain itself.
All options should be on the table and all opinions of participants in the ecosystem should be considered. I'm in favor of ads but I am also in favor of it being opt in. I'm in favor of ads specifically here for Steemit because Steemit is based around blogging while Steem Monsters is something else.
I guess we will have to see what will happen. Perhaps one of the other front ends will monetize and run ads in their system, such as busy.org. They can auto add "Posted by Busy.org" to the tail of all the post from their site (as many other front ends do also), so it should not be hard for them to add advertisement banners to the top or bottom of a poster's post.
It does not all need to be on the top of steemit's front end. An ad placed in this manner would still be visible on all front ends. Look at the footers of some of the posters, some of them have a lot of "banner's" at the foot of their post advertising this or that service or page or program.
posted with partico
posted with esteem
posted with Busy
Posted with steeve
These are all micro ads.
I would be very sad to see adverts on Steem. The trending page is already one big advert. But I can just avoid that. I don't think I could deal with it disturbing my enjoyment of post. The lack of ads was one of the first things that intrigued me about seem.
Posted using Partiko Android
We will just have to wait and see what happens. One of the nice things in this flow of comments was reading that @ned is not in favor of ads.
Could you consider taking a small beneficiary cut out of steemit.com's posts like other dapps do? And maybe think about it more than ads? :)
This is a very promising idea!
@ned Before you do that, I dare you to contact me!
I need 5 min. of your time to exsplane you my idea! I will put my STEEM, where my mouth is!
So, after you heard my idea......if you say, it was a was of time, I will give 100STEEM (all I have now) to user of your choice!
Here is a small suggestion from me. It won't make huge amount of money and I'm not a programmer. So I'm not sure about the difficulty of implementing something like this. But I'll just leave this here: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@vimukthi/steemit-improvement-proposal-cosmetic-upvote-feature-to-replace-bid-bots-and-fund-blockchain-development
Additionally here is a poll I conducted on the subject: https://dpoll.xyz/detail/@vimukthi/steemit-inc-had-a-layoff-of-70-of-staff-due-to-lack-of-funds-how-should-they-raise-more-money
Hope these would help at least a little.
Best of Luck!
Yes! Ads (that can be easily shown or hidden) will be a game changer.
I think selling ads is a great idea, if done properly. Select ones that are relevant to the community and let people opt out of seeing them. Most of us wouldn't opt out, if we know it helps keep steemit going.
I think ads are the best idea so far if it can be done in a way which burns Steem so the ecosystem benefits.
THIS. STEEM ecosystem needs capital that comes with advertisers and ecommerce in general. You can not relay only on people that believe in steem and are willing to invest their hard-earned money.
We have a great crypto-focused community here, let crypto business pay for promoting their content/ads here. But not in "promoted" tab where no one goes but on the trending page - like one "sponsored" post on the top. I wrote about it like 2 years ago but for some reason steem inc. just don't want money.
Check out https://www.livecoinwatch.com - after establishing a very good service they added small ads and now they're doing great.
!tipuvote 2
This ^^ - please
This is a good idea. Earn.com is an example of a similar service.
Not on trending either. We need opt-in advertising on posts. Forget advertising to authenticated users, unauthenticated users and established top content providers are top untapped resources.
Or maybe not traditional ads per se, but blogs for companies? I mean, people would follow the funny PR person(s) who handle Wendy's Twitter - they do there!
Wait, wait - SMTs for companies, that you can earn gift cards to their company, maybe (I don't know if that's even feasible, it just struck me as cool).
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That's a perfectly fine idea. But the attitudes of many Steemians have to change. We are all shareholders and it is insanity for shareholders to oppose revenue.
Companies are coming here. Check out @landshutbrauhaus, they just registered yesterday.
I could see how company's could invest 10-100k into some steem power to create a social media presence on steemit,
Now scale that to and sell it.
This seems like a reasonable option.
This comment is supported by $1.19 @tipU upvote funded by @cardboard :)
@tipU voting service guide | For investors.
So we can be just like google and Facebook and then they can demonetize us. No thanks.
Well, who should monetize us, then? You?
Are we not the ads ourselves? Isn't that the point, decentralized, peer to peer, ads, and when I say ads, I mean content, and advertisers want to be seen and we want to be seen too and some advertisers can start a Steemit account and post ads on Steemit for example if they're not already.
On the top of Steemit.com, you see the tabs, Trending, New, Hot, and then you see Promoted which might be the option you were mentioning. Maybe advertisers can pay for their posts to be promoted. Therefore, that is the way ads are sold, if I'm not mistaken. Is that not good enough? Maybe Nike wants to sell shoes. So, they could start an account on Steemit. Post about shoes. Nike could buy a bunch of Steem and power up some of it into SP in order to get a better reputation and be able to upvote itself to get into trending to better sell ads. Is that not a win-win situation where more people can see their ads for example and more money goes into Steem from outside sources like Nike, etc? I mean, people already buy Steem. So, I don't want to make a distinction between corporations and individuals who invest & buy Steem. Regardless, people help Steem by buying & by sharing Steem articles. Cryptocurrencies may not be doing so well right now but they will be rising in the next few years, before 2025 at least, if not a lot sooner, and we can hang until then if we can.
I would be very sad to see adverts on Steem. The trending page is already one big advert. But I can just avoid that. I don't think I could deal with it disturbing my enjoyment of posts like it does on the rest of the net. The lack of ads was one of the first things that intrigued me about seem.
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Sounds to me like you over-paid and they under-delivered. Tough lesson to learn, that's for sure.
Out of funds with really not much to show for it...
(upvoted because @fulltimegeek is a flat-earth believing beotch)
Steem isn't working because it has a worse governance structure than the US government. A representative plutocracy, with a shit distribution. Look how much energy is wasted with accounts like @berniesanders and all his "foes". The only way to beat the massive inflation in this system is to fight back with selfishness and self vote yourself above the inflation rate. Witness responsibilities are vague. Accounts are impossible to get for the average person (I have a friend who has been on a waiting list for months). Who is going to use a blogging platform that is Pay to Play that has almost zero viewers? It's not a coincidence that the view count was removed from steemit.com, nobody looks at content here.
The only way a system like this can work is through co-operation but there is no mechanism in which to cooperate. It just becomes every person for them selves, who can find the best delegation bot, or suck the proper orifice for upvotes.
#1 problem with steem is distribution which puts the responsibilty of the platform on the 'whales'. This platform has stumbled with no focused attempt to get actual users on the platform. With curation being broken There needs to be more delegation to hire professional curators for the network... the front page has been embarrassing for the entire two years I've been on the platform, and genuinely interesting bloggers have been overlooked again and again. Users need either viewership or compensation and steem has provided neither except for those who have bought in.
Please @ned act like an open source project and opensource your SMT code, maybe the community can actually get it done.
We create accounts for anyone with delegation. Check out @comedyopenmic and hit up the strawberry of death in the discord for an account foe your friend.
Thanks for the tip, and I'll do that, but it shouldn't be that hard. The fastest growing sites are usable with a click of a button. The simpler the sign up the better. Wallets need to be handled and spam precautions are important.. but maybe wallets should be instant with a nagging to learn about it.
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it's a artifact of the old way of creating accounts. now accounts are minimally usable upon creation with like 3 comments / week. Unless the user invests and buys their own steem. I agree though, the account / wallet creation should be free.
What other sites give away free money?
Some of us have invested money in steem and only lost it. I've worked hard curating on the platform trying to make it a more hospitable place for artists because I want them to get some of this "free money" but in the end most are ignored, get no views or upvotes, and I've wasted my time and money.
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And I'm supposed to feel bad because they weren't determined enough to stick this place out for the long haul? lol. Go back to facebook, twitter etc. And have fun there paying to "boost" your own post. That's what facebook does, they make you pay them, so they will show your post to more of your audience. The people that already "like" your page anyways. Facebook doesn't let them all see your stuff. It will go into the feeds of only like 1% of your audience, unless you want to cough up some dough.
Thats what people do here too... They pay to boost their own posts but instead of actually getting hundreds or thousands of views from it on Facebook, they get 29 views here on steem, and are spammed by a bunch of bots in the comments.
I've been on here for two years, I've been sticking it out, this place has major problems, but I want it to succeed. Im just pissed at others profiting off of the work I put in, which is mostly how the economy here works.
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Click here to vote for the amazing witness @nextgencrypto!!!
Please check this out: Why our way of distributing Steem by voting sucks, why it does not scale and how we can improve this situation
My team is working an a solution: Wise - 2nd layer voting protocol for Steem, which helps curate better content. https://wise.vote/. It is already working, but we should have a official release very soon.
Steem community already have all professional curators we need. The problem is... that those curators are not properly empowered.
Wise was beta-tested among polish community and few early adopters. To give you some example of possibilities of Wise, currently I am delegating single votes (not SteemPower, but single votes!) to 30+ people, which I considered experts in certain area of expertise.
How this scale? Everyone can delegate single votes to chosen users which focus on own areas of interest. Wise protocol is non-profit and open-source.
I find this plan very interesting. I will have to think about it more deeply. I did go to read the original post and gave it a quick read.
You got a 2.50% upvote from @oceanwhale courtesy of @industriousliv! Earn 100% earning payout by delegating SP to @oceanwhale. Visit www.OceanWhaleBot.com for details!
Looks interesting. Do you have any plans for connecting delegators and voters? For example I have been working hard to support artists on the platform, I have voted very unselfishly for a long time because that is how I think the platform would work best, but my stake is so small, and I have no one to ask to help me with vote power in this task. Where do I go to find a whale interested in the types of votes that I make?
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On our Wise Hub experts/curators will be able to generate links, which will allow delegators (aka. Wise Patrons) to delegate a certain amount of votes per week under specified conditions.
So for example you will be able to add to your post a "magic link" with a description:
Please delegate to me 5 of your votes per week, which Wise protocol will allow me to use only to post with tag #art
It's very tempting for us to implement list of top wise curators with categories... but personally I do not want to create such a ranking, because a lot of people would later just chose top curators... and that could spoil those curators and decrease decentralization of Wise.
Take a look on this (our brochure from SteemFest):
so the link generator isn't available yet correct? This is exciting, i'm looking forward to trying this out. Any interest in delegating me some ammount for a week in #art to try it out? Or know any one using the platform interested in supporting artists?
I just did that few minutes ago :) Please check this comment.
Wise is young project... but currently users like you have an incentive to ask other users for single-votes-delegation. I believe you can ask all your friends which know that you are an expert in art, to delegate you just a few votes per week. They can restrict this... so you will not be able to use their vote for example if they will not have a lot of voting power.
I believe it should be easier to convince someone to delegate 1 vote per week, and to remain in control... rather than delegating SteemPower and lose a control over it.
I am glad that you like it :)
Cool I'll take a look
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Professional curators? Are you kiding me? So you will say they you have pros and they are doing a shit job.... wtf...
lets give them more money, maybe then they will make better job....reduces... waw...
Time for a change. Steem on✌️
@solar I made this post also today. So you see the same problem to ... and I thnik we are not the only one
I just mean that if some people set some goals to create a healthy ecosytem of users like: "we want to have 1000 artists that post at least once a week", then a hired curator with delegated steem could focus on a certain type of voting, and reblogging. This happens a bit, people have built communities around certain ideas, but ultimately the most interesting content gets drowned out by the most persistent content, or those who are self voting.
There are some good programs out there like @curie @utopian-io but not nearly enough actual community building has been supported on the platform.
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@solar I will add only this....
As I told in my previous post... Im working with on of the top movie makers in the world!!!
Nobody give a ..... not even @dtube
I have the
world leading expert in weather photography and storm chasing,
interestet in STEEM (oh yes, we have a accound) YES, you all have seen his work !!!...
but still nobody give a ....
@ned, maybe you will see a little value and maybe even help
I mean your posts are making more than most people's. Its not a lot but honestly payment should be secondary to views on the platform in my opinion.
None of this is simple, but where we can agree is what we have isn't working.
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I worked my ass of to get where Im today.... As most people here, I have a job... the rest in in photo and videografy ...stock video! What you see on my profile in 2 years of hard work!. DAY AND NIGHT.... its about money, but it not all money.,.... it more about other Soc.Pla. ..taking edvantage of creators....
AND STEEM COULD CHANGE THAT!
When I heard about STEEMIT ...I was like...
BRO WAY DIDNT YOU TELL ME SOONER!!!!
Now, I m getting an idea.
How I did get good upvote is that there is still some smart curator ....( BIG) IF he will find you... in this mess of falls tags, upvotes...and bad useless posts....
.... hm... A little marketing strategy...
P.s.: Im from EU. I did work yesterday, I work all night on videos and photos for stock and now also for steem... an in 2h Im going back to work.... so you get the idea.
BUT I LOVE WHAT I DO.... SO ITS NOT HARD FOR ME... ok job sucks .... but I do it, so I can follow my dream!
The main thing... That, WE ALL are aware of the problem!!!!
STEP BY STEP
I noticed that you created a ruleset for yourself:
Yeah, protocol allows that, but this doesn't make to much sense in this configuration.
Best use case is... when someone with much stronger votes allow you to vote on his vote.
So, I created a 2 votes per week delegation to you:
So now you can vote on my behalf via https://wise.vote/voting-page/
Use it wisely :)
Thanks @noisy yeah I didn't know what I was doing. Thanks so much, ill try it out this week!
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The key is allow each curator to focus only on things which he or she really likes.
For example, I read tag #steemdev anyway... and I enjoy that so this is not a hard job for me to curate this content.
For example, in polish community there is a girl which only focus on cooking. Cooking is her hobby and she reads this content anyway. They key thing here is that for example I delegated to her few of my votes per week, but she can only use that on posts about cooking.
She is not doing this for free either. Because she can use my much stronger vote, she can vote first and then use my vote... and maximize own curation rewards even 10-20 times.
Important thing is.. that she do note have to use my vote. If she will not do that it won't be wasted, because it will be used by other curators on other tags. If she will abuse my vote, I can cancel it or reduce or remove whole delegation.
This a decentralized voting done in a Wise way.
I CAN T BELIVE THIS....
........The key is allow each curator to focus only on things which he or she really likes...... SO
So curators are PROS, but tehy upvote what they like ?
Its like you saying, we have educated, qualefide people in space.
And then you say we have a gardner, music teacher , dancer....
BUT
...they are making a good job!
..... stopp the madness! The mindset, that you have... it old and it's not working anymore...
That is a good read, I had not considered how it could get challenging voting organically once your vote is worth more.
That's so cool you're doing that. We met and talked at Steefest3. I curate Steemit Open Mic, the longest running contest on Steemit and am interested in getting a single upvote delegation from you to give to someone who enters the contest. Please consider delegating and thanks for the work you're doing. Really cool stuff.
I would be verry happy to delegate my votes/voting power to people like you. The problem is... that I already delegate to 30 people. And because of current price of Steem this vote currently is not worth as much as it used to.
So you shouldn't asked me, but people which do not use own voting power... or vote for less-than-ideal content.
Also.. I belive that delegating someone voting power or single votes... so this person could vote themself... is far from being optimal. It still much better than autoupvoter (because you could decide when you would like to use stronger votes), but optimal way is to curate content you like and which you are really an expert about it.
So for example, what is your area of expertise. In which fields you could very easilly spot trully remarkable posts? And in which field you could very easilly distinguish great posts from average or bad posts?
Interesting you mention self-upvoting. Until the last couple months I only upvoted others, not myself. Recently I have though. However, if I had a delegation I would not use it on myself ever.
I had a delegation for quite some time and when it started I stopped upvoting myself entirely because I was earning enough from curation that it made more sense to save the voting power for others. Running Open Mic takes a lot of votes, so much so that my voting power was always low until @ausbitbank created an account for others to delegate to that only upvote my manually curated upvotes for the openmic tag.
It was so cool he did that without even telling me until it was done. That way I could reduce my voting slider and keep upvoting hundreds of people a week and the other account he created boosted my vote.
It's people like that doing cool things like that that make you realize you're on the right path.
I will stay with Steem for now.
This things take time...
But did Steemit fall like Gab, Minds, Bitchute, Brighteon (Real Video), Infowars, you know, because those websites were attacked, and they continue to be attacked, & even Facebook was attacked, and some of those social networks fell, crashed, at least for a while, but that didn't happen to Steemit, at least not yet, right, which is better than being vulnerable when you are not decentralized, and Gab fell because it was not decentralized, right?
Did you see how bitshares just froze? And people lost shittons of money?
Steem freezes often. I've seen it happen a bunch of times over the last year. Steem is also affected by the markets way too much. A working publishing platform should be able to operate no matter the state of the market, otherwise it's not working right.
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Agreed. Can we seed & mine Steem at all like Bitcoin & BitTorrent? That's what I want for Christmas.
Not really. Steem uses DPoS, so you would have to compete to become a witness which is near impossible without sucking some major D.
Mining here is more about creating consistent blog posts and finding community which will support you.
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When I say mine, I'm trying to reference the computer servers, nodes, that run the Steem blockchain. I want to say "MINING." Or, I also like the other term used on BitTorrent, "SEEDING." But I'm trying to describe either what serving, witnessing, is, or what it should include for Steem. I just want to get more people involved in witnessing. I want more computer servers, nodes, & more compensation for all of that, for Steem, like we might already see with Bitcoin. Why can't Steem borrow from BitTorrent & Bitcoin?
Well it would need a redesign from the ground up which would break the blockchain. Its very hard to change blockchains once they have started. I'd suggest googling steem dpos witness to understand how it works. Its competitive and only ever a small finite number of them
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Well it would need a redesign from the ground up which would break the blockchain. Its very hard to change blockchains once they have started. I'd suggest googling steem dpos witness to understand how it works. Its competitive and only ever a small finite number of them
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Well it would need a redesign from the ground up which would break the blockchain. Its very hard to change blockchains once they have started. I'd suggest googling steem dpos witness to understand how it works. Its competitive and only ever a small finite number of them
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We were attacked once and it slowed down the Steemit website for a couple days and made it really hard to post.
How often is Bitcoin attacked? I wanted to emphasize on the difference between Steem getting hit and Gab. We saw Gab down for a whole week because of what happened for example. Decentralized networks can handle attacks better.
Oh shit, I totally overslept today. Did I get laid off too? Where will I stay? Where will I get my special shampoo made out of panda tears with baby penguin feather applicators? We were just hiring like a week ago. What happened? When I file for unemployment will I get paid in imaginary money? I guess I could reach out to @valvenusent and see if he can put me in contact with The Rock and see if he is ok with taking me in.
If that falls through I guess I could try and get ahold of jerry scamfield and see what new
conproject he is working on.Gumby Jerry made my day.
lol, a Gumby Jerry. Do you have any collector bobblehead Jerrys?
You may have solved all our problems right there. @ned let's get a Mr. Meseeks. He will fix everything. Together our powers are limitless. With his ability to fix things and my dashing good looks, we can take steem to the moon.
I don't think the head bobbles quite enough for "that".
I adore you!
And I adore you @kerrywolf. I see you are new to the platform. I just want to extend a heartfelt welcome. I hope you enjoy it here.
Hahaha!
@nedshair enhances everything
My love for the people is strong like super hold hair gel. That's my secret.
I am getting tired of that little prick getting all the attention. I AM HAIR TOO!!! I demand equal rights. I am tired of the hair pay gap. Support beard sufferage on hard fork 21.
Hahaha, to funny
Well thank you, sir, but in all reality, perfect hair is no laughing matter.
Where there is Bernie, there is drama!
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Jeez full-time has how many bots downvoting you? Witnesses shouldn't be pursuing vendettas like this, reflects badly on them and the platform.
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😂😂😂 You never cease to amaze me
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Ned,
Thanks for the message and transparency. I'm sure this wasn't an easy decision.
I don't want to be overly negative, and I understand there are probably a lot of elements at play, but it's concerning that less than a week ago, this was your message on Facebook:
I'm not sure how a Nov. 21 post with Steem value at $0.41 USD communicates a Steemit Inc. team that is "growing fast," and then, less than a week later (with a $0.32 USD Steem value) more than 70% of the team is laid off.
Probably automatic ads and the hope that the bear market would reverse faster or bottom higher.
It was posted organically on Ned's page; it wasn't an automatic ad. And as for the hope... I think we're all hoping for the best, but surely Ned had a grasp on the reality of the situation. Seeing the steady decline of the crypto market, it's strange to say "growing fast" when a 25% downturn in the market results in laying off 70%+ of your team.
You're right. Good eye!
The current lay off was probably done in preparation of an maybe even deeper drop. Making the team as lean as possible. But I'm not sure about that of course.
These actions were automated and not posted by bots. This was an error and has been removed.
"hoping" is never a good business strategy
Obviously, but life is sometimes like poker, where you have to run a fine-line and play on risk. But I don't think right now is the time to analyze everything into detail, instead, we should focus on giving as much as we can (and want) to bring Steem forward.
That was an error, the post has been removed.
Thanks for the clarification. My response above to @therealwolf was posted after I read this.
There’s an idea. Premium (ad-free with beneficiary) or Free (company driven ad algorithm).
So, let me see if I have this right...
Your company mined, what was it - about 120 to 130 million STEEM or more? And you had been selling millions of STEEM this year since prices had been well over $2.
What happened to all of those millions of dollars, Ned?
You have nothing to show for it except a half-assed interface and some protocol changes that haven’t exactly gone well. Seems to me that any “reorganization” should include the CEO stepping down.
But I actually think this post is your way of announcing a STINC exit after cashing out your millions and millions of dollars. Your small team of developers and a few servers doesn’t cost tens of millions of dollars per year. There’s no point in blaming a “bear market” for having a lack of funds, considering that all of your transactions and STEEM prices are readily available for all to see.
The money is there. It’s the leadership and money management that has failed. The funny thing is - several people have been saying for a while now that this would happen...that nothing useful would ever be delivered and that you’d make your exit after cashing out a large portion of STINC funds.
Makes us wonder what the point of that ninja-mine was, since it was never really spent on development, onboarding, and marketing. Many other people have done so much more around here with a tiny fraction of both the funds and the dev resources.
You and your company should be embarassed and ashamed.
Happy Holidays people laid off but could delegate millions to sailor moon looking girls who had handlers writing for them...slow clap
Have fun with Zuckerberg , hear him and Sandberg really are chill AF
self-aggrandizement,,, Happy Holidays
hehehehhee
Would I suspect be an interesting calculation to make.
I have no reason to believe they are sitting on a pile of cash. The truth is even worse - they did actually spend all those dozens of millions of dollars, just with nothing to show for it.
Seems like closer to it
I wish I could resteem comments... I'd be interested in being able to do the math!
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He had to build The Bridge to announce he was laying off 70% of staff bro. The Bridge cost money, ask Captain Kirk.
I have nothing against Ned but this is very spot on. How such funds have managed to essentially disappear is anyone's guess right now, but it doesn't look good. Looking like poor management and use of time and money. Steemit should have A LOT more to show for it to be at such a scary point.
It's like watching a fancy rocket prepare for launch but only make it a few feet into the air.
I'm sorry you feel this way.
Our team does in fact cost many millions of dollars per year, even after these layoffs.
Infrastructure costs line towards $2MM USD per year. This is the most expensive website per visitor to run through the top 1000 Websites, if not much lower, by infrastructure costs.
People would pay monthy to access RPC nodes. They just don't know they will yet.
Just like people pay monthly for the Digital form of the New York times, or washington post, or LA Times? How many on line monthly subscriptions do you Pay For?
If you want to put it like that. I invest money each month in steem via hosting IPFS nodes. If we had more seeds, and software that enabled lower ram machines to do seeding (as far as the full steem nodes) then centralization wouldn't exist regarding RPC/API and steemit.com
I pay for internet access. I have tried monthly subscriptions before in the past, I will never pay another monthly subscription. (It was not a good experience). I do not see people paying for internet access, then paying other companies to look at their site. It has not worked well for newspapers, and on-line magazines, I doubt it would work for Steemit. Where are the monthly fees companies like AOL, Compuserve, and Genie now? Just saying I do not think people would pay a monthly fee.
If you pay for internet access, you can seed content. Run full Steem nodes and IPFS nodes. 1 Trillion USD has left the big "free/monthly" companies. Because they are unsustainable. The question becomes, why should i host your data? And the response should be from both sides, community.
I had a business plan and discussed it with many people to run nodes-as-a-subscription-service, but I also called all this platform mismanagement bullshit as far back as a year ago or more, and in the end, decided to run my business ideas elsewhere and in different forms, in more accomodating environments.
Ok... Why after several years of service this project is not connected with the "real economy".
You have thousands of users? Ok... Run Ads, what's wrong with that?
More important, you are printing the money, why you don't clearly tell/ foster good content creators? If we write something that will be the first page on Google Search (and yes, there are many examples from my community) it's the free advertisement for Steemit.
Order good authors, real pros - and give them something. If you left the whole thing on "free will" it will go nowhere.
Ha ha ha ha, I agree with your opinion. It's very pleasant.
I wonder if @ned get's the satire of this....
https://steemit.com/blog/@lucylin/these-rc-s-are-doing-my-head-in-comedyopenmic-39
Welp, we tried to tell 'em, David.
But they didn't listen.
Ned, it has been a pleasure working for Steemit, Inc. I wish your remaining team nothing but success. Steem On!!
Hi! Thanks for your great work.
This for me is a great opportunity I'd like to take advantage of.
@Coingecko is a powerful investor and community member. Since you're a Ruby dev, would you consider helping them out with their cryptoexchange project?
Oh wow, that's pretty cool!
It is! With CMC changing their API, CoinGecko is stepping up. With this project, I can only see great things happening.
Actually using Coingecko now. Stopped using CMC. The Kyber integration is a great new feature.
Thanks for your hard work, inertia!
Thank you, inertia! :)
Upvote talks bulshit walks
Great community for social crypto and new invention. Thanks @inertia !
Oh man, I'm sorry inertia. Are you continuing to work on Tinman?
Absolutely.
Amazing! You could even have it rewarded via utopian.
Thanks for everything inertia.
Class act. 👍
Truth be told the fact that you came out in front and put this out here like this speaks volumes. I'm sure that you and the team know how much negativity being transparent usually brings, but despite the possible outcome, the comments that I'm sure will show up on this thread very soon, you decided to put your face on a video and deliver the message yourself.
To me that shows a brave step and leadership, so as much as it feels like you are delivering us bad news you are also feeding the community a dose of realism, which of course is precisely what we need.
I realize that adding more things to the table sounds like an impossibility at the moment, and I'm also aware that some steemians cringe at the idea of selling ads or anything that remotely smells like the legacy system they abandoned. But difficult times require difficult choices being made, and to be honest if coinmarketcap can survive with some ads, I don't see steemit.com sporting a label of treason for adopting a similar strategy.
At any rate, I'm grateful for the video and the post...
@meno
That was the goal of this communication. Transparency is key at this time, more important than ever.
thank you. i'm with @meno and i honor and respect your communication & transparency!
i am also hoping that other front ends like @steempeak, @busy, @partiko, and other dApps that are coming out with incredible developments daily come to the fore as steemit.com falls away (and also looking forward to your new dApp too @ned, but we as of yet don't know too much about it.) It's an incredible time for essential die-back and to see what rises in its place.
I know there has to be many of nerds like myself playing @steemmonsters at least a five games a day to do their daily quest, I see that game having the ability to drive it's own little community off the Steem blockchain.
that's a great point. and i'm a nerd there right along with you! i love that game!
To add to the community aspect, we need lot more than "text". Games & other types of "consumable content" will drive usage.
I like to "start with why" too - but transparency is not a goal to be completed. It is a value you can embody, through practice.
A single communication on this or any topic is hardly transparency; transparency would revisit this idea next week, and the week after, and regularly with updates of some substance.
The RC's problem, is a massive problem.
People don't join a blogging/social media platform to be penalized for blogging and interacting. One post and 2 comments, and you are essentially locked out until the next day!
It's just not a logical to set things up like this.
(if a growth in users, is the desired result)
Agreed
Totally agree and couldnt put it into better words. Thanks @meno.
The Best Comment I Saw Under This Post.