3 Month Retrospective

in #steemit5 years ago (edited)

Retro Post Thumbnails.jpg

A few weeks ago we announced that we had left survival mode and entered into thrive mode. One outcome of that change is that we have been able to resume agile development practices which include retrospectives.

Retrospectives are conducted at the end of a “sprint” and are a time for teams to reflect on how they have been working with the goal of continuously improving their processes. We want Steemians to have as much insight into what we are doing as possible, so today we’d like to share with you a summary of what we discussed in our most recent retrospective which covered the past 3 months.

Things that went well

  • MIRA was merged into production and succeeded in dramatically reducing the costs of running a node.
  • We were able to continue making big cost reductions.
  • We were able to onboard a new developer and quickly transition him to working on all layers of the stack.
  • On a technical level, all of our deployments went smoothly and there were virtually no production issues.
  • We cleaned up the condenser (steemit.com) repo by closing outdated issues, merging completed PRs and organizing the rest into buckets. This has made our efforts on public repos more transparent.
  • We’ve reestablished good project management practices.
  • We rolled out featured posts (and made a lot of changes to it to improve our communication outreach).
  • We’ve engaged with the community on important matters, listened to their valuable feedback, and integrated it into our plans.
  • We’ve released more public communications and the overall engagement on those communications is way up (some is even positive!).
  • On a technical level, the wallet split rollout was smooth (more on this in the “Things that could be improved” section).
  • Thanks to the wallet split, we have been able to merge in MANY more community contributions and our development cycle for condenser has rapidly increased.
  • Thanks to the wallet split, user keys are handled more securely.
  • The ad program has matured a lot and begun generating more revenue. Splitting out the wallet alone added around $45,000 in revenue to our bottom-line.
  • Thanks again to the wallet split, we were able to migrate to a different CDN which has reduced our costs $8,000-$10,000 a month.
  • We were able to assist Flipside Crypto in their Steem blockchain integration. Because so few blockchains have the kind of user activity that Steem does, the Flipside team was not taking full advantage of all the publicly shared data on the Steem blockchain. By helping them process the publicly available data which reflects user activity, our assistance may improve Steem’s FCAS score

Things that could be improved

  • Communication with the wallet split wasn't as good as we thought it was (“Featured” posts were a response to this).
  • We didn’t identify how disruptive the wallet split was going to be to user experience, which means it was difficult to communicate to users about it.
  • MIRA development was longer than expected.

Moving forward

One of the guiding principles behind retros is that the first step to solving problems is acknowledging that they exist. The idea is not necessarily to know how you are going to fix all of the problems you identify as much as acknowledge where your weaknesses lie in the hopes that you will not continue making the same mistakes over and over. Instead, you want to make “new and exciting mistakes.”

We did, however, have some interesting discussions about how we can move forward. One thing we discussed was the potential need to highlight early on how different a Steem account is than an ordinary social media account. When Steem and steemit.com first launched, just getting people to consider using a blockchain-powered social application was a massive hurdle.

At that time it made sense to frame steemit.com as “just another social media app." But the reality is that a Steem account is closer to being a financial account than a social media account, and as long as we pretend this is not the case, users will continue to have a disappointing user experience.

Your Feedback

One of the things we’ve learned is that we aren’t always a very good judge of what the community feels is needed. That’s why we’d love for you to leave your feedback in the comments section below. What do you think went well over the last 3 months and what do you think we need to improve the most?

The Steemit Team

Sort:  

Regarding Steemit.com-specific feedback...

  1. Notifications would be great to have again and functioning properly.
  2. A view counter that works properly and can't be "gamed" by F5-ing a bunch of times. (I see that this was already addressed by justinw.)
  3. Serving ads only to non-logged in viewers. (Give casual viewers incentive to become a new Steem user.) Or, maybe allow users to opt-in or opt-out of seeing ads. Even better...allow the option and start sharing some of the ad revenue with stakeholders logged in and using your interface. This would not only keep people using or attracting them to use your interface, but it may also entice more users to buy STEEM and power it up. Have advertisers pay for ads with STEEM and we're now talking about creating an actual social media/advertising ecosystem with perhaps some real investment/commerce.
  4. On user profile pages, separate user posts and those that they have resteemed into two different columns.
  5. Allow a limited number of characters to be written as a "blurb" when resteeming a post.
  6. Rework the trending page. Perhaps use the "Promoted" feature as a means to get onto the trending page. For example: User sends 100 SBD or STEEM to a null-like account for promotion. Steemit.com keeps a (small) percentage of that and the rest is burned. The total value spent is "added" to the projected post reward only for ranking purposes. This gives the Promoted feature some actual utility and gives Steemit.com another revenue source...and also burns the inflated currency that is apparently not in high enough demand to overcome the inflation and dumping.

Other than that, getting rid of Ned as the face of the company was probably the smartest move that has been made so far. I'm not sure that the damage he did as the "leader" around here can be reversed any time soon, but you have to start somewhere.

It would be great to see some actual marketing from Steemit, Inc. for both Steemit.com and the blockchain that you work on and that hosts your site. Talk more about the speed, scalability, and free transactions and less about how people can "get paid to blog!" And while you're not giving people so much false expectation about making money from blogging and commenting, maybe market the fact that the simple act of voting can earn them a little money. That's the much larger audience to attract. (Combine that with ad revenue sharing and you'll likely have yourself a big winner.)

Glad I could help yet again!

Steemit inc have given up on notifications because the database infrastructure broke and then they never fixed it BECAUSE the Ginabot and other discord and telegram steem notification bots and partiko cam eout

I have partiko notifying me of everything on my phone like transfers etc, but i do remember those good old days when i got push notifications on my browser for stuff that happened on steem...

They never got rid of ned as the face of steemit, he is still ceo and there is no other faces out in the public. I hope you arent talking about no stake elipowell who doesnt do anything useful compared to even the least active of steem minnow....

you know as well as I that its too late for steemit inc tro do any marketing and @ned is in fantasy land where he thinks he can pay $0 for marketing similar to reddit which only paid $500 in Total on marketing buying reddit stickers..... I am pretty sure ned thinks he can do this too...its been 3 years and no marketing. Ned literallly told Degensloth that the reason ned isnt onboarding a lot of people is to "Protect the steem name space" Can you believe that? Well that was his excuse over a year ago...

Lol wtf are you talking about no stake? You think that she's supposed to "blog", is that what your idiotic dumb shit self think her job is? To "have an account"? To 'introduceyourself'? Fucktard. Idiot. Lol.

Posted using Partiko Android

Actually I think "Blog" is EXACTLY WHAT ALL OF THE FUCKTARDS AT STINC NEED TO DO... FUCKING DAILY, YOU RIDICULOUS FUCKING CHUMP!

SteemIt.gif

Why fuck head? How may front-ends blog daily? Clue

not one

How many blog weekly?

(hmm is a changelog blogging? If so maybe esteem? Or whatever it's called)

Stinc is in charge of running a front end not appeasing a bunch of entitled assholes who consider them incompetent or nefarious or both, and all have a golden opinion regarding that and even when challenged and confronted thoroughly will not lay down their idiotic nonsense, I've seen the smartest people on here do it, I'm sure I could exemplify it with your nonsense as well, who's not on the "blame steemit.com for breaking their mothers favorite china, somehow".

Posted using Partiko Android

@ned has my number,
I consider them incompetent or nefarious or both...

Why?

That's what I thought, you had nothing to reason your nonsense with.

Let me meander down this treacherous path, why do you consider them so...

Posted using Partiko Android

In retrospect I will put MY Work on this Blockchain up against THEIRS any day @baah...
now beat it! I hate typing!

Hi there, I'd like to report a bug. For the past three hours, I've been pressing the share button. I don't think it works. I'll keep trying but in the meantime do you think you could have one of your people look into it? Thanks.

It is working as intended. Thank you for testing!

The real one can be downloaded here, or tested on any of the pages listed here.

How many times must it be pressed before it engages share mode? I feel as if 999 is too many. Have any of your people over there heard of the double click? It's a new thing.

We don't want people to over-share, and we are excited to announce we have found a way to prevent that.

FOr three days. Push push push push. So tired. So hungry. Just want to share.

The woes of a sharing man.

Good points @ats-david, if they were to take just one of your numbered suggestions, I would say number 3 is absolute gold.

It would be great to see some actual marketing from Steemit,

I think I used to say this, but gave up after a couple of years. It would be nice, but I'm not holding my breath.

Cg

What are you doing about getting STEEM and SBD on exchanges?

Steem is on Binance and Bittrex that’s all you need. You can Convert all your SBD to steem and vice versa in your wallet.

Is it hard to get on Binance? What about the micro-fees? When say "in your wallet" are you referring to Steemit Wallet or do you have to get another wallet? ...puff puff pass

Very easy, just deposit what you want to exchange. You are going to find microfees even in DEXs like Bitshares....

No.... was very easy to get set up on Binance as far as I can remember .... fees are pretty low. .... I just use Binance as an Exchange to trade and move to Coinbase where I can convert to fiat if I want, https://www.binance.com/en?ref=11778379

We saw lots of (for me unexpected) changes for the better. I am very happy with the new form of communication and pinned posts. And thumbs up for the keychain integration.
If you are able to keep up this pace of improvements, good things will happen.
I really hope that you don't rush the EIP+SPS hardfork and make sure that there are no unforeseen consequences. If there would have to be a rollback, that could seriously hurt the reputation of the steem blockchain.
As for criticism, you already mentioned the horribly executed wallet split. This literally caused panic and frustrations to a lot of people, especially to those that never used the posting/active key before...

I would love to see the view counter again. That one was very important for me and a huge downer as you took it away from me...
Another thing I am waiting for is an easier way to filter through posts. It is so hard to find good quality posts for curation. For improving this just add a ton of easy to use filters...

I know this is not a priority, but the rep score has been gamed by bidbots. I am in favor of a new rep system which factors in daily activity, number of posts created, number of received comments and SP.

Steem has sooooo incredibly much potential. Please don't fuck it up for everyone...

@ew-and-patterns Thank you for touch these very interesting points and I really hope like you to see the view counter eyes again too.

Steem can be one of the best platforms today.

I really hope and I wish the best to Steem team and all the stockholders.

Wishing you a beautiful and successful day!

Improvements are being made which is good but the bidbots have to go. Bidbots remind me of the payola system in the old music industry where artists had to bribe DJs to play their songs on the radio.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

I am not sure if they have to go completely, but I would certainly like them to have less influence. If the trending page algo gets revamped so that it does not show posts which have been upvoted by known bidbots, then they are not as much of a problem anymore.

No Bidbots are fair, you cant stop them, its a free market. you just need steemit inc taking responsibility to SORT the posts out, it would be very easy to mark posts as having been using bid bots, it wouldnt be difficult at all ..... but you cant get rid of bid bots they are just the organic advertising system

once steem has real users again we will have organic upvotes but youy need to have actual GOOD CONTENT like REDDIt has and Reddit users post for FREE

Reddit is PROOF steem can change and be successful if it had better leadership leading the CONTENT

@ackza, why is promotion not implemented in the front end? For the record, I don't think the answer is incompetence.

It can be done but you know as well as I that bid bots are not exclusively used for promotion. It's the "free money" notion being pushed where people can ROI with minimal effort. I've seen countless abuse posts that have allowed many a scammers walk away with piles of Steem.

The fact that large stakeholders are whoring out the reward pool to those with the deepest pockets is a problem. It's legitimized circle jerking.

Posted using Partiko Android

No its not circle jerking, its proof of stake,its just not framed well, its not whoring out no more than google or facebook whores out to advertisers.... the promoted sectiona nd bid bots just need to be rolled up into one and @steem/ @steemit inc can SIMPLY undercut every other bid bot and drive them all out of business by offering the cheapeest bidbot service, like walmart, then they drive up prices later when otehr bid bots are out of buisiness

i dunno if this would work, like is there ENOUGH SP in hands of @steem and @steemit accounts to handle the demand of all bid bots? Yes I think there is because they have like 70 million just in those two and no one else has anything clsoe to that

the steem/steemit accounts can be used for a passive income system, if you have steempower you SHOULD be given a passive reward like just for staking without having to pretend to make shitty contrent just to "circle jerk" as you say

Payola
Payola, in the music industry, is the illegal practice of payment or other inducement by record companies for the broadcast of recordings on commercial radio in which the song is presented as being part of the normal day's broadcast, without announcing that there has been consideration paid in cash or in kind for its airplay adjacent to the recording's broadcast. Under US law, a radio station can play a specific song in exchange for money, but this must be disclosed on the air as being sponsored airtime.The term has come to refer to any undisclosed payment made to cast a product in a favorable light (such as obtaining positive reviews). Some radio stations report spins of the newest and most popular songs to industry publications. The number of times the songs are played can influence the perceived popularity of a song.

Good ilike..

Thank you Steemit Inc team for this.

We rolled out featured posts (and made a lot of changes to it to improve our communication outreach).

This is one of the best decisions you've ever taken. Communication is the lifewire of any community. YOu've showed in recent times how much you value Steem users and their feedback. This is a good step towards a better future for Steem.Thank you.

Meanwhile, I wish to remind you to add to the list of tings that went well:

  • The integration of Snax blockchain to Steem. We are now earning #snax token and this is an amazing way to catalyze engagement on the Steem blockchain.

Thanks @Elipowell and Team for this forward movement.

What is this #snax token you speak of? We are earning this now on steem?

I agree 💯 % with your comment.m especially on the communication side !
We just need to BOOST Marketing !!! To get more users and more traffic on Steem dapps ans Steemit.com !
I am also earning Snax now, let’s see how it develops.

Posted using Partiko iOS

Thanks Vlemon, we have to do more of the advertising and begin to have real products gets exchanged for Steem like SPlinterlans of @Steemmonsters and @Tokenbb are doing.

On Snax, I hope if steem community will support snax for a good listing, it will be good deal for steem

Exactly my thoughts! I swear i didn't see your comment before i wrote mine lol. Communication is key!

Im happy to see more updates from you guys. A lot has changed in the backend but now im happy that more can be done to improve the actual user experience.

I agree with those that want view counts back. Weve been waiting a while for cosmetic improvements.

Posted using Partiko Android

Good stuff. To me this is a good indication that steemit is really getting its act together and showing some mature development practises.

Keep up the great work.

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I definitely think Inc has improved a lot since the restructuring

The vision is clearer, communication has improved and it's a lot easier for important ideas to bubble up to the surface and be accepted.

For the first time in well over a year I'm feeling optimistic about this place again. Thank you all for your hard work.

Hi. My name is.. well... nevermind. Someone took all the names.

I've been here forever. 25600SP. Earned it, organically. The honest way.

I work hard, then I crash and burn. I just got back to this place after a five month hiatus. People missed me, apparently. I don't know. They must be crazy.

Screenshot (552).png

That's what I get for coming back. These people are awesome, I like it here. I managed to pull that off without buying a vote, as per usual. It's not unusual for my posts to have more engagement than the majority here. I'm not rubbing it in, just saying, "That's what happens here, for me, sometimes."

I want the view counter back. That's my only request. Back when we had the view counter, my posts would receive hundreds of views within the first day, sometimes. I'd have more views, organically, than some of these wannabe trending page bloggers, and of course far more genuine interaction. Real people, saying real people things. I'd publish my work, enjoy whatever came my way, then push my work to the outside world by dropping links in key locations. Because I focus on entertainment, people looked, and over time, I'd see that view count rise. Many month old posts seeing sometimes 20 more views in a day and I had no idea where they were coming from, but those links of mine were drawing outside eyes to this place.

Now I don't even bother. I have no way of knowing if going the extra mile is even worth it. Swinging at curveballs in the dark.

So what if people are paid to look away and that's mainly why there's nobody left to actually view and vote. I still want to know how much action my posts are getting. It's important, to me, and I'm not alone, but that's my story. If someone gets duped into purchasing votes so they sit at the top of the trending page with their whopping 7 comments or whatever, them seeing what they're actually paying for would be a fine wake up call as well. You want to see the quality improve around here? How about lets take an honest approach? If someone spends money to be internet famous for a day, you damn right they'll improve once they see how much a fail their crap wannabe trending post was.

Now, pardon my tone, or whatever. I've been away for awhile and I kinda walked into yet another political shit show of a mess, when I was silently hoping things got better while I was away... so I think being a tad bit frustrated with a few things today is excusable. I'll try to be a nice guy, and if you can put that view counter back, maybe I'll even smile. Deal? ;)

I want the view counter back deseprately as well. My best post had over 1000 views which made me proud. I know that the counter only factored in steemit.com page views, so the actual number of all frontends could have been even higher.

Hopefully they can figure out a script that tracks traffic from all frontends and combine it in one viewcount.

I once wrote an odd little humor piece where I went into character as Elmo's son, except in my twisted world of thoughts, Elmo (that red muppet from Sesame Street) was a dead beat dad living the A list celebrity party lifestyle. Elmo didn't even know he had a son, but the son was actually more of a creeper fan/stalker. The son witnessed his his dad, Elmo, get stabbed by the cookie monster in the club that night. Elmo didn't die though. Anyway. Long story short or whatever.... It was a well written bit, but those were my early days here, I only earned ten cents... but the post had thousands of views. At the rate it was going back then, by now it's possible that post alone might have 100k views. ...but I have no way of knowing and it drives me nuts! LOL

LOL, I feel you. It is frustrating to not know your true reach. On any other social network you know at least that, even if you don't get paid for your efforts :D

Thanks for your feedback, and welcome back!

A post view counter is something we would like to add back and we've actually had some discussions about this. We have a pretty good idea of how we might like to do this using hivemind. However, it probably isn't the single most important thing for the front-end team to be working on. This by no means means 'no' - it just means it's on the backlog to be worked on in the future. Again, thanks for your feedback 🙂

I'm a patient man. Take your time, get it right, and I'll look forward to having it back.

upgrade the look of steemit, like golos did

plz get rid of xrp and eth prices on frontpage add steem-engine price

sponsor @yabapmatt fund him to get a MOBILE Steem Keychain created for iphone and android.... you guys at steem need that so badly..... keychain needs to be like scatter is on eos....

you also need an organic marketing system that works off a reddit tip bot anda twitter tip bot that uses steem, and allows reddit users to get tipped and use theiur reddit account to redeem this steem tipped to them, also on twtter, because the dogecoin tip bot on reddit years ago hgelped push dogecoin to here it is today.... so a steem tip bot on reddit would blow reddit users minds....

Hey @justinw!!

While I agree with @nonameslefttouse, @ew-and-patterns and many more steemians here that recovering and getting back in function the view counter, is and will be a very welcome feature to have for content producers & authors. I want to add another old feature that we all also had and enjoyed here on stemit long time ago.

Sheez mate, please, restore again the internal DMs (private direct messages) within the steemit platform UI/UX... ¡For God Sake! It doesn't matter if these 'transactions' are going to be registered on the Steem Blockchain or not. That's not exactly the goal mate. Whether it can be implemented in Hivemind jointly with the view counter or way before. But crap mate, we actually need a quick and more expedite way of private communications between each other without have to appeal to the infamous Discord, Steemchat or the undesirable practices on the rise of send Wallet Memos for that crap. };)

I was not around here, when private messaging was a thing, but I like the idea of not having to use Discord^^.

There's never been DMs here

Pft @pharesim. Under what sort of heavy rock you've been hidden below?

You are old enough here in steemit to know that we actually did have DM features within steemit interface. I even remember having used this feature to talk with @sykochica plenty of times when she was very active here and also on the original first steemitchat.com website.

Well, unless you don't remember. You never used that feature before. Or you wouldn't classify what I'm talking about as DMs. };)

PS. Don't worry @ew-and-patterns. Let's give to our good friend @pharesim a little more time to refresh his shipwrecked memory. LoL

You are refering to something else. There was https://steemit.chat, which has rebranded to https://steem.chat quite a while ago to show that it's not affiliated with steemit. Those have always been witness projects.
There's never been DMs on steemit.com

Yes, on a second thought I think you are right @pharesim. :)

I have the hunch that that feature I recall we had before within the old steemit UI was 'Notifications' and not DMs.

Yep, there was a time when we didn't need SteemWorld, GinaBot or any of those external Discord/Python bots to know who the hell interacted with us in our content. };)

Cheers!!

Do you have an idea what he is talking about if there have never been DMs here ?

Nope

Maybe steem.chat.

The view counter is ESSENTIAL - put it back ASAP

Welcome back 😉 missed you mate.

Technically speaking though, if everyone was using steemit.com,a view counter would work, but since so many people now use partiko and steempeak, it wouldn't be an accurate representation. It would have to be built into the blockchain, but that in itself raises an issue in that it would be really easy to fake views.

You just put Donald Trump's voice in my head you f-worder.

You're fake views!

Oh hey, by the way... it's good to see you too!

There could be a collaboration between all of these platforms. What I envision is someone runs a server that has the view counter, with both unique views based on ip and returning views, that then gets implemented on each site so none of them host it, they only transmit the data on who accessed the particular post and receive the updated count. This would be essential and I would also give us an accurate representation of traffic. Whoever runs the server wouldn't matter, all that would mater is that it's open source and auditable by whomever wishes to inspect and analyze the data.

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I think running it on a server defeats the whole point of decentralization (that's the whole reason for the blockchain). If the view-counter was on-chain and did like you say, use IPs (and maybe an IP/username hybrid), that would be perfect. No way to make the other sites adopt the viewcounter function of course.

Well the best solution would be to make it decentralized, but honestly that would probably take a lot of computing power, essentially making it a very hard sell for the witnesses who would be the ones paying the price. The way you get everyone to adapt it is simple: make them an offer they can't refuse, and since they won't bear any costs and it basically is a much requested feature, all one needs to do is host the feature and make the code available to be audited.

Posted using Partiko Android

{'type':'view', 'timestamp':'<<timestamp>>,' block':<<blocknum>>, 'json':{'ip' :'8.383.849.11', 'account':''}}

Is what a view would look like on the chain. Literally bytes of data, not even kilobytes. And every transaction we have makes our blocktivity ranking go up. Steem witnesses used to process ten times as many transactions as they do now, and that was before mira made node costs a fraction of what they were before.

Can't argue with that, but wouldn't it take computing power (not just storage) to add those transactions up, what would that look like?

Posted using Partiko Android

Very little. Whenever you refresh steemit.com you'd be using more bandwidth and processing on comments and votes (which are tallied the same way) than on tallying views. Counting is bread and butter for a computer. And counting the votes could even be done clientside (on the users phone or Web browser).

Wouldn't an accurate view counter be of interest to advertisers?

Maybe, it'd work if ip addresses that'd viewed the page were stored on the blockchain along with usernames of applicable.

Seems like an unnecessary addition to the chain and still possible to fake.

Unlike votes though, there's no real incentive to fake views unless it meant trending.

Yes, or unless it's meant to attract advertisers.

where is smt i'm just waiting for smt you should tell us because we are waiting last 2 years for it why you not launching smt look eos price and his system they have awesome developers who did completed his job within time and steem developers so lazy just tell me when steem price cross 1 dollar atleast?

SMT is still in development. You seem to think that there were any promises made or dates nailed down regarding when it is coming, but you're very mistaken. You were waiting for 2 years?

Why do you think that they are lazy? Because they didn't bring SMT two years ago? Why do you have the impression that any one person knows what the price of steem will do?
Go troll on eos, please. You don't have to be here if you think so little of this place, go thrive somewhere else, check the price listing and cash out when you've had enough, no?

Posted using Partiko Android

They put out several deadlines... the last one was January 26th testnet and March 26th go live.... which was cancelled after 2 months after announcing the definite deadlines in November 26th.

https://steemit.com/smt/@mexbit/smt-release

Then go to eos mate..

Posted using Partiko iOS

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