RE: What is up with the steemit hate?!
Hi guys,
Brian here from Epicenter. Thanks for your comments and criticism. I can totally understand where you are coming from. Let me try to explain.
Before the episode, I was wondering whether we should cancel the episode completely. We have never had a project on the show that has seen such widespread criticisms and accusations of being a scam. We try to be very careful at Epicenter to only have legitimate projects on the show and have received comments countless times that we don't challenge guests enough. In the end, we decided to do the episode, but with that background I felt I had to challenge Ned directly on the accusations.
We try to get to a thorough understanding of every topic before the show, but we don't always succeed in that. I did have a Steemit account before and looked around a bit, Sebastien posted some episodes here, we looked at the whitepaper, etc. But still - there is no question that I wish I had been better prepared.
In my view, Ned handled our questions very well and after the show I did feel that I had been too confrontational. I continued reading for several hours through the Bitcoin Talk threads and other articles to understand better what happened during the launch of the project. The main accusation there seems to be that the project intentionally made it hard for non-company people to mine Steem so that much of the Steem would end up with the company.
What I only really wrapped my head around after the show was that the distribution of coins ended up not dissimilar to those of a tokensale, while potentially avoiding legal issues. So I understand why this was done that way (whether or not it was intentionally made tricky for others to mine). Especially since the company didn't sell much during the bubble, I feel okay with how the Steem launch was conducted and if somebody told me today the project is a scam, I would disagree with the person. So you're right that I should have gotten to that point before the episode and I would have been more understanding.
I hope that explains a bit why this ended up an unusually confrontational episode.
There is no question in my mind that Steem has succeeded in a pretty massive way in building a vibrant community and a blockchain application that is widely used. That is a fantastic accomplishments - so hats off to all of you for that! (And this thread is the best example for it.)
Thanks for doing the interview. Personally, I thought the questions are reasonable and should be asked. I would rather have an open debate to find out where things can be fixed. Your concerns are not unfounded. There really is a layer of complexity for those generally outside the sphere. It's been working like butter for me for the past few months, so it's certainly difficult to comprehend when someone doesn't seem to get it lol, but that's totally understandable.
Don't be too sorry, I think it's reasonable that people still have lots of suspicion because those things haven't been explained clearly enough. Generally I think @ned is great guy but sometimes he is just not very good at explaining basic stuff. He and @dan are constantly looking forward and rarely stop and look back.
This was a big problem also for Bitshares. It made some seriously great innovations but @dan didn't take enough time to explain those for general audience.
@dan wrote this post before the launch of Steem: https://bytemaster.github.io/article/2016/03/27/How-to-Launch-a-Crypto-Currency-Legally-while-Raising-Funds/
"You just need thick skin and the ability to ignore the Bitcoin pharisees and the angry mob they incite to nail you to a cross for failing to sacrifice your creation to the prevailing mining gods."
This happened, and @dan and @ned have had thick skin. But there should have been much more thoroughly explanation why the launch was made like that. It's just really bad PR that there is still lots of people who believe that Steem is a scam. Very little have been done to fix the situation.
Also IMHO @ned failed in the interview because he didn't promote the innovations that Steem blockchain has. It's transactionfeeless blockchain, which is one of the biggest innovations of the year in the blockchain scene! That would have been a great talking point for your audience who are probably more interested in underlying technology than most people.
And the whitepaper is becoming obsolete because there have been so many upgrades to the system. Currently it doesn't give a clear picture of what Steem is and how it actually works. Hopefully it will be rewritten in the near future.
I do think the complexity of Steemit is a serious issue. Reading through Tone Vays' tweetstorm on Steem he points out at various times that mechanism and entire paragraphs are incomprehensible. Perhaps that's not intentional, but when one can't understand the structure and economics of the system in a reasonable time, it contributes to people looking at it with suspicion. I think focusing on that is would help Steem a lot.
I don't think that Steem is actually too complex or hard to understand. We just lack good documentation for the system. Devs haven't understood yet that documentation that is comprehensible for layman is very much needed for marketing purposes.
Yes this interview was very tense.i actualy started feeling sorry for Ned. Fair enough there were lot of criticism on steem but just few sentences warning Ned at the begining that thus is how it will be would have been great. Btw Ned handled it really well. And hey good on you Brian posting this on steem. I guess you are getting more attention here than on youtube or other media.
it is great to have you on the platform. I am looking forward yo see your posts here :) You should start with short #introduceyourself post :)