Help Conserve Bandwidth Usage!
I hang out in steemit.chat's general room a lot. It's a guilty pleasure, that helps me make a lot of social connections, that help grow my account.
Unfortunately, though, we get pretty much every newb with a problem in there.
Lately, that means a ton of new users that have run out of bandwidth.
It sucks.
The bandwidth issue, not just that they come in with every problem. That sucks too. Also the fact that many don't try to research their problem before coming in to ask.
Search engines are your friends. Unless they keep massive troves of data on you, and then sell it to other massive multinational corporations.
Even if they did power up like $50 though, that's less than 10 Steem. It wouldn't be anywhere near enough to fix their bandwidth issues. Even $250 wouldn't let them fully escape the bandwidth monster. It would help extremely mitigate the issue though, for now.
So here we are, suffering from yet another pay to win mechanic. Yet another thing that makes it especially hard for new users.
What's gonna happen when there are even more users? We're not even close to a large social network yet.
What's gonna happen if they fully peg SBD to the dollar, and Steem rises higher and higher, and it gets harder and harder to power up? New users won't be able to do anything without someone choosing to delegate to them, or spending as much as you might in order to buy a new computer.
How are users from countries with lower income averages going to start here? What about when they're faced with the dilemma of cashing out more than they earn in a month, or powering it up, to be able to post more?
And then some large user posts an utterly fucking useless reply to me, and I think, "This is why we're having bandwidth issues."
Of course, it's not. Well, it's part of it. It's all of the people doing useless crap. I personally feel perhaps it should be a bit more evenly distributed.
Just because a user doesn't have a lot of SP doesn't mean they aren't worthwhile, and just because a user has a lot of SP, doesn't mean every comment they make is worth making.
We are in a drought right now. We have a ton of new users, and we're having a bandwidth shortage. We should all be conserving bandwidth together.
Photo By: Courtesy Photo (source)
Stop making the commoners conserve water when you're watering your mansion grounds with thousands of gallons per day.
Stop posting useless shit.
Tell people to conserve bandwidth.
Don't reply to everything, unless you have something worthwhile to say.
The minnows are suffering, and we need to work together, so new users have a chance to earn enough to power up, and be contributing members of this ecosystem.
At least until they adjust how they conserve bandwidth, so it effects spammers more, and good new users a little less.
I had this big problem as well. Couldn't do anything until a friend delegated me about 40SP. The thing is, new users means growth for Steemit, so if we do not help them and make it easy for them to use the platform they won't stay and Steemit will just stagnate or even worse.
It's ok to conserve our bandwidth but that's not gonna cut it. We need a long-term solution. Currently, if I am not wrong Steemit has about 50,000 active daily users. I don't want to think about the bandwidth problem if we are going to hit 200,000, 1M daily active users and even more...
Thanks for bringing awareness to this problem @geekpowered
You are exactly right.
And what you said someone did for you is another short-term solution for individual users. I hope that more delegate to good new users to help with the bandwidth issues and give them a chance.
I'm told they can eventually increase the block size, but that too sounds like it's just pushing it down the road. I don't think the system as it is works exactly right. It should be effecting large users as well.
I am relatively new to Steemit so I don't have the technical knowledge and understanding to propose a solution. The bad thing though is the people who could take action don't seem to notice the newcomers' struggle
PS: I am glad that this post got great upvotes and people will probably start to see it :)
They could take a tiered approach which diminishes bandwidth increase at a specific ratio, that is, the more people "pay to win" the less benefit they get for it. It might reduce investment incentive BUT, it wouldn't reduce the power and stake, which is more important than bandwidth.
I personally prefer gradual increases over tiered systems.
I think the entire system is at risk if new users can't actually use the system, including investment. Why invest in a platform that can't grow? So, even if something decreases investment, it should still be considered, if it addresses an issue as large as this one.
Has there been a solution in discussion? Because what I hear is always... In the future everything will be OK.. The blockchain can handle it.
Maybe the blockchain can handle the transactions, but it doesn't seem to be able hlto handle the amount of user, 50k/day is nothing.
But all whales want more users.. Stinc wants to spread their SMTs.
Not sure, but currently steem looks like a ponzi scheme.
Pay to win.
Why not increase the blocksize?
If it is just temporary, minnows could at least use the blockchain again, u till it is fixed,, by magic, I guess.
No word, how the devs want to do that.
I think they are not aware of it.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/1800
That doesn't even touch the issues for small users.
And don't tell me spam.
If 35k new à counts are generated by steem the last days, they are just plain incompetent, if they think, all those users won't even Blog 3-4 times to get the first steem experience.
All in all, very short sighted moves going on here.
< rant off >
Yeah, you're right in that often the answers are somewhere along the lines of everything being okay in the future. I've even repeated it myself occasionally. It is still in beta, but they need to address a lot of issues.
I don't know if they have any plans to try to fix it. I know that increasing the block size will fix it for now. I don't know how long it will fix it for though, and whether or not they will solve the issue before the next time it comes up. I personally would prefer if they would at least put forward possible solutions before doing that.
Spam happens on every network, it needs to be factored into any system design.
I was thinking today that they need to perhaps delegate whatever minimum amount of steem you need in order to post like they currently do to get you up to 15, the problem is 15 is not shit.
here are my thoughts on the subject yesterday:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@funbobby51/bandwidth-some-bandwidth-my-kingdom-for-some-bandwidth
That's part of the problem. They had to decrease delegation due to the number of users.
This is really interesting. Have not run into the bandwidth issue at all personally, but have been wondering about the scalability of this platform. I think being mindful of posting good content will only help in the long run, but that is a lot easier for those of us from privileged economies. If I were developing this system I would focus on growing users from developing economies as there are & will be huge #’s of new internet users looking for income from the internet. They may not be big initial investors in dollars but their time & attention value will soon dwarf what Facebook has been able to produce in the USA. Have no idea if that is even possible on the technical side, but the more people with power willing to grow this organism from the bottom, the bigger the organism will get.
If they don't address the issue, more people and groups are going to have to start delegating small amounts just to allow users to post. It is one temporary solution for some individual users, but they can't possibly help every user.
It's definitely going to slow the growth, especially as Steemit grows, but is there a way they could remedy the situation? Or is it a building block of the chain?
I'm sure there are quite a few ways they could address it. I'm not certain if they will until it gets a lot worse though. I can hope they will though.
A lot worse? I dread to see what that's like. Two weeks straight of not being able to interact for 6 hours was a bit nuts for me.
Hi @geekpowered,
Thank you for your advice.
Can you, please, take a look at this case and lets them know your thought?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@chloeroy/supporting-minnows-we-are-supporting-the-steem-future
This should be much more than 40SP, right?
Thanks.
They probably need to be delegated at least up to 30 SP each, 50 would have fewer issues though. To have no issues...I don't know.
Even 10 SP each would be enough to let them post more often though. For that, you don't need a whale. Even a minnow of a few months old likely has 10 SP to spare.
I wish you luck. You'll likely need it.
I would suggest they watch their bandwidth on steemd. There are times when they can post likely. Your steemd would be the following, for example:
https://steemd.com/@chloeroy
I personally think you need to show that they're worthy of delegation though. At least link to their profiles, if not have them each do posts as to why they deserve delegation, and what they will bring to steemit.
In general, we need a whole lot less shitposting here. I do believe there should be some sort of consequence to continually posting low quality content. It would be nice to see a feature that would hit whales as hard as it would minnows. Sorta like with driving under the influence. In Denmark, that is ticketed based on your monthly income, so everyone gets hit equally hard. Would like to see something like that being implemented
They definitely need to do something that affects large users just as much.
I find it a little difficult to come up with a perfect system, but I know the current system is wrong.
I can post pretty much all day, to everyone, and not even come close to using my bandwidth, but a new user can only post once?
Seriously this is becoming a big issue and it all started this year. I always dream of steemit becoming the greatest social media of all times and i still believe. We are having new members always and its still increasing, let the bosses know how to resolve this issue. Thanks
I had no idea the bandwidth was such an issue for new users. I started back in June but never had any problems with bandwidth. I think it's odd that it'd be throttled to such a degree - is this an issue with the architecture of the site itself? Conserving bandwidth seems like a temporary problem for something that could potentially become a much larger issue - a site of this magnitude should be easily able to handle its current user capacity.
The problem is with the growth. With all the new users, the amount delegated to new users is being reduced, which reduces their bandwidth cap. Combine that with more active users, which means more bandwidth is being used, and they can pretty much only post once per day. They pretty much can't network, which kind of makes it less of a social network.