RE: Clarifying my decision not to support EOS-related posts and witnesses (100% of post rewards donated to curation initiatives)
If your heart and imagination are captured by EOS, then that is where you should be putting your time and energy. What I want is witnesses who are putting steem first, second and third - at LEAST until this platform is fully functioning. Hearing top witnesses say things like/ "We do not want new users, we are not ready" almost made me quit about a week ago. I NEED NEW USERS. I am not part of the old boyzngirlz club, I am not going to ever be a "big player" but if new users were coming AND STAYING my blog would probably grow. It feels, from my perspective, like all the folks who made their money early are pretty content to coast and those of us who got here late keep getting told "You are an early adopter, just hang in there!" are, well, hanging out there.
I will say, I am quite impressed with how much time and effort you have spent to respond to me and to others; brownie point and duly noted. ;)
I've appreciated the conversation! It helps me think about these issues as well, and put pen to paper to push some of these thoughts out into the ethos.
I really do wish it were that simple, time will tell if this is true or not. Over the past couple days even though I've been away from Steemit, I've still been thinking about this topic a lot.
At this point my imagination isn't captured by a single project, I have my fingers in dozens of different technologies that I'm researching and evaluating for various purposes. EOS is one of many, and while I'm attempting to be a part of it (with a larger team) - time will tell if that's even an opportunity I'd be lucky enough to have. For all I know we're going to be 80th on the producers list and not involved in any meaningful way.
What I will say though is that if at some point my focus becomes completely consumed by another individual blockchain (whatever it may be), I do agree that it would be best for Steem if I were to step aside. That point isn't now - and funny enough I'm actually excited by some of the progress I've made on wallet tech, which I'm looking forward to reusing when SMTs are released.
At this point I think I just need to let the next few weeks unfold. Everything is incredibly uncertain right now.
To shift into Steem topics, I get this, from both perspectives.
The hard part about it is what you capitalized, the AND STAYING part. It's a chicken or egg problem - with the divide being users won't stay until the experience is good enough vs users won't come back if it's not good enough.
Witnesses on Steem, when it comes to onboarding and growing Steemit.com, are largely powerless. Each one of these Steem powered sites, Steemit, Busy, etc, are all in control of their own destiny. While they may take a witnesses opinion more seriously than a random person, they are the ones ultimately deciding and the witnesses have no direct control over what these sites do or do not do to encourage growth.
That's why I set out to build chainBB and Reprint in the first place - to take that control and try to better improve the user experience. The problem I ran into though is that I couldn't do the things I wanted it to do - 90% of the time it was because the technology I needed didn't exist. That's why I've been working on more boring projects recently, that aren't user facing, because I want those tools to exist for the next guy like me who wants to come along and build something better.
I'm getting a bit rambly, it's been a long day. I hope I've at least shed a bit more light into what's going on... at least in my head :)
Ya' know, I am starting to like you in spite of myself... You earned my respect, and that is not really easily done.