Applications Team Update: Hivemind/Communities, Sign-Ups, Developer Tools, Condenser, and More!
Today’s @steemitblog post is brought to you by the Steemit Applications team. In this post, we highlight some of the projects we’ve been working on over the past few weeks.
Hivemind 1.0
Work on Hivemind 1.0 remains a major focus. Over the past few weeks, we have been heavily testing compatibility between hive and condenser. We have also committed significant resources to documenting the steps required for Hivemind integration, which will help community developers deploy and take full advantage of hive once it is ready.
Improving Sign-Up Approvals
The faucet admin system has been updated with new and improved tools for detecting patterns of abuse. This will help limit fraudulent sign-ups while simultaneously enabling us to accelerate the non-abusive sign-up requests of non-abusive users.
Improving Developer Tools
Work has progressed on developer tool libraries jussi and steem-python.
Jussi
Jussi is a critical piece of software for the Steem development stack. It is a “reverse proxy” service, which allows us and developers to map various API calls to different Steem blockchain servers to optimally distribute the load. It is a critical component that ensures the quality of Steem-related services remains high. It is especially useful for developers and node operators.
statsd support has now been added to Jussi. This will allow us to track data related to request process times. Caching has also been improved, which means that if data has already been queried, jussi will return it faster than ever.
Steem Python
steem-python is a library used by application developers to interface with the Steem blockchain. In the past, the command get_blocks would intermittently fail to return data. That issue has been resolved.
Condenser (steemit.com) Updates
Much of our work on condenser has centered around preparing for the move to React 16, a major update to the core library behind steemit.com. This will allow us to provide faster performance on both the client and server sides, handle errors better, and accelerate the addition of new features.
Improvements have been made to the copy on steemit.com. For example, we clarified the error message that shows up when a user’s vote is to small. It now reads: Voting weight is too small, please accumulate more voting power or steem power. We also updated and clarified a lot of the wording on the wallet page.
We fixed a few minor issues, including the translate@steemit.com email not working on the FAQ page and the TOS/Privacy Confirmation window being presented to the user when they were trying to read the text, which was preventing them from being able to read the pages without accepting first.
One of our community developers (@eonwarped) also fixed a long-standing issue on the witness voting page, where the page would not accurately display the results of a witness vote after the vote took place. The vote button will now spin until the transaction has been processed on the blockchain, and update to the appropriate (voted or not-voted) icon based on the final state after the transaction has been processed.
Other Changes
The team has also worked on a lot of miscellaneous changes behind the scenes. For example, we recently updated the infrastructure that we use to deploy changes from our GitHub repositories to the live applications. This change will allow our engineers to safely deploy features more quickly, which will save them time and allow them to focus more on developing fun new features.
Most of the other changes are highly technical, so they are not included here. For those interested, you can see what we are up to in our GitHub repositories:
https://github.com/steemit/
Steemit is Hiring
As many of you have already heard, Steemit is hiring. If you’re a talented software engineer who loves the challenges of building cutting-edge dapps for cryptocurrency (and especially for Steem), then we want to hire you.
More information can be found in this recent post or on our jobs site: https://jobs.lever.co/steemit.
Thanks for reading!
Steemit Applications Team
I vote we make beem the official python library instead.
Let roadscape focus on his hives.
😂
I spend a lot of time rooting out faucet rings pulling down the impact of communities and propagating abusive behaviour, so I'm personally really excited and hopeful for on-boarding speed ups and slow downs. 😊
I'm liking the rotation of the updates through each branch of the team — kudos. It's nice to be able to build a "bigger picture" knowledge base with each subsequent update, and the frequency is just right. I did prefer the linking of a few specific issues and PRs in the past tech update, however. For some laypeople, I imagine clicking over to the main Git might be a bit more intimidating, making it harder to choose subcategories and pick out pertinent bits. With one or two relevant, more direct links, gleaning whatever they're able to from the description and comments might feel a bit more inclusive than, "this is too technical for you, go check the code" and dumping a giant pile at their feet. This is a niggling criticism, though. Keep it up!
Sorry for the ignorant question, but what are faucet rings on Steemit? Google search gave me useless results for the most part.
They are rings of STEEM accounts that are often automated to post (usually plagiarized) content every few minutes or hours with the idea that Steemit can be used to generate no or low-effort passive income by doing so. They generally upvote each other as well. The tactic doesn't actually work well to make money because people can tell the accounts are fraudulent and rarely reward them. Moreover, when they are discovered they will get put on blacklists and their meagre rewards reduced to zero.
You may already know this, but the term "faucet" comes from sites like http://moonbit.co.in/ that offer users a steady but very tiny trickle of satoshis for clicking a button (surrounded by many advertisements.) The basic idea is "free money" but as we know "there's no such thing as a free lunch!"
@daan
Thanks for the explanation! I knew what faucets were, but had never heard of these sort of schemes on Steemit. That explains it well.
This is just embarassing guys:
RPCError: Assert Exception:_db.head_block_time() < comment.cashout_time - STEEM_UPVOTE_LOCKOUT_HF17: Cannot increase payout within last twelve hours before payout.
I see WAY too much of this still, when attempting to do things most users will see:
I recommend you try and get @xeroc or @furion ...
Does anyone else have trouble looking up usernames in the search bar? I consistently get an error when I search @steemitUser.
Upvote for visibility if you have this issue.
It could just be me.
Thanks for all the hard work Steemit Inc. Love it. see you at Steemfest
Great job keeping us in the loop of what's going on!
I'm excited for HF20!
I am as well @therealwolf. Steem to the moon and beyond!
All great new things on steemit! Looking forward to all the new features! 💪🏼🙌🏼💯
The changes will be epic to say the least @stackin
Thats the truth :)
Congrats, you made the #steemitminute for today!
Click the Image Below to see the Video!
I had no idea so many job offers had opened up, last time I checked it was only the engineering positions.
I really am glad that the team is working towards HF20 and more importantly, hivemind and the signup issue.
The one thing I would love to see done right though is the issue of user retention. Too many are leaving, being discouraged or seeking other options, many don't know ''what'' steemit is, that should be clearly defined, whether a blogging platform, a smart contract platform or a social media platform.
kudos for the updates! cant wait to see steem wide implementation of the ''editing after day 7'' posts everyone is talking bout on the SMT telegram.
https://ulogs.org etc if you are here, then people shouldn't leave
I agree with you about user retention, it really needs more work. While we have plenty of communities like @welcomewagon working to help and support new accounts, and #SteemitRamble run by @shadowspub giving accounts of all sizes the voice to speak up and share the work they are creating - it is so easy for many to come here, find nobody pays any attention to them and just leave when often they could have contributed so much.
I have heard the arguments before that big investors do not care for "Blog content", but the biggest attraction this platform will create is volume of user accounts - the biggest wallets are advertisers looking for a captive audience - when Steemit holds a substantial active User base the true potential it holds will be finally revealed.
All those people who are struggling should find each other and support each other as they grow!
If I can take a moment to plug @opgaming, we're working on the retention and networking side if things. Our goal is to help our members build up they're accounts, improve the quality of their posts, and shine a spotlight on the best place out there. If you know anyone who's a little lost, likes gaming, and wants to meet some cool people, point them our way. We'll help them out.
As a newbie here without any knowledge of cryptocurrency and coding/programming, I definetly agree with you about user retention. I was keep studying and researching about the steemit (platform), and it was too hard to define what it is. As I am researching, something else is coming up like dtube, dlive, steemhunt, and etc. These were ok to use, but other apps for developer’s app or something like steemnow are too difficult to find out what it is for people who have any knowledge of computer things. I was frustrating while I am studying about the steemit platform because there are too many steem based platforms. Moreover, I don’t know what to choose among them. Lol. Decentralizing is good, but sometimes centralizing is needed i guess personally.
It's a decentralized community and it can be lots of things to lot's of people. :)
Yeah. Agree with that as your reply up there, i need to find someone who can support/help me to understand and adapt to this community. Lol. You can be the one by the way!!! So, following you now. :)
I really hope you can deal with people mass-creating fake accounts. I've heard some have even paid others to create accounts for them. It shows what value they have. I realise this is very difficult and even the big social sites struggle with it.
Good error messages are vital. Some I've seen have been cryptic even to me :)
I really hope we will see HF20 this year to take Steem to the next level.