RE: A few thoughts on the 19 May 2018 witness chat, including some ‘discourse analysis’
Happy to see you write down all your thoughts so shortly after the forum~
Non-American here! I specifically brought up the point that to some degree, diving in and continuing a witness is a chance I and others need to take to help disruptive technologies like this grow enough to truly be disruptive. There's always the chance that governments will all come after us for this sort of thing... but until there's some more clarity from more than one side, my opinion is we'll just soldier on.
Or to put another way: is spam a platform-level problem or just a ‘witnesses and other rich and powerful people’ getting irritated by spammers’ problem? (Because there aren’t that many of them irritating me!)
As a minnow witness (in fact, I literally powered up just enough STEEM to become a dolphin after almost an entire year on the platform just this morning, I think this is interesting that you picked up this vibe. I am neither rich, nor particularly powerful, despite being a top twenty witness. I see spam as a problem on a number of levels, for a number of reasons, the very least of which being messages dropped in my wallet with a dust transaction or stupid comments.
Spammers tend to make chained rings of multiple accounts, duplicate content, copy/paste things like poorly translated journals, use bots to drop the same comment thousands of times, or propagate phishing schemes. There are more than just the "personal" annoyances to consider, on this particular front: all of these things contribute to blockchain bloat- if our platform needs to be scaled as it grows in size, the hope is that it would not be the same copy/pasta pushed from 1000 accounts simultaneously, but from different authors sharing their content or investors making transactions. Even then, it's not only about bloat; there's the wholesale spamming of copyrighted material and spun/generated text making regulation issues more difficult, the demoralizing effect of less and less meaningful/legible human interaction on the platform, the cost required in terms of SP delegated to give a "free" account enough oomph to actually be able to transact in any way on the chain, or the spray and pray effectiveness of huge phishing nets... these are are just a few of the spammy things that definitely have an impact on accounts of all sizes, and in many cases, more-so on smaller ones.
Thanks for the clarification on the spam, that's well explained (albeit as a flow of consciousness, but that sort of worked), so I guess limiting the bandwidth is a necessary step to take then.
It's good that anyone can become a witness, it's something I just don't have the time to explore ATM myself.
On the powering up note, you've just inspired me to invest another few hundred squid. I was going to anyway once my flat-sale goes through (hopefully in a few weeks), but I'm feeling optimistic on the back of your enthusiastic reply!
Cheers,
Karl.
I do often tend to be overly verbose... I'm working on breaking up my walls of text to be a little more digestible, hahah~ sorry!
This is basically the tip of the iceberg when these discussions happen; HOW do we choose to limit bandwidth or make costs that dissuade these actions without harming a large subset of the user base?
It often ends up feeling like everyone is bitching and no one is doing, but I suppose to some degree it's an important part of the process~ because I'd rather have everyone and their dog weighing in and arguing through it for a bit, than a single decision being handed down from on high with no regard for the people it effects. Our system is one constantly in flux; sometimes it works amazingly, and sometimes it is pretty damn broken... but I think this part of the process is one of the reasons that it has such great chances.
You almost had me there on the verbose line!
And I agree - it's better to be talking and disagreeing than not talking!
And as everyone says, this is simply an experimental phase.