Steemit’s New Direction
Hello Steemians, as you might have heard, Steemit has a new Managing Director (@elipowell). We are still developing and refining our strategy under her direction, but we wanted to share with you what we are thinking so that you can have better insight into the organization.
Steemit.com
We are committed to making consistent improvements to Condenser (steemit.com). Condenser is the open source software that powers steemit.com. The difficulty with maintaining Condenser was the large cost we were bearing. Steem integration is a powerful driver of growth, but with growth comes scaling challenges. As more users joined Steem to use steemit.com, the more time, energy, and capital was allocated to improve the back-end database built entirely on the Steem blockchain.
The more successful steemit.com became, the more time was spent on Steem, not Condenser. When the cryptocurrency market was strong, it was more justifiable to just absorb the cost of running steemit.com, but it eventually became clear (even before the bear market) that in order to justify the back-end costs of running a site, the front end itself must be revenue generating.
Lowering Node Costs
When steemit.com initially launched, Steem users had no other option for accessing the Steem blockchain. There are now a plethora of great Steem-powered user interfaces and more coming online every week. We think that’s amazing, but most of these interfaces also use the infrastructure that was created to power steemit.com (Steemit’s APIs and full nodes), increasing our costs even further. Due to these factors, operating our full nodes became the single largest expense which is why we had to spend the last 2 months focusing on lowering the costs of running nodes. We have made a lot of progress on that front, making it less costly for 3rd parties to stand up their own full nodes, power their applications, and foster more decentralization.
Advertisements
But there are still real costs associated with running front ends like steemit.com, and the back-end infrastructure necessary to power them. In order to sustainably pay for those expenses, revenue must be generated which is why we are working to integrate advertisements into steemit.com. Ads are the most established and mature method for monetizing web interfaces which makes them the most promising opportunity for monetizing steemit.com.
Real Solutions
As the only blockchain powering real applications with thousands of ordinary users, Steem needs real solutions for improving the economic sustainability of the ecosystem today. Since Steemians now have ample choices for accessing the Steem blockchain, we believe the time is right to experiment with ads. We are open to exploring more advanced and innovative solutions, but first we need to stabilize the organization and develop a sustainable business model that provides us with the revenue needed support this massive, and growing, ecosystem.
Leadership
This is why @elipowell has been made Managing Director of Steemit and @ned has moved to a higher level position where he will be less involved in the day-to-day operations of the organization. He will be lending her his experience and expertise in the space, while empowering her to move forward based on her own vision of a successful steemit.com. We have an amazing team of developers who know this technology like the back of their hand. @elipowell has that same level of expertise with advertising and managing teams. We believe that these two skill-sets, when combined, will enable us to make faster progress. Thanks to the recent release of Hivemind, related tools, and our successful node cost reductions, we are now primed to make rapid progress on efforts like RocksDB and Version 1 of SMTs.
We look forward to keeping you updated as progress is made.
The Steemit Team
Who exactly are the members of the team now (STEEM user names)? Or is Steemit, Inc. kind of a secret organisation? :)
Anyway, I am thankful for your recent communication efforts.
Ned laid off nine people correct...... From a team of twelve correct.... Now we have a team of twelve?????
This attainment of reality is unacceptable. lol
I’m just trying to figure out what is happening LOL 🙃
I only know that recently @elipowell stated:
I am just curious who the persons behind these numbers are?
Other companies proudly present their whole teams (including photos of everybody) on their websites ...
when contributing code is the same as "working", well then you can simply watch live who is working
https://github.com/steemit/steem/graphs/contributors
when it comes to main contributions we are at an all time low
but this does not mean that there is no working in other fields
Here you see all the fields devs are working on
https://github.com/steemit
recently it was mainly hivemind
and some work on the image hoster and as we have noticed on the post pinning on the condenser
Thanks for your help offer, I am sure one can find out who the staff members are ... but that's not my point: why should I make any efforts at all? WHY THE HELL doesn't Steemit, Inc. present its team like every other company does? If I had a great team I wouldn't hide it, but instead of that say: "Hey, people, look at my great staff: these are the members ...!" :)
I see :D those are all webdevelopers and a software engineer. The problem in Blockchain is that you need blockchain designer it is a highly competitive field where the winner takes it all. Frontend development is not solving any scaling or safety issues.
When you look in Ethereum or Bitcoin you have mathematicians like Andrew Poelstra or Vitalik. Those people are high IQ geniuses.
dPOS
as consensus mechanism for permissioned consortium database has possible problems with DDOS Attacks... a nice looking front end does not help with those fundamental problems. You don't learn Byzantine fault tolerance mechanics in programming schools.
this really does not attract any investors. In other teams the problem is solved with angels and VC-Investors, their key role is not to provide money (money is more than enough, look at Eos/block.ones 1billion dollar development fund) Their role is to provide intelligent money, they have skin in the game and want the project to succeed, therefore they provide human capital. But steem had no pre-funding and no ICO...so there are no Angels and VCs, biggest shareholders were miners from a bitcoin forum (all they had to proof, is that they can run a script lel)... Steem was a one-man army.
This game is not as easy as we think it is. Now the only way for real investors to buy the Plattform is a STEEM/USD pair...but there is none. Intelligent money cant access the ecosystem.
or in chess terms ...stalemate/patt
And you think that's the reason why they bashfully try to hide their names? :-)
Again: high or low IQ, red or black hair, green or brown eyes, what speaks against revealing the names of the team members?!? :)
Is Steemit, Inc. a software company or a secret organization?
Your right it looks like hiding
but yes, I think that's the reason why they don't prioritize it. Others are showing their team because of the names and the track record. Like "Brandon Eich Ex CEO of Mozilla and inventor of JavaScript".
Brandon Blumer from Eos has a quite solid track record in building solid online and real estate businesses. His net-worth is 700 Million. How many people with a net-worth of over half a billion are behind steemit.inc? Sadly this is how people are measured.
Investors are interested in teams and not in ideas and therefore venture capitalists and angels are focussing on a good looking teams. Thats the "Aushängeschild" for later investors. They even clean it if there are problems like in TenX, where there are still webinars on the internet, of the CEO how he gives advice to scam people. Steemit.inc has no experienced marketing layer because there are no big early stage investors. Or is there a Andreessen Horowitz baking them up? I dont think so. Now we have elipowell, thats a good step.
They don't hide their team, they simply don't stress it. But maybe I´m completely wrong. Maybe @elipowell or some of the devs can quick fix this issue.
Source steem.com
Well, I guess it's @ned and his 11 other personalities.
lol hahahahha
It will be super if that new direction also includes making it easier for the community to contribute to it's open source code, rather than resistance to such. I know at least a few members of this community that would have rather been working to improve condenser than building their own versions.
The team agrees and we are already discussing how we can make contributing code a more satisfactory experience. The challenge is that engineers cannot develop code and review code at the same time, meaning that we are faced with a choice: make the site better, or review code that might make the site better. It's a challenging problem, especially during times when the organization is strapped for resources, but we definitely want to tackle it. Thanks!
This is not exactly true, one hour of reviewing code doesn't equals one hour of producing code in terms of productivity.
Unless the guy who wrote the code did an awful job that makes it super hard to read. You can expect the one hour of reviewing to produce much more than the one hour of coding because he is reviewing like 2-10 hours of code in that one hour.
And it's not even about reviewing code, it's about the community making changes and then having their PR shut down because steemit inc doesn't agree with them. I would have contributed to condenser or steem core myself but I know I'll never do that because there is a moderate to high chance that I'll be wasting my time. And basically all of the devs that I know on steem have the same mindset. We dont want to work on steemit inc owned repositories because history has proven that it's a waste of time and we be better off working on other things.
" make the site better, or review code that might make the site better." => This is the core issue. You guys believe that you can carry all the weight by yourselves and do all the changes because you believe that your time is worth more than everyone elses because you are better than everyone else.
And this breeds this current situation where everyone is just like "well steemit inc will do it"
And this is what happens : Even though you have a lot of knowledge about your own product (obviously) you can't be everywhere at once. A simple example is canonical links. A feature that is vital for a front end (especially steemit.com that's the biggest) to have a healty ecosystem of dapps and yet despite multiple calls to steemit inc to do it we had to wait two years for a community dev to finally do it.
Well said. Upvoting specifically for this bit.
I don't think this is an accurate picture of what we "believe". We believe that we need to do better with respect to helping community members submit code. We understand that it hasn't felt this way in the past. We're doing our best to change that in the midst of very challenging times, we're sorry if you feel our best isn't good enough.
It's not your best and you know it
Hey @andrarchy, remember when you introduced yourself as Steemit's Content Director?
https://steemit.com/steem/@andrarchy/i-m-steemit-s-content-director
You muted me forever for asking questions about content from Steemit and making suggestions to improve content? Oh the IRONY...
I left you this comment in regards to how you treated me.
Let's see if you have any inclination of changing. Oh wait, you can't read this since you've muted me forever. lol
Good one, @socky! 😆
It's definitely moving in the right directly though. I am harsh in regards to the past not the future.
The problems you mention are easily solved with a properly defined contribution process.
Look at StackOverflow, it's the perfect example of a platform that entrusted the community to maintain it and it has worked quite well, which is impressive given the size of StackOverflow and other StackExchange platform sites.
I actually am a core team member of a large open source Javascript framework that is very friendly to open source contributions. We have found that requiring unit tests alone takes a lot of the work out of reviewing, and in most cases changes are simply optimisations or linter warnings.
I haven't examined the Condenser codebase extensively, but from the outset it doesn't look like it has a whole lot of test coverage and I think that should be one of the first places to start. If we can get tests covering most of the current codebase, then we can use those tests to refactor and guide new features, whilst ensuring nothing breaks.
So many talented developers in the community are being wasted, a huge missed opportunity. I don't speak for everyone but as an experienced front-end developer with eleven years experience, I can say if STINC were more receptive to community contributions and trusting, I would gladly help improve not only Steemit but other apps as well.
I think what it comes down to is STINC seems to distrust the very community that keeps this site and blockchain running. Many of us want to see Steem succeed, many of us are working on ways to improve Steem and Steemit itself.
dead on...I can tell you've worked on improving legacy systems doing QA in a large development project or two.
Super excellent advice by a seasoned dev; and in my experience these kinds of views take time to digest in any large O. Source SW group. Egos take time to put aside, critical issues take time to dismiss, and then we have time to start including the community in development.
Seems like great advice! Thanks!
that's where decentralization comes in handy, because there are community members who are also qualified to review code. js. no response necessary.
That's true in general but if the code will run on their servers, they have a responsibility to review it themselves.
one step forward is if SteemIt's CONTRIBUTING.md was a bit more defined like Bitcoin's CONTRIBUTING.md.
Code review is supposed to be the first and easiest step in contributing to an open source project.
The only reason I bother is that when I found Steemit, part of the proposed appeal was decentralization. Every move in that direction will make this project more interesting, if there is really any hope for this instance of the Steem network.
Steemit Inc keeps saying "resources resources" while refusing to loosen their grip and support decentralization. Supporting community contributions, and further decentralization, means less resources required from steemit, and steem begins to look more like an actual blockchain.
I doubt it works that way. They own the dream, they have to shape it and let it reach a stage first before fully opening it up. Plus, they are a company and have responsibilities acknowledge by us, if things go wrong due to contributed code, we will still come out and hold them responsible. While i am not an expert, i understand better now how huge these things are. I went from just posting to steemgigs.org and ulogs.org and even as small scale as it currently is and even though it is open source and receive contributions, in looking for contributors, i still have to look for the exact dev aligned with the vision cos the vision is still building and i want that vision to stay intact, with its framework fully understood before, i leave it all out. cos yes, the vision can so easily change and turn into something else. The current steemgigs.org is the sixth version already. cos i was still learning at the outset, it was mostly seen as a fiverr replacement by contributing developers but in my eyes it was more of a dream-building social interface than a freelancing one with the freelancing just the surface. Also, i wanted to add value to steem in new ways using my interfaces, so contributors didnt understand e.g why i would want whole-post testimonials that are curateable as opposed to just simple reviews etc. so when they build they would go away from my vision and i sometmes at the time, would sway and leave my vision and accept what they offer cos i didnt know about coding at the time and because of wasted time and because i would thinki in my mind it is actually hard for these developers. now i created an entire enterprise called macrohard to solve these things and in the near future i want to create my own progtamming lanugage that people can code in etc. In general, steemit is still fresh and can very much be considered an experiment cos nothing like it ever existed and till date none exists. when i started steem, there was akasha, yours and synereo and some others and i don't see any of those having attain success today and whatever exists out there currently has steemians on it. steem and steemit i am sure has been a learning experience for steemit inc itself and i am very very very sure it is a big deal and would be big deal or even bigger deal, where it is fully open to contribution where the main vision of steemit inc is not set and stable, at least its framework. regardless of what is contributed as well, steemit inc may be held responsible or at least feel responsibile even where the comunity is proven and love steem. I just left this comment here to related my own small experience. overall, entire decentralization doesnt exist and doesn't mean success. even on steemit, it is obvious, someone will still come out and say he has more knowledge and your post has no value. The steem blockchain host humans. where there is ever entire decentralization, that system or tech will be flawed too cos it will still host humans.
I support your comment for sure but perhaps, it isn't so time just yet.
Steemit inc may have been considered slow and all, but i so doubt that no one will not be slow, where steemit and steem is an entirely new tech, never done and without much prior to steem to learn from. those who pop up now and say they are the best and fast in development, is mostly cos they have been on steem and seen steem and build off of that experience.
Its super lame you are justifying and encouraging their centralized position.
we're talking about the community helping with the front-end website.. so many amazingly talented developers in this community that have been cast aside by steemit to make 100 renditions of the steemit website rather than improve this one that hasn't changed in over a year.
FALSE!!!
They have 0 responsibility to users of the platform, and we have 0 power except to vote with our feet, or forking. Unfortunately for most, this system is so complicated by the time anyone learns how fucked it is they are invested too deep to get out.
I'm sorry but there needs to be guidance (which is centralization), there is a difference between, individuals with many different goals and a corporate structure which goal is to figure what is needed for the project and focusing only on the project for the projects sake.
otherwise you have this which I did a year ago...
I'm only angry because I care, and really love the idea of what this platform is supposed to be about
I do love your comments, and I feel your pain. I was working on condenser for a short time, it was so lame, I just gave up before I got started, but I was not encouraged very much, and for that I am still sore...
Reviewing the reviews is generally a lot easier than reviewing the code itself.
Still they could have community members do some of the work like the initial obvious things (coding style/comments/tests/pr is proprely formatted) and not have to spend so much time.
And it's not like there is no incentives for such a system with tools like utopian.io.
You guys seriously don't have a clue. Steemit Inc is an embarrassment and so are most of the top 20 ass kissing witnesses.
Elaborate.
Why, there is nothing in his statement that hasn't been common knowledge for a couple years now.
I just wanna know his thoughs on that statement. What do you think? :D
It's a long story of disappointments, collusion, sneaky behaviors, non-existent management skills, embarrassing and unprofessional behaviors and on and on. You kinda had to be here for a while to see it all, but the gist is, nothing is as advertised, and most of the stuff that happens here is heavily skewed to favor insiders, whether they are known entities or not.
I suppose a proper cynic would point out that all Proof of Stake systems are inherently designed to favor insiders. That's the very definition of the protocol. The more you have, the more power you have, and the more it is in your best interest to protect the circle of who has the resource from anyone outside of the circle as it existed when you joined. Likewise, it's in your best interest to try and force out anyone who was an insider when you managed to join the circle.
As a social dynamic driver, it's fascinating. I'm not sure it's the best design for a commodity.
Thanks. I guess I just want to confirm what i already thought or started to think.
It's almost like you have no idea how open source works Andrarchy. Surely github is just a dump of projects that cannot advance, because engineers can't do two things at once then.
More bullshit. Don't buy it people.
Whats the matter @novacandian, truth hurt? lol the skins around here, so thin because there isn't much substance under some of them.
Eat your own Dogfood Gentleman... You're new replacement Gal cannot even respond to her own comments because she lacks resource credits on this network... YOU of all people should be on this platform EVERY DAMN DAY! Until you and other STINC representatives begin to swim in these waters rather than dipping a toe every now and then; you will continue to look and sound like liars and conmen...
Making changes to code IS important yes, but so is actually BEING HERE rather than Telegram and Twitter... It's provable you guys use the competition and other networks WAYYYY more!
And before you get all indignant with me, just remember you represent a group of people on the network who obnoxiously make a great many of us feel like CHUMPS and SUCKERS. Before you get long winded... be SURE not to whine about trying your best... after this many years and false promises, many of us straight up know you guys are a complete set of CONs.
I'm Frank Bacon and this is MY 5555th post! you have 2110 posts... @ned has half that...
Tell your new Gal to start eating the Dogfood, it's the only way to get through this properly.
'steemit's new direction' is towards the slammer . this platform is so criminal it boggles the mind !
Reading wallets can also be an enlightening experience for the community . This platform is drenched in bot-snot that leads to a handful of people.
Good to see that someone is both thinking these things through and communicating those thoughts with the community. The lack of the latter has often led us to question the presence of the former.
Good luck in the next step, which is showing us that you can follow through.
We are definitely excited to see serious actions towards improving the whole Steem "ecosystem", on all different fronts including restructuring, serious development effort, revenue generation and better communication. We were delighted to listen to @elipowell yesterday, and looking forward to see some more progress and further signs of success in light of those changes.
Although only time will tell, we do have high hopes for the upcoming period. I hope they'll be proven right.
What is higher than CEO?
Good point. I don't know how one could move to a higher position when they are already CEO. Perhaps he moved on to another company?
I wrote a massive article tearing apart the conversation between the brain trust, but this update actually made me decide not to post it. It's hard not posting something I worked hard on but it actually seems like things are set to improve. Good job.
I’d love to see ad opportunities explored that may be equally beneficial to the community, and possibly more aligned with the crypto community overall; although understandably you’ll want to maximize revenue and if a model like Adsense does that, so be it.
Exciting ad possibilities to me would be exploring integrations with crypto friendly services like Basic Attention Token and Anonymous Ads, or a revamp of the official promoted system which improves placement of promoted posts and perhaps integrates a percentage token burn and percentage to Steemit Inc.
Looking forward to what lies ahead regardless!
Great suggestions! We're definitely eager to explore more innovative ad solutions.
Apropos Basic Attention Token:
My Brave Browser tells me the following:
"You’ve designated 8.8 BAT for creators who haven’t yet signed up to receive contributions. Your browser will keep trying to contribute until they verify, or until 90 days have passed."
steemit.com is one of these sites which haven't signed up yet to receive contributions.
Read more here.
Ironic. I discovered steem when I was trading BAT about two years ago.
Heres's an idea; take some of the ad revenue and automatically buy steem tokens with it, then give the tokens to the community, even if it's a small amount, it creates guaranteed demand for the tokens/more stable price, giving people more confidence to hold for the long term, like a stock dividend.
Just created a poll on Dpoll.xyz to see what the community sentiment was regarding the decision to have Ads on Steemit.com. Maybe it helps you measure the community opinion on the subject: https://dpoll.xyz/detail/@chitty/do-you-support-the-recent-decision-of-steemit-inc-to-show-ads-on-steemitcom/
I see that a popular choice is to include to option for Steem and SBD paid Ads.
Best of luck!
I can understand to some extent the need for ad revenue, however I do have serious questions on how it would be implemented.. Do we now need to be concerned with our personal data and information being sold to the highest bidder as it is on other social media sites?
So the "NEW DIRECTION" and "FUTURE" is..... you are putting up advertising on our content........?
oh that looks awful.