My appeal to Jeff Berwick: Holding public debates on Steem without the presence of true experts on the subject is risky
There is the risk of misconceptions being further perpetuated, instead of being debunked.
After one or two weeks, most of us are not able to fully comprehend all the nuances of Steem's inner workings. It just takes time for these complex concepts to settle down in our heads. In my case it took much longer than a week and even now, after several months, there are still areas that I don't fully understand.
A lot that Tone Vays said during the latest debate was utter non-sense. You did your best to oppose his claims and sometimes you succeed but on a couple of occasions you let him off the hook, while what he was saying made absolutely no sense or was just untrue. And that's OK, after a week of dealing with the subject most of us would not do any better.
Tone Vays should have been knocked out in this debate. He came unprepared (though he declared reading the whitepaper) and has almost no understanding of the blockchain business - yet he survived quite well and got away almost unchallenged. This should not have happened, especially when you receive several thousands dollars for doing this job.
Here is my appeal:
Please, next time when you organize a similar debate, invite (or partner with) somebody who has a deep understanding of the Steem whitepaper and its codebase.
I'd suggest Nathan Hourt (aka @modprobe). I don't know if he'd agree but I do know he's a very bright guy who can talk very clearly and has a deep understanding of Steem (and the entire Graphene codebase).
Good point. I think Jeff's approach is more relatable to a mainstream user because he's not technical, so I didn't think it was a bad interview. But it would have been fun to see someone technical annihilate Tone.
We need people like Tone Vays to oppose steemit. The more people there are trying to debunk it the better.
I have to agree on you on your first sentence, people don't usually test claims. They just roll along with them.
I agree with this very much. I joined steemit around the same time as Jeff and every day I seem to find myself engaged in a discussion (never a debate, still in the learning process) with more experienced steemit users where I discover something that I thought I knew was slightly or completely wrong. It's imperative that people engaged in actual debates with vocal detractors have a necessary arsenal to shoot down all of their concerns and doubts, and when that is happening on a public stage it's even more important. +1 to @modprobe, also either @dantheman or @ned since they seem to be fans of @dollarvigilante, or any of the devs or witnesses who have deeper knowledge of what's going on. Jeff you do a great job but would be nice to see more of a panel type approach with a complete expert to oppose Tone's nonsensical arguments
intense debate, I liked
Agree!
I actually enjoyed this debate quite a lot. Vays is biased and possibly sometimes uninformed, but the whole exchange still comes across pretty meaningful. A voice of an uniformed sceptic is in my eyes valuable, leading the conversation in different direction from the one you would ideally like to see, but still a lot of interesting points are getting addressed.
Being in Vays' position, I would certainly spare anyone my personal opinions on Dan or other people involved in Steemit, which is what happens when he is projecting his impressions of Bitshares onto Steemit, tying them to the authors. Serial entrepreneurship is constant trial and error, and judging someone in that manner is actually a big giveaway of biased judgement. Fortunately Jeff is pretty quick to point it out to him.