RE: Communities Nearly Done!!!
It isn't. Much of our community work has been done for a while, we just often get sidetracked developing other infrastructure-critical projects like Hivemind and MIRA. In addition, back end software like this isn't of much use without a responsive front end interface (i.e. a user interface that works well across all devices) that enables users to interact with it. Most people have one specific feature they want and they imagine we are focusing all of our attention on that one thing, whether it's SMTs, Communities, or MIRA. The reality is more nuanced. We are working on all of these projects, but not necessarily at the same time, and not necessarily with equal priority. The hard part of Communities was Hivemind (complete) and UI. We provide lots of free services and software to this community (our nodes, Condenser, Jussi, Conveyor, Hivemind, soon MIRA, etc.) and the cryptowinter forced us to to scale-back, re-think our approach, and focus on cost reductions and advertisements so that we could continue to support the Steem ecosystem. It's not so much that Communities is hard as running a sustainable blockchain company that gives all of its software away for free is hard. That's why Communities aren't out yet.
Thanks for the great explanation and I don't wanted to underestimate your work that you do everyday to develop new features for the Steem ecosystem.
I really appreciate your efforts and hard work towards the community and hope that things will play out well in the future. I think from what I heard you guys are on a good track to complete the next milestones like MIRA and SMT-lite.
Since, I have you here to talk...I had this idea in my head and wonder how the economical relationship between Steemit.inc and all these Dapps/SMT is going to be in the future. I mean Steemit.com is more as a user another Dapp or Interface to the Steem Blockchain like Busy or Steampeak, but the big economical difference is that its native token is Steem for Steemit.com and the reward pool is tied to that Dapp. So, in my head that is hard to compete for other Dapps or SMT since they need to create there token on top of Steem. What I'm trying to say is wouldn't it be better for the future if the interface Steemit.com would create its own SMT and own reward pool instead of being tied to the Steem Token and Steem reward pool. This would make the playing field more fair and even in the long run for all Dapps and communities.
I'm curious what you think about this idea?
Thank you for your time.
Perhaps, but that's way outside of the scope of anything we are working on now. Right now we're just focusing on delivering the features we've promised. Once SMTs are live, then we can have that conversation ;) Thanks!