Stem.Witness Witness Survey V.1
Hello to all fellow STEEMians, We at the SteemSTEM project are proud to play our role in maintaining the Steem blockchain through our witness (@stem.witness) and seed node (seed.steemstem.io:2001).
What is your position/stance on bid-bots (ownership/delegations/opinion)? - @abh12345, @ammonite
We recognize that bid-bots have not been a net positive with regards to content quality on Steem. This may initially sound critical, however bid-bots exist because they fulfill a need that users have. Increased exposure. As there is no other effective mechanism for promotion, users turn to these bots to gain better access to trending pages, get new viewers and find new benefactors.
This overall is a positive aspect of bid-bots, however there is a large drawback. Bid-bots are massively profitable, and delegating to them results in greater earnings for those who delegate than they could get by any other mechanism (delegation to @steemstem included). This is in part because the economics of Steem is still not optimized enough (as described eloquently in this post by @kevinwong). So long as the underlying issues remain, bid-bots will remain a negative influence overall on the chain and result in drastically reduced overall trending content quality.
SteemSTEM and @stem.witness take no positions on bid-bot users/delegators/owners. Your STEEM is your money, use it as you see fit. Each of those groups is all just playing within the rules dictated by the economics of Steem.
What does the witness want to do to make the blockchain more user-friendly and help to onboard new users. What do THEY personally want to see done and what will they do to get it there? - @ericwilson
We have been around the Steem blockchain since its early days, and as such we have seen on-boarding show up as a major hurdle for adoption of the Steemit platform as well as all other Steem based applications. As we are building our own STEM-based application (www.steemstem.io) we do not want that trend to continue. To that end we have in addition established a collaboration with @wise-team and steemfounders to allow users an opportunity to earn their Steem account through posting. For our niche, this comes in the form of creation of a STEM-based blog post which can then receive support from the community, the earned STEEM being used to fund the creation and functionality of that new user's account.
Of course, we are also doing what we can to claim accounts with @steemstem's resource credits to better facilitate our project's abilities to create new user accounts at no cost to them as well. This is an important issue, and one we hope will continue to be at the front of developers minds as we take Steem into 2019.
Do you think votes for witnesses should last indefinitely or should they time out (or perhaps decay over time) so that periodically voters will need to reevaluate and affirm their positions by recasting their votes? - @harvhat
We think users should be actively engaged in selecting witnesses that they think are doing beneficial things for the Steem blockchain. Having a decay would prevent inactive/long lost accounts from having a say in which witnesses are actively working for the chain's best interest today. This isn't the worst idea, though a more effective position would be for users themselves to play that same active role. Unvoting and voting for the very best witnesses at any given time.
Do you think the 30 witness votes each Steemian gets is the correct number, especially in light of the fact there are only 20 top witnesses to be seated? - @harvhat
There are a lot more than 20 witnesses (we are currently ranked in the low 60's), and certainly those outside of the top 20 are able to make significant contributions to Steem and help shape its future. The number of witness votes each user receives seems fine to us.
What is a concern or two that you have about the #steem blockchain? - @johnspalding
- The economics are not conducive to effective content curation/ effective delegation of newly minted STEEM to users.
- Onboarding is very difficult
- User retention is poor
- The reputation of Steem in the outside cryptoverse (reddit/twitter/facebook etc) is not as good as it should be, considering the tech of the chain and what it has to offer.
What are you hopeful about for the #steem blockchain? - @johnspalding
- SMT's and the changes to the economic situation of the Steem chain they will inevitably bring.
- Hivemind (communities) and more effective mechanisms to promote well-constructed content (not just blogs).
What is the monthly cost of equipment? - @abh12345
We run a witness and seed node, each costs us about 54 euros/month + fees. So break even requires us to earn about 120 euros in Steem per month.
Where do your earnings go? - @abh12345
We currently earn less than the cost of running the witness... What are earnings?
[What are some of your] Current projects? - @abh12345
We manage the SteemSTEM project and are building our own STEEM based front end https://www.steemstem.io. SteemSTEM plays a large role in supporting the very best of STEM content on the Steem blockchain through our team of curators and voters, as well as maintain a discord community for additional ease of communication and discussion. We assist in the mangement and development of a variety of language/national specific STEM based sub communities (Nigerian, Italian, Spanish, German, French, Slavic and hopefully more to come). We are beginning to spin up the creation of an open-source public domain image generation project 'Stem-Art' for STEM authors/academics attempting to connect scientists and artists together for a better depiction of science. However that is in its very early stages, we hope to tie it in more closely with our steemstem.io website, hopefully building out a searchable public database a la Pixabay for these images created through STEEM-based transactions.
There are a few other pending projects which will remain undisclosed as they are actively in development and we do not wish to be scooped!
[Will you provide an] Alt accounts list? - @abh12345
@steemstem, @steemstem-io, @steemstem.pay
What are the benefits associated with being a witness? - @klassic
You help establish and maintain the blockchain upon which your project runs, and your vision needs. Ask not what Steem can do for you as a witness, but for what you can do for Steem.
How do I become a witness? - @steemingmark
Buy/rent a good server (we rent from Hetzner.com) and follow any one of the great guides ranging from instructions on the steemit inc github to those written by your fellow Steemians [1], [2], [3], [4]. There are many others beyond this small set, you should probably reference a number of them to decide whether you want to install from scratch or use one of the dockerized installs available. Either way install the software on your server get it running, declare your accounts intent to be a witness and that's it, you are a witness confirming blocks.
Have you implemented any new procedures for evaluating potential hardforks? - @patrickulrich
No, not yet at least.
How does a new user make the availability of his vote known to the cabal of witnesses wannabes trying to overthrow the current witness regime? - @grimgriz
Each user votes for whichever witnesses they feel bring value, and are helpful/effective in guiding STEE forward.
Should we have interest for SBD? - @patrickulrich
It has been a valuable stabilizing mechanism for STEEM over the existence of the chain. The SBD 1 USD peg has not always held, but overall it seems to have been a valuable asset. More so than many give it credit for.
What takeaways do you have from the Hardfork 20 issues that occurred? - @patrickulrich
More people need to be involved in the Testnet prior to official roll out, especially when large changes to the underlying code were pushed (as was the case for HF20). Additional time where the next version is running on Testnet, perhaps with additional community members involved should be taken before full rollout as well.
Do you think 20/21 top witnesses a good number or should there be more or less? - @harvhat
We feel that there are more witnesses than just those in the top 20 that provide strong value to Steem. If anything there should be more, certainly not less.
Thanks for the mention and answering my question. I have resteemed for you mate 😀😁
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The team thanks you (and everyone else) for your questions. We tried to answer them all, to the best of our ability. There are so many great guides out there which point out step by step how to run a witness. The community has really made the whole process quite easy to understand, especially if you are comfortable with Linux and know the basic commands.
Thanks ye I thought it was very interesting that you rent your server I will look into this.
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We rent more than one, and it is... prohibitively expensive, and likely not a great option for many given the current price of steem. We are not the only witness using this path. As far as we know, most rent their servers from one provider or another depending on cost and latency.
Yes that is what I was thinking too. I also wanted to run my server from green energy too.
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Congratulations @stem.witness! You received a personal award!
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
I one hundred percent concur with this
Time changes so do the activities of people. Continuous evaluation will help fish out passive witnesses.
This is well explained and the answers provide are enough to douse arguments and confusion.
As regards bid bots, I can't really say much. To everything that has advantage come with some disadvantages as well.
Weldone team
Passive witnesses is one perspective, but another is vision for the future. Many witnesses do not see eye to eye with regards to the direction things should go in. In the future people may need to make some choices based on those differing perspectives.
Although the https://www.steemstem.io system is a project that we must wait until 2019, it constitutes a solid tool to maintain publications of interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics with high impact in our society. In addition, here we have had special interest in maintaining content that encourages discussion and analysis of the issues exposed, avoiding plagiarism and sharing original text with unpublished images. Good job, continue to be the winning team and reference in the Steemit.com platform
Thank you, we appreciate the work you do for #stem-espanol and look forward to continued growth in the years to come.
Will you be using sbd as one of the steemstem.io token asset?
STEEM, SP and SBD are all accessible in the wallet functions on https://www.steemstem.io. Future changes are subject to the release of SMT's. We have no plans to discontinue the use of SBD on the site.
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A lot of questions were covered on this update. With the current bear market, I guess only the top 20 witnesses may not have to dip a hand outside to cover the cost of running a witness node. Thank you.
We've never made it to the break even point, however the witness has only run for 99 days, so we are still young. :)
Well, the young shall grow :)
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Or maybe a framework should be set up to make everyone's witness vote equal, without recourse to the sp. This will place more power in the hands of the minnows; which constitute majority of the entire steem blockchain. Imagine a scenario (maybe in a country) in which the vote of the rich would count more than the vote of the poor masses, would people still be interested in the electioneering process? My thoughts though; what are your views about this?
That could be scammed by people making thousands of accounts. That would only work when it's one person one vote.
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I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 9 SBD worth and should receive 221 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigBut I thought steemSTEM discouraged bidbots boosted posts! Getting visibility versus writing correct science is different right?
The former stance was illogical, the position detailed above is the official position of the management team.
We don't encourage people to use them, but the reality of the situation is, they are a tool and can be effective for generating exposure.
They can also result in you losing money, however it is not our right to tell others what they can and can not do with their money.
Use of a bidbot on your posts may affect how we curate a post, but that is subject to the assessment of the curation team.
But do you mind commenting about visibility versus real science article thing? People can write flat Earth stuff and get visibility under the tag steemSTEM! What do you think?
It won't show up as curated on https://www.steemstem.io, we can not control what people do with the tag. People could have always done that with bidbots if they wanted, regardless of what our policy was.
Do we still have flat earthers on the steemstem tag? :)
Probably not because its a hostile environment, IE the people that read our tag arent interested in flat earth. That said, there is nothing anyone could do to stop them from using the tag. It's part of the reason why we continue to work for steemstem.io, where we can display the best face of the community to the outside world.
That is correct; my question is just that it'd been a long time I've come across such.
What about Möbius strip Earthers? :P
A fork of flat-earthers :)
Having no right to forbid anything doesn't affect the right to criticize it. :)
For example I also have no right to forbid excessive self-voting, but nevertheless I can suggest to implement some mechanisms which would make it less beneficial.
And concerning exposure: if one user reaches more visibility, logically always another loses ... Where is the benefit for the community now? Are bid bot supported (and thus more exposed) articles in average of higher quality than non-bid bod posts? I strongly doubt that ...
True. However I support STEM content, if stem gets more exposure and others lose.. that fits my intention.
Some are, some aren't just like anything else. Want to fix bidbots? Fix the broken economics that make them more viable for delegators than anything else. Steemstem can't compete, so the same is likely true everywhere.
You are part of the community and choose judiciously which posts to support and which not. A bid bod doesn't care at all about whom or what it upvotes. It's just a money making machine. I think it's annoying for long term users and discouraging for new ones (just my personal opinion).
But yes, it's everybody's right to use bid bots ... but at the same time it's my right to criticize it.
Push for fixing the broken economics that make bidbots so profitable. I fear I have to repeat this like a broke record until more prominent members of the community demand change.
We did for a time, but the chain has changed, we have to adapt to our surroundings. The general rule of thumb is that if they use bots after our vote, then whatever. It's not like we'll blacklist them. It may come up for discussion if they boosted like $200 but... that never happens. Normally just a few cents or something