The waters were red with the blood of the fallen Powers and the battlefield was devoid of comments and votes. All that was left was an empty shell of a promise of a better future for all where fish could swim without being choked by the dust of spam accounts and a flood of new survivors of the centralized wastelands to populate the new world. And here we are, the day after Mana-ñana on the Steem blockchain. Is there anyone left to witness it?

Ok, so as dramatic as it has all been, we have all had a little bit of time to process, recover and get a bit of a feel for what is going on and, it isn't as rosy as anyone would have liked. There are many lesson to be learned of course and there is plenty of time to play the blame game later but for now, I think that the focus should be on putting together a working approach so people can get back to doing whatever they enjoyed doing before and perhaps find some new enjoyable things to play with.

With some justification, the top witnesses are getting a bit of a bashing but I am still going to take the middle ground and say that I am pretty sure that all of them did whatever they thought was right in whatever circumstances they had. Yeah, there was a lot to be desired in the planning and with the troubles that other witnesses had, I think that now my suggestion made to @roelandp last week to have an off-chain witness update site where all witnesses can get pertinent information quickly and consistently should be employed.

I am still hopeful that over the next days, the equilibrium will be found so that then there is the feedback from the system that gives a chance for any patch deployment to be effective in plugging holes. I am pretty pragmatic in general but since there is absolutely nothing I can do about these issues in the immediate future other than talk about it, I will take a wait and see approach.

Although this hasn't been an ideal experience over the last week and a half, what is great to see is that it shows how engaged (@penguinpablo's stats are going to be lol moments in coming days) people are and how connected they feel to the platform. I still caution however that there is a difference between passion and anger and what many are feeling is anger, but I don't see it as overly helpful in this case. Shit went sideways, we should deal with it the best we can and that means us as users too, not just the witnesses.

It is pretty frustrating for everyone who has limited capacity to do what they want to do but I am not a big fan of going backwards on somethings and instead prefer a new hardfork to combat whatever cockups have been made with this one. I don't think it is actually possible to roll HF20 back now anyway as perhaps too much time has passed.

From a community perspective, it would be much better to implement small change hardforks more often so that then we can have a chance to see how various things interact as well as never being too far away from the next iteration. More small hardforks would also help the community grow in bahaviours more organically and naturally meaning that future changes will be better suited to the continually changing shape of the user base.

You want some good news though?

Go have a look at trending and take note of everything posted after the hardfork. Looks pretty healthy considering doesn't it? Sure, there aren't 1000 dollar posts there but this is currently number 1 with a massive... 44 dollars!

Not only would trending be much healthier if this was the norm, distribution would be too.

The lesson

There are hundreds of take-aways from this experience and there can be changes and failsafes put in to continually limit risk but there really is one core lesson that covers everything here and in this world:

Do not get comfortable

 

Things go wrong, witnesses leave, autovotes end, whale sell, @dlive are pricks, competition arrives, people complain, hardware fails... Everything is subject to changes.

There are no guarantees here or anywhere, no perfect system, no security in this world so the best any one of us can do is our best and hope that on any given day, it is good enough. This isn't just winging it though, this is a case of responsibility.

We all have it, even those of us who don't take it.

Maybe when VPs are charged and people have settled their nerves and quarrels, The day after Mañana will be a better day. Until then though, imagine five years from now as if what you think will happen happens. From that distance, how important is your anger today?

There is a longer game to play.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]