Rebuttal to the arguments against the call for a moratorium: Steem cannot rely on eternal growth.
In "Am I the only one around here who would like to see the interface de-suckified, follow- and blocklists implemented and tagged browsing made possible before the next huge waves of new users rush in?" I proposed we all calm down, catch a breath and sit together to have a serious discussion on what kind of culture we would like to develop, for the sake of steemit, but also because it would be a disfavor to invite our friends to a place with such an unfilterable, unbearable clickbait scamfest botbattle infested created feed and no agreement, let alone a best practice guide, whatsoever on how to use which categories (and why not).
Since the interface is suckified so much that I can't even vote, reply, comment or edit in my post because the profile pic thingy remains a spinning cycle - at least on my own posts - I must address the counter-arguments in this new post and hope I don't make too many typos.
- @razvanelul complained about typing errors in the bar scene. They had a beer or two already and were speaking in typos, of course ;)
- But steemit.com is still in beta. Related: The UX/UI developers are working hard (@lovejoy, @gord0b, @calaber24p). I know. I used that apology often enough already, trying to pacify fellow newbies with less patience than I have to dig through the feeds, bookmarking valuable pages. But that is my point. It is in beta. Beta means: this is the phase where you test the system, find bugs, issues, unforeseen consequences, and fix them before the product is released to a broad audience. Beta does not mean inviting everyone to a huge party and welcoming them with a shovel to find the potatos for the fries themselves. Beta is not an excuse for a sucky user experience. And beta, most of all, is not an apology for not implementing the most basic and fundamental of features, something steemstats, steemwatch, piston.web etc. managed to do. Incited by upvotes alone - within days.
- But Steem depends on the growth.. Or as @lovejoy put it: have you ever tried herding cats? let alone cats making large sums of money for promoting something? Can we get anyone to wait at this point? Firstly, if anything about free markets is true, then withholding the product from the market will generate greater demand, causing it to gain value. Secondly, if Steemits/Steems success depends so much on constant growth, what will you do when the markets are saturated? If everyone has an account, and her dogs, cats and bots too? Breed more children to have someone to sign up and make Steemit "grow"? Conquer other planets and force their inhabitants to submit to the teachings of the Holy Steem? That is a short-sighted strategy!
At some point, the inflow of users must reach equilibrium and peter out into a small brook corresponding with humanity's birth rate. Unhindered growth is not sustainable. The "pie" will not grow forever, as some economists paid with central bank money so regularly would like to make you believe. It is pure madness to expect that, if just enough people participate, somehow every day a new masterpiece will be produced and thus "value" be generated. There are only so many "Moby Dicks" you can read in a lifetime, or a civilization needs to define itself. The way Steemit is organized now, Homer's work wouldn't get an upvote after 12 hours anymore and be forgotten within a month - instead of surviving the millennia. Unless you all speculate on "cashing out" by securing at least two or three powerdown payments before Steem proves to be an unsustainable bubble about to burst, we should try and analyze what will happen if indeed everything goes according to plan and in, say, 3 or 4 years, steemit has completely replaced tweetbook, wikizon, tumbay and diggit.
Then steem will derive all its legitimacy and value from being a reliable network with a stable currency with actual purchasing power, and all in all a great place to spend time studying, teaching and discussing - from the trust of its users (see also: Akas answer -- "Where does the money come from?") -- completely independently from a Steem's "value" in Dollars, Pounds or gold buillons, and we will see that we have only one "pie" to share: our beautiful home planet we call "Earth". And it ain't getting bigger (unless you subscribe to the expanding earth theory, of course).
This is not a rant, this is not a complaint - although I am skeptical, I am excited and hopeful and would like to see this "experiment" succeed. That is why I share my worries and concerns, because otherwise, there will be no dialogue, no discussion. Bringing these issues into the debate is a thankless job: speak the truth and have a quick horse. But I wasn't known for "karma-whoring" on reddit, and you won't know me for "whaling" on steemit: as a good Prussian, I do not expect a reward for doing my duty. And I find it is my duty right now to alert you to the dangers I see looming ahead.
I share your excitement, I share your optimism. But if we can't develop a "culture"with ~40,000 users, and cannot possibly greet and brief all newcomers except with a wangbot creating more questions than answers, we will not have one when there are two billions of them.
It will turn into a centralized pandemonium of people climbing over each other, attempting to grab a mouseclick's worth of attention of the mighty whales (if catchawhale.com, or trucker @venuspcs' recent complaint do not help drive the point home, I can't help you). And that is a pity, because the engine allows for independent markets to form, to decentralize them, to empower all the funky subcultures we have grown so fond of. In the best of all worlds, a user will spend his lifetime on steemit.com, do his thing, vote, blog, curate, invest, earn - and never hear a word about "@ned" or "@dan" because all that whale dance never even makes it through the feed filters the UI allowed him to customize to his liking.
Until this is fixed, I cannot with clear conscience tell my friends how awesome this blockchain thing is and how we are all going to be rich posting makeup tutorials and soul stripteases. With a functional UI, liberating the user with powerful filtering tools, I could at least say "this is what Facebook and MySpace were meant to be, it can't be censored, it is open source, it is decentralized - let's not be late and join the fun".
Still found this boring? Have another Cassandra!
Let's see whether I can edit, comment, reply and vote on my own post this time (//edit: I can!) I am looking forwards to your thoughts.
If you had no time to read the post this one builds upon and think I am more complaining than proposing solutions, here they are again:
- Ignore function/banlist/block. There are some accounts that have proven to be pure noise generators, nothing more - no need to even display them.
- A working "follow" function. In its simplest form, a text field to add names to; in a more advanced form, it would be possible to group them according to topics/interests/"circles" (whales/friends/musicians/analyists/whathaveyou). steemstats.com already has implemented the feature somewhat by reading the
followdata from the blockchain - which is recorded by steemit, but not implemented yet. This would allow to have something like the Facebook feed: content of people one chooses to follow. With checkboxes to ex-/include posts/replies/votes, of course. - tagged browsing. Would allow the user to specify the tags by which to filter the "new" and "trending" pages, maybe even in the form of
(steem OR steemit) AND economy, for example. - Bookmarks/favourites.
- (editable) Profile pages. And profile pics, mayhaps.
- PMs. How can you offer a social network service and not implement PMs?
Keep up the good work!