If we want to succeed, we need leadership to help us all work together on developing Steem and the open source projects running on it.
Steem is frustrating. We're all in this boat together. We're all trying to earn. Some of us are trying to earn stake. Some of us are trying to earn SP. Some of us are trying to earn crypto. Some of us are trying to earn enough to survive. Some of us are trying to earn respect. Some of us are here to earn followers and fans. Some of us are trying to earn our place.
Perhaps I would be a bit better off, and perhaps a few others as well, if we were just running blogs to get something out there. I've had certain experiences in my life though that have made me want to keep certain things close to the vest. I think in certain regards, that is a good decision, while in others, it might not be. Fewer on here are just here to run blogs than any other blogging platform. Of course, that doesn't mean that some of our posts aren't written just to get something out of ourselves.
So perhaps it's not so accurate to say that "all" of us are here to earn. Some, fewer than try to claim, are just here writing blogs, just because they need to get something out.
We've had a lot of news recently...and feelings. Steemit announced that they were laying off 70% of their employees to reduce costs due to the extremely low bottom of the crypto market, reducing their R&D. Before they announced that, Ned mentioned at SteemFest that the Steemit interface, Condenser, was in maintenance mode. That effected me far more than the announcement of layoffs. The layoffs suck, but they're just temporary. If anything, I wish they had been done sooner. Or perhaps, that a few had been done sooner.
We all kinda knew that Steemit wasn't doing a ton of development on Condenser, the Steemit interface, but with Neds words, it became clear that they weren't doing anything. They weren't going to do anything about the difficulty to find good Steem posts, or Trending sucking donkey balls. It's all up to us.
All sorts of developers on here have been doing all sorts of development. We have some awesome alternative interfaces to Steemit. We even have our own trading card game! We have curation teams with their own development tools. We have tons of different kinds of bots, some of them annoying as fuck, sure, but some of them awesome! But we haven't organized our developers for Steem itself.
We can't rely on Steemit. They aren't helping to organize the development community, and perhaps we should have realized that a lot sooner. We need people, especially witnesses, to step forward, and organize the community, to do development on Steem, and possibly the front-ends as well. All of these projects are open source, and we all need to help contribute to them.
I myself have never been in a lead position in a open source project. I have always been a small contributor that occasionally is frustrated, not knowing what to do. I'm in the same position now. Except it's even worse here. I hate JavaScript TBH, so just forking Condenser to make my own changes that I think are necessary is...problematic. Though, now I realize perhaps I should have been pushing myself to do just that. I'm also not a hardcore C developer with blockchain experience. I don't even know where to start with Steem. That's the problem.
We need people to organize developers like myself and others and give them direction on where to go, what development to do, etc. If we want to earn, if we want Steem to be worth anything, we need to do this. We need to decentralize development, so we can get more done. We need to stop just expecting everyone to just do their own thing and magically move Steem forward. If we want Steem to be worth anything, we need decentralized leadership for development of the blockchain and the projects on it.
We need to work together. Can we get the people to help us do just that?
Attribution: Descryptive.com Uploaded on June 1, 2018 CC BY 2.0 (source)
I agree.
What is your opinion of Utopian? I've had getting involved there on my TODO list for a long time now. To me it looks the closest thing to a developer centric DAC for STEEM? Maybe the answer comes out of there?
I don't really like it personally. Not like I gave it much of a chance though. I went to the page a long time ago and was turned off by it. At least they took care of a lot of the abuse that was happening with translations and such.
Probably should ask Steemit Inc to give up the ownership of the steemit.com codebase and let the community handle it. A new server could be set up with a vote system to allow the selection of which pull request would make it to the deployment. Maybe through some utopian tools.
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They don't have to give it up. It is named after them after all. It would be nice if they turned to the community to take more of an active role in it's development though.
Sorry, "give up" wasn't the best choice of words. What I meant is opening access and let the community not just make pull requests but also help with the selection and deployment. The community can already do some development and submit pull requests, but the community might value features differently.
I completely agree with that.
I personally would have liked work to be done on curation tools to try to ensure that really good posts have a chance to be in "Trending", even if they also chose to get rid of "Trending".
Teams can try to work on such things, but even if they create an awesome tool, then they have to get the audience, host it themselves, and it will always be separate from the front-end. That means that every time a user wants to use it, they have to switch tabs to check it, or have it open in another window. That all makes it a lot more difficult.
Tons are using a very basic interface to Steem, where it's really hard to find good posts.
The community has to figure out how to get in there and fix things in whatever ways they can.
I think the biggest problem of STEEM is the reliance on Steemit yes. I think the STEEM project would be far better off if instead of going the corporate route with Steemit Inc, the main interface would instead be an open-source produced one. I think if the development of Steemit was done through open-source it would probably have been a lot better by now in many different aspects. And at this point it may even be a necessity because it looks like relying on Steemit Inc to fix the issues isn't going to work either.
I've never liked that 95% of Steemians use Steemit anyway. If STEEM is supposed to be centralized then it makes no sense to have such centralization around Steemit (the website). It is for this reason that I switched to Busy.org long ago.
But honestly, we need a 'Linux of STEEM'. And ideally, an actual usable desktop client which allows you to post and not only transfer. It's not really censorship resistant if the domain owners function as bottlenecks that can simply block you, IMO.
I only just downloaded it to start playing around, but eSteem Surfer is a desktop client that connects direct to nodes so there’s at least one option for that so far.
It would certainly help things if we were able to access Steem from a desktop client. There are apps for phones of course. There's also the Vessel wallet.
Condensor, the Steemit front-end, is open source. We can fork it ourselves, make changes, and then push them upstream to Steemit...but that's all pretty much reliant on individuals to just make the changes. Every time I've heard of people wanting to make changes, they just have to dig in and do it themselves, often when they have limited experience with development. Steemit has an open source front-end like many of the others...but Steemit Inc has just been the primary developer, that's done nothing to spur open source development of it.
They're not alone in this. Plenty of other corporations have open sourced projects and just expected the open source community to spring up around it like magic. The only time it's happened is when people decided to form communities to do it, or just started doing their own thing and others joined in to help.
Steemit and Steem aren't open source produced...but they can be moulded by the open source community...if we organize one around it.
I totally agree but without a strong incentive structure it is difficult to gather talent to help build the foundation. Witnesses will be working towards this end but resources are limited unless developers are encouraged by the potential of the ecosystem and the future potential value of the cryptocurrencies themselves. I only wish I knew the technical aspects of it all to assist but I fall short of that; all I have is my stake in the ecosystem to support the community of developers that will assist in building the future and decentralizing the ecosystem over time.
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Well, if the discussion of the development was done on the blockchain, they could get upvotes for it. But most open source development isn't done for the rewards.
LMAO! ahhhh... I appreciate the humour you bring into this. But besides making me laugh, you're totally right: Steem needs leadership, cooperation, and a way to properly utilize the talents each individual can bring to the blockchain. Thanks for stepping up and putting this out there. I hope people can band together and get things organized so that the growth happens more effectively and we aren't left with that frustration of not knowing what to do to move things in the right direction.
I think there are a few good teams out there but like everything in the world it's a matter of incentive. If most of the developers were whales they would want to see their stock rise.
However many are not. And the few that work hard to develop the platform don't get compensated well.
@ned should look into outsourcing some work. It will promote Community involvement and boost general feeling of togetherness.
There are a ton of awesome teams out there. But that's the problem, they're individual teams working on their own projects. We have a problem with the organization of them all to work together on the main project, Steem. We all have incentive for Steem to work out. Even if it's just because we've made friends and fans here.
I am not a developer myself... Just a simple writer and a poet. But somehow I understand the anger to want to fix a whole community. I joined Steemit to polish my writing skills and earn something while doing it but this whole year has taught me a tough lesson about all of it.
It's hard to get many people to read my work or help me grow as a writer and the bear market is upon us. I think if we paid attention to each other over ranting about who ain't doing what, we would determine the future of Steem but we rarely do. Bots are here to make sure we satisfy our selfishness not help build a collapsing community.
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I agree totally. I'm actually working on a project right now to organize all of the active communities on the blockchain so that new and veteran users can find communities based on topics that interest them.
It will be ready for release soon. We're also working on a DApp of Open Mic that will be open source so other music communities will be able to use it.
As a witness, I think it's time we just do it instead of waiting for Steem Inc. to do it for us.
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