Everybody is talking about it this week and no one else will post this. If we cannot express a politically unpopular opinion on Steemit, then what kind of free marketplace of ideas is this? So I’ll do it; I’ll post it. Here are the ideas that much of this community has been talking about for a week in the chat channels, but no one else will publish. They have families to support or Steem businesses that stand to lose; they have too much at stake to handle the blowback. But I’m just a former lawyer who lays carpet and grows his own tomatoes. So I don’t care; I’ll post it.

And I’ll go a step further. At the end of this lengthy and well-documented complaint, I’ll suggest a solution to this mess.

Confession: I was a Steemit PR Writer

A friend introduced me to Steemit early on. Within days, I was making long posts, and the most popular ones were about the Steemit opportunity. I wrote several early articles about curation rewards and how someone could earn good money by voting.

Back then, if I submitted a Steemit post that didn’t hit $800 within the first 10 minutes, I considered it a failure. We were telling Steemit’s story and we just scooped up the rewards. Whales loved that we put the information out there for the community. And the real writers hadn’t arrived yet.

How does one go from a dense whitepaper and the code on Github to actually communicating with a social community of typical tech-deficient people? There were two main ways. First, Dan’s posts have been pretty good at explaining why things are important, but they have fallen far short of explaining what they mean to average people and how a Steemit user can benefit from using them. So second, it took writers like @donkeypong and @gavvet and @cryptoctopus and @nanzo-scoop to tell that story early on. When @stellabelle got here, she took things to a whole new level, though she didn’t write many Steemit infomercials.

We were hired guns for Steemit, Inc. We hired ourselves; they didn’t have to do it. But we would check with the developers and witnesses about pending releases, try to get a layperson’s understanding of what was going on, and then we would post articles that made $1,000 or more for explaining some aspect of this system and how real people could use it.

My point: They needed us then. And today, they have that same need, but a much bigger gap has formed. Top writers have mostly moved away from writing about Steemit, because the big whales will not reward those article topics anymore. While that’s the right direction for the platform, we have been left with a communications void that is much larger than it was before.

Now writers and curators have no clue what is happening behind the scenes. And Steemit, Inc. is not capable of explaining things to the community any more clearly now than they did before.

Result? A bloodletting on the markets this month.

But read on, dear friends, since I propose a solution.

Open Letter to Ned and Dan

---

Dear Ned and Dan,

You have created something special here with Steemit. But it is suffering due to your team’s awful communication. The communication has been lacking since I got here in May. But the last two weeks have set a new low. Now we are hurtling towards Hardfork 14 on Tuesday with its deeply unpopular vote balancing change and NO ONE, outside of perhaps 10 people on Github, has any clue how to prepare.

How do we set the default voting strength? What will the algorithm do? Will there be a user-friendly “web interface version” for idiots that sets the default voting strength so that peoples’ voting strength is not zapped automatically, something they can understand easily enough? How can these large curation operations prepare for this fickle cliff?

A lot of minnow posts next week are set to go unrewarded and frustrated people may quit the platform, because curation operations have no choice but to take a deep pause.

And wait for clear guidance from your team that may never come.

Why? Because nothing has changed. Your team still has not shown that it can communicate effectively with the community.

This vote rebalancing was unnecessary, it is deeply unpopular in the community, and it makes the site worse. A close friend of mine showed me a private message he’d exchanged with a senior member of the Steemit Team who actually wrote on Slack that the pending vote rebalancing change “might have the adverse effect you mention” after my friend had suggested that it may kill the platform. I’m sorry to throw that insinuation out there without proper attribution, but the source is very credible, the person who wrote that is one of the few people who work directly for Steemit, and I stake my reputation on it as a co-author of the Steemit 101 e-book.

So the Steemit team itself is not sure that it won’t kill the platform, yet the vote rebalancing change still has not been stripped out; it’s included in the HF 14 release that’s going live on Tuesday. And this change is extremely unpopular in the community, an opposition which your team has dismissed as “uninformed” when in fact those dissenters have some very strong reasons for objecting. These reasons simply have been ignored by the Steemit, Inc.

Which can only mean that this change is being forced on the team and community from the top down.

That’s some decentralized, community-driven decision-making. And if you believe the community doesn’t get it, then whose fault is that? As usual, there has been no decent communication.

Instead, Dan took precious time to post an article which addressed some wacky proposal for letting people cash out Steem Power right away. To me, that speaks to a serious lack of confidence or misdirection. Most people who saw that post laughed at the idea; even the author may have been laughing.

For Dan to write a long post in response was quite unnecessary when there are clearly much large issues that must be communicated and explained to the community. In fact, it smacks of being very seriously out-of-touch with the community.

Do you guys believe in the changes you are putting forward, such as this power down penalty? Or are you just thinking these up on the fly, throwing stuff at the wall, and seeing what sticks? As a former lawyer who has analyzed the comments that both of you have made on many posts, I sadly believe that it’s the latter. Is this no more than an experiment, even though peoples’ livelihoods are at stake?

If we don’t have a proposed change that’s definitively better than the current setup, why not just keep this and work with it? If it ain’t badly broken, please don’t throw a monkey-wrench in it. Let this thing develop and grow. Haven’t we come too far to play those kinds of games?

Apparently not.

The Most Uninformed, Dismissive, and Disrespectful Comment I Have Ever Seen on Steemit Came From One of Your Own Employees Last Week. And Nobody From Steemit, Inc. Addressed It.

I understand that there have been some nasty politics in recent months. I understand that people get passionate about beliefs and they say things they might later regret. I also understand that @nextgencrypto has disagreed with Dan and his team on many things, notably the most controversial previous fork in Steemit’s history. And that some people said he was a real jerk about it. And that he has sold some Steem, as many have (how else do you get it into new hands?).

None of that justifies a comment like this from a Steemit employee. I have been waiting for it to be deleted or for someone on your team to apologize for it (to the community, if not to the person to whom it was directed), and yet none of you seem to care. It still sits on Steemit as a testament to how badly your team’s communication is failing. Is this amateur hour?

Apparently so. Amateur stuff. @smooth knows better, as you can see from his replies.

Apparently, @val missed this post by @donkeypong : https://steemit.com/steemit/@donkeypong/announcing-project-curie-bringing-rewards-and-recognition-to-steemit-s-undiscovered-and-emerging-authors

And this one by @curie : https://steemit.com/project-curie/@curie/project-curie-s-daily-curation-list-8-sept-9-sept-2016

And this one by @furion : https://steemit.com/stats/@furion/homepage-payout-distribution-power-law-and-project-curie

Along with a host of others.

By the way, here is the chart from @furion’s excellent post (below). @furion is not involved directly with Project Curie. But he analyzed every vote that the project had made in a certain period and came up with this. What are you looking at? Rewards for posters on the Trending page.

And EVERY SINGLE RED LINE was a Project Curie post, upvoted and rewarded by @nextgencrypto and his friend @berniesanders . @nextgencrypto donates a ton of voting power to this project and he shares his curation rewards with the team, who pay it out to curators in the community who find worthy, unrewarded posts from people who are not established authors yet.

You can dislike someone, maybe for good reasons, but to accuse that person of not curating to help the site when @nextgencrypto does this more effectively to help others than anyone else on Steemit right now, that is a statement that the Steemit group should have apologized for…and did not.

By all accounts, @val is a valuable member of your team. I’m sure he does great work on the site. But in defaming investors and whales who are funding some of the most effective projects on Steemit, projects which have the power to save this site from its failings, it’s clear that @val understands little about how Steemit really works beyond the code.

As a former lawyer, who is qualified to give only a layperson’s opinion (not legal advice), I will even mention that this statement is worse than dumb. It may qualify as actionable defamation (libel, in this case, which is a civil cause of action in court). And still no public statement from Steemit, Inc.?

Did you read the @curie post above? Here are some screenshots (below). This is just ONE DAY of @nextgencrypto ‘s curation. His votes rewarded EVERY SINGLE ONE of these people. These posts sat for hours at under $10 before Project Curie rescued and rewarded them, thanks to @nextgencrypto ‘s vision and support. His whale votes were the reason these posts rose to prominence and that the authors felt encouraged by their experience on Steemit, not discouraged enough to leave it forever.

That’s just one day. @nextgencrypto is rewarding deserving posters like that every day. Now that’s dedicated curation.

Do you still think that this large investor/whale does nothing to help Steemit and that all he does is cash out?

You guys should let your people out once in a while. Or maybe breathe a little less venom in their direction, because apparently they take it as gospel and extend it to make entirely invalid criticisms. I love that you let everybody post and air their views. But any reputable organization I have ever worked for would have released a comment by now disavowing that employee’s statement, even if you supported his right to make it. It is utterly unbelievable to me that we have not seen this statement addressed.

There is no true communications presence at Steemit, Inc., nor is there much understanding of the work and needs of writers and curators. This site will die if you don’t listen.

You Need a Content Expert and Someone Who Can Explain Things to the Community

There are two people in this community who are above it all. They are better than this petty political shit. They see beyond the code. They know how to write and how to curate. They know what content creation involves, which I’m pretty sure your team takes for granted and does not fully understand. These two people are so successful that they have written their way up to whalehood or whaledom, becoming the two most successful Steemit writers in terms of their Steem Power holdings.

They give of their time to help others. They have formed deep, loyal friendships throughout the community. Combined, these two have mentored or given a real boost to probably 30% of the authors who regularly hit the Trending list on Steemit. Everyone in this community looks up to these people.

And they know how to explain things in terms that a layperson can understand.

I hereby suggest that you create a new position at Steemit, Inc. for a Content Advisor/PR Writer and that you offer this position to either Leah Stephens @stellabelle or Tom Janowicz @donkeypong . One of them would transform your communications problem in a hurry. They would add instant credibility to anything they help you announce and explain, because the community trusts them and because they know what content creators need in terms of information and support.

One of them would solve these problems.

And as @stellabelle herself has even suggested on forum channels, perhaps it is time to convene a Council of Content Creators (Writers, Artists, and Others), which could be advisory to the Steemit team. It’s become clear to us that there is little understanding or support for the work that we do to create the content that drives Steemit.

If I can be of any further help, please feel free to contact me. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
Richard Kaplan, @steemship

P.S. As a reminder, we have a hardfork scheduled for Tuesday and no one in the community understands a f****** thing about how to adapt their behavior to accommodate this vote balancing.

#steemit
#steemit-ideas

References: Post links included. Thumbnail image is public domain from Pixabay. Other images are public domain or used under license.