How have your first days on Steemit been?

(This article is based on my own research. I’m not a Steemit official; actually, I’m just a curious Steemit newbie.)

This is only my second post here on Steemit, and I decided it will be my last one, at least for now, until Steemit allows for unlimited editing of blog posts.

Just in case you, as a reader, have missed it:

After 7 days, a post on Steemit does no longer acquire upvotes, e.g. it is no longer monetized, and also, it cannot any longer be edited or deleted. This is due to technical limitations, namely the underlying blockchain technology, as explained in the FAQ. While I’m okay with the monetization limitation (it actually makes sense form an economical perspective as well), I’m not okay with a limited post editing timeframe, as I will explain later.

The good news first:

Apparently, this is in the works

On the Steem GitHub repository which is the Steemit blockchain’s source code repository, there’s the closed issue 1714 which implies that after it goes live, the ability to edit Steemit posts indefinitely will be available.

The only kinda-official timeframe concerning the planned go-live is “soon”. On GitHub, you can see that this change is part of a release which, for the better part, seems done. Since this is a change to the underlying blockchain, I cannot even give an estimate of how long this will take before it is actually “live”. I guess we have to stick with “soon”. Let me know in the comments if you know more.

I really hope this is considered a priority because it is a really, really important feature.

Why is this so important?

I could bore you with a discourse about privacy and user data sovereignty, but actually my concerns come mainly from a practical point of view.

With the current system, it is after 7 days impossible to:

• Fix any errors
• Update posts with new information.
• Even just put in a link which points to a new, updated post.
• Realize something like multi-part series (over the course of more than 7 days) simply because you couldn’t even add a “read the next part here” link.
• Remove any content which I want to or have to have removed from the internet (cf. discussion below).

For instance, this defeats posts of general knowledge nature because in general, the world and our knowledge about it evolve. Say for instance, I want to write a newbie-guide for crypto. The crypto world evolves fast, and after two weeks, the information may be outdated, maybe even harmful. I could not even make readers aware of this!

So really, with these restrictions in place, I can only see one form of content suited to be safely posted on Steemit in terms of “quality control” at this moment:

• A link to an embedded YouTube video.

Because even though I could never update or delete the link, if the video belongs to me, I could delete the video which would then just leave the dead link.

That’s it then. It’s a platform to promote YouTube channels, and to make an alternate earning from loyal fans. I heard Logan Paul could use a little compensation for lack of ad sense revenue. (In the name of Eru, let’s hope this platform never goes mainstream.)

This is really, really basic

I think this should be core functionality of any blogging engine / CMS software, no matter the technical backbone. This functionality really, really has to be in place for this platform to be taken seriously. We must be able to have CRUD, including U + D.

While personally, I may understand this as a technical limitation of the blockchain technology, the average user probably will not, hence the great number of discussions about this topic. I believe we need to get this done for Steemit to go further.

One more wish, please

Oh, and while we’re at it, can we please also delete posts? I propose that this doesn’t even have to work on the blockchain, you could just implement it as web frontend layer functionality, like so:

• Introduce a “hide” function. It will just flag the post for not being shown / not being indexed / findable by the web frontend (not to be confused with the existing “flagging” system). The old post will stay on the blockchain.

I haven’t found anything about this on Github. Well, worst case, in the future, there will be the workaround of editing a post, deleting all its content.

Apparently, there is currently really no possibility to permanently hide / remove content of the website / blockchain, at least not through the existing “flagging” system (as explained, for instance, here). I kind of have a bad feeling about the legal implications of this for the platform as such.

This is not a rant post

Not at all. I am still fascinated both by the Steemit idea and its community. Still, these technical shortcomings make it impossible for me to use the platform at its current state because I could not post the content I wish to post in the quality I intend to post.

I may still remain active with comments and upvotes, and I will gladly come back once this technical limitation is lifted.