A few thoughts on the 19 May 2018 witness chat, including some ‘discourse analysis’
View this post on Hive: A few thoughts on the 19 May 2018 witness chat, including some ‘discourse analysis’
I've moved to Hive, along with most other people, following Justin Sun's takeover of Steem in the Spring of 2020. I believe hive is a lot more decentralised than Steem!
Really interesting insight. Regarding your points on decentralisation, they were well made. Steemit is no decentralised. If the majority of witnesses are american, any new US laws that forced them to obey would by default be forced into the Steem network! The joys of DDPOS!
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.
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.
Glad you joined in yesterday @reviseociology and thank you for your take away impressions of the chat.
I see that @abh12345 has already talked about the spam issue. Part of what was discussed yesterday was that somehow balance has to be found that limits the spammers while not making it almost impossible for the new person who isn't investing. There was a witness or two who seem to feel people should invest or so what, but I don't get that sense that is a general consensus.
I don't know that we can suggest that the majority of the witnesses are American. For instance, you likely assumed that @crimsonclad and @drakos are American, they are Canadian. There are about 160 active witnesses and they do come from different parts of the world.
To the best of my knowledge, 8 of those present yesterday were Americans, 2 Canadians, 1 Australian living in Croatia, 1 British, 1 Indonesian, 1 Venezuela (living in France) and I'm not sure where the other two hailed from. Might want to keep in mind that with me being in Canada, the time zone would make it difficult for some to attend.
Someone else asked about the number of women who are witnesses. I'm aware of four, @patrice and @thekitchenfairy are sole witnesses and @crimsonclad and @paulag are in witness partnerships.
Thanks very much for the reply and for the stats: still very American though, but point taken about time zones.
NB - I'm not being critical of the skewed representation, I'm just interested about such offline realities.
I certainly got the impression that limiting bandwidth was a 'done deal' for a future hardfork, but I wasn't suggesting most of the witnesses have a 'blasse' attitude about this.
Thanks for hosting the show btw, it's an invaluable forum for the platform!
I didn't take it as being critical.. more was making sure that we were both aware of the time zone potentially helping to skew the representation
Going to be doing another on June 16th same time
I'll look forward to it.
It'll give me a break from exam marking (peak season mid June!)
Thank you for this excellent post. A few thoughts:
Spamming - Given what you've said, this warrants a bit more investigation: who is being spammed and by whom? Limiting bandwidth for new users is likely to increase frustration and reduce retention which is not in the long-term interests of the whole community. This is already a frustrating platform to join with massive churn, and we need to look at ways of reducing that. There is a second problem about delegation for worthy newbies - what will be the criteria of worthiness, who will decide and what level of resource is going to go into curating (or managing, by any other name). Do we want resources to go into, essentially, bureaucracy, rather than into creating wealth?
Delegation - not sure what I think about this for individuals, but a great idea for community initiatives or investment in initiatives to overcome spam etc. People who run community initiatives (thinking of #payitforward as an example) put a huge amount of time into it, often voluntarily and delegation to help those initiatives grow for everyone's benefit and some reward for the people doing the work would be good.
I guess the witness liability discussion is referring to the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) that are coming into force. A discussion elsewhere on steemit (sorry, can't remember where) highlighted that these sorts of regulations tend to be hard to understand, ambiguous and difficult to police and enforce. They are EU regulations, so I wonder how they will apply globally ... I can see why folks are apathetic, but some investigation and guidelines might be a good idea, if only to avoid getting sucked in to messy litigation.
Witness votes - This is my next area to investigate. From what you are saying, it sounds as if we are incorporated through whales buying votes? How many women witnesses took part? Be interesting to see if there is greater diversity among witnesses in a year or two's time, although my experience has been that it is necessary to actively work towards that, if you want it happen, rather than believing that it will happen organically.
Thanks for the detailed comment - bit limited by my phone to reply at length.
It sounded to me like the bandwith issue had more or less been already settled. It is a problem for the poor for sure.
I didn't want to lay into it in the post too much but witness land is a very first world techno oriented world. To be expected I guess.
As to gender I'm not sure but I'd hazzard a guess that there's not too many - hard to tell for certain.
NB above I'm only talking about the witnesses present in the chat!
I think I generally agree with delegation as being a force for good.
Yes, I've been thinking more sbout newcomers (up to now, I've been busy with my own coming) lately and your post has helped me develop my ideas a bit more concretely about what I can do. Gorgeous day today, planning to get a bit further with my garden.
Have a lovely day outside! I might have to head out later after a good session in front of the computer!
A solid write-up of events, and I agree these 2 hours are a really good way to learn about what is happening on Steemit - helpful when abiding by 'the first rule of steemit' 🙂
A couple of points with regards to Spam(abuse) and Delegation.
Most of the Spame and abuse doesn't appear on the posts of users. The worst cases seem to be 'comment farms' in which an older Post has 100s of comments, and 100s of small votes on these comments - this is programmed and often the accounts are seemingly owned by one person using the initial delegation to reward themselves little and often. An adjustment in bandwidth and the starting SP would make this more or less popular.
Reducing the above and heading towards the pay to play model would affect people from places like Venezuela, and we (I) don't want that.
Delegations gave rise to the Bid-bots, have also allowed the dapps like dtube, and utopian to kickstart - projects I personally feel bring value to the Blockchain.
Thanks for listening in, and I hope your brain slowed down to allow some additional sleep!
Thanks for clarification on the spam. I do feel a bit wasted this morning, but nothing an early morning run won't sort out... better get to it!
Karl.
Good writeup!
This part is not correct though:
What I said is there are around five large accounts that have a large influence over the witness voting, and you basically need to get votes from at least a few of them if you want to be in the top 20.
Thanks so much - that was all from memory and I will put in a correction when I'm back on my pc later!
Karl.
@revisesociology, If you ever run a witness you'll have my vote. 😂
Lot of stuff on the table here! Looks like all the good points have been made and for the sake of brevity I'll share one idea I have been considering...
On the subject of Flagging:
Those ideas are not bad, but I think that a new dimension needs to be added, that being the ability to flag a flag! A second layer to the peer-review process, one that will help offset and disincentivize wrongful and abusive flagging. As it stands, there is no risk for flagging posts, and this fact is one of the reasons why abuse has become so rampant... So I propose the added layer with liability being transferred to the flagee if the action is found to be in error or malice by the rest of the community. This liability will be the same that would be incurred from the initial flag on the defendant post/party. To expand, diminished reputation score and monetary debt added to their future rewards ledger.
Thought I'd throw this out there and see if anyone had any thoughts or wanted to expand upon this.
Regards, @Odrau
Sounds like a great idea to me, but probably the kind of thing that @yabapmatt would slap back down as being impracticable to implement.
Me, run a witness: now that really would be a learning curve!
I'm really enjoying your posts about Steemit. I hope to come along to the next one of theze discussions.
So what I takeaway is that if the 17/21 rule was changed to, say, 14/21, then things would get a lot more interesting around this little fiefdom :)
Thanks, and I guess they would, although whether that would require a higher level of consensus itself to change I've no idea.
They're certainly worth spending a Saturday afternoon on!
Karl.
Yeah, I can't see there being any consensus around that one haha. But it's interesting to think about how different it would be here if it was so.
Thanks for taking the time to write this summary, especially at that time of the night.
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