@timcliff, thanks for the effort to at least try to clarify what's currently going on. In general, I appreciate your efforts to put some of the technical underpinnings of Steemit into non-technical terms for those of us who are primarily content creators and little else.

Your post (and need to make it) suggests we have a certain lack of communication between the developers/Steemit and the users. There's a lot of "black box" type stuff that seems to happen, and the community only finds out about it post-fact. It's not that people need to know about technical details... but there's a danger people losing confidence. If you think about it, in the earliest days of Facebook, Zuckerberg was actually quite active in user forums interacting with the community over development stuff. Same with Tom at MySpace. Same on several other long lived user-generated content venues.

Sure, experiments have to happen... changes get made... and maybe the decentralized format adds extra communication challenges precisely because there is not a centralized repository of plans and actions. In the current case, I think a lot of people felt in the dark as to whether this was an actual "Steemit experiment" or just abit running some stuff to see what would happen. I'd like to think we're all onboard and trying to go in the same direction... but is someone actually driving the bus?