How Will Steem Cope With EOS? How Steemit Inc. Might Take Advantage of Their Head Start over Competitors on EOS.
The EOS Blockchain Operating System is due to be launched this summer and promises a new level of performance for blockchains, not to mention for distributed applications. With 0.5 - 1 second transaction times, it may be the fastest blockchain in use and will clearly out perform Steem's 3 second transaction processing time - How will Steem adapt?
Originally, I didn't realise that @dan and @ned had parted ways in not such an amicable way and I thought that once EOS took off we might see Steem transition to be run on EOS, taking advantage of the new functionality and performance - but I think now, based on what I have seen, that that is unlikely. What does this mean for Steem then? If EOS can support Steemit like apps, with higher performance levels, will Steem be lost in the ever accelerating march for higher performance?
No doubt @dan has learned a lot from his time creating Steem and so EOS will be very likely a significant improvement in many ways over what Steem offers. What I do know is that every moment is currently an opportunity for Steemit Inc. to take advantage of their headstart over competing apps that might be launched on EOS before the year is out!
The challenge here though is that Steemit's track record for change and improvements is reliable, yet slow. The features do eventually get added but they are in a miniscule scale as compared to what is truly necessary to accelerate Steemit to being a highly used social website. Steemit Inc. appear to be gambling entirely on Smart Media Tokens, but as we are yet to see these in action, we are left with even longer delays on getting what should be absolute bare bones basic things about Steemit fixed!
What do you think about this ? It's a huge topic and much about EOS is not clear to me yet - but I'm sure others here will have a lot to say.
If I had my way, I would make the following top priority for keeping Steem and Steemit competitive:
FIX THE SIGNUP PROCESS: Users don't even have clear text to guide them through the process (when it works at all). Sometimes the text message process fails completely with no backup and other times users have no idea they can't create an account because there is an UNDOCUMENTED account limit per IP Address.
Employ a support team: Apologies if a real support team exists, but I have only ever seen Witnesses stepping in to help new users in the chat room. Having paid support staff would make a world of difference here and would hardly break the bank.
Expand the UI for Steemit Inc to make it more engaging and add opportunity for content exposure that motivates people to stop paying for vote bots. The terms for Steemit actually states bots are banned! lol.
I could make many other points, but the ones I have stated already are so basic that I feel to make any more would be labouring the point.
I love Steem and Steemit - I love the genius behind the maths and I love the productivity being stimulated and being able to be rewarded for being me.. But as a software engineer I often feel very frustrated with the process of evolution here - I would hate to see Steem fall way behind from it's commanding lead.
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
View My Witness Application Here
I was under the impression that EOS would benefit Steem as well until I learned about the Ned and Dan 'issue', but now I agree that that may no longer be the case. I am all for SMT's as well, but like you said, it seems the priorities are a bit off. Why launch an SMT for a giant content/media organization if you can't even onboard enough people to the current platform? I keep hearing that they are working on the signups, but new users continue to complain to me about the process and consistently need help. A support team would be amazing. I don't mind helping new users, but if the process was streamlined with a support team maybe I wouldn't be as needed. I've also heard rumors of Steem 'communities' coming 'soon' for over a year now.
Considering the funds available in the pool - it would be easy to pay a support team - in the same way witnesses are paid even. The last time I mentioned anything along those lines I got accused of being a communist by 'respected' members here.. oh well.
Funny how paying working members for a job that is vitally needed is 'communist'. I get a similar response when I mention to people that no project should have 100% of block rewards going to mining alone. It takes a lot of various roles working harmoniously to build a long term sustainable project.
In the case I mentioned, I was just supporting the idea of redirecting some of the rewards pool towards funding projects that enhance the steem Eco-system.. So not exactly paid 'worker' roles - but not too different.. Certainly not communist.
It's all very exposing really. As was Ned's comment. Three words and upvoting himself whilst flagging dan? Hmmm.
If anyone doesn't know what @dannyshine is talking about. Also worth an honerable mention is @ponts the poor bastard below that got flagged for his admittedly funny comment, by blocktrades no less.
As a recent user of Steemit, this rift does give me pause. A community and platform lives and dies by its users and to see such a split and potential competing platforms makes me a bit cautious about investing in it if it is to start to lose core supporting resources.
While I'm not the person with the skills to do any of the programming, I can see that steemit needs some major work on basic functions to get it up back in the game. If other websites that use the steem Blockchain have the ability to look up mentions, why hasn't steemit implemented that here? Why do the replies notifications not work still? Just some little things like that could make a huge improvement to the site. From what I've read, Steem and Steemit Inc are supposed to be two completely different things. Why is there so little improvements to the steemit website if steem improvements has nothing to do with it?
I notice changes happen and then they are taken out again later. Right now, I just noticed that I lost half my comment window with this notice that I can select an image to add. Great feature for the comments section, but that could just be a button beside the "post" and "cancel" buttons. I don't have the ability to drag down the window on an iPad like I would on a PC. So now I only have 4 lines of text instead of 7-8, which makes a difference when you're writing something longer than, "Nice Post."
I also noticed the ability to choose 50/50 payout or 100% power up is gone from the comments section. What happened? Something to do with the price of SBD maybe? We are all supposed to be 'stakeholders' here, but I have no idea why these small things are/aren't being fixed/added/taken away.
The difference between being a stakeholder and a shareholder appears to be that you can be ignored as a stakeholder but not as a shareholder ;)
Right, good point. I wouldn't really expect to have a say in things, but we should all kept in the loop a little more I think. There really needs to be some sort of public person to do a weekly post on some of the changes that have been made, or things to come from week to week. It wouldn't take much, and I'm sure upvotes alone would pay for itself if it's for some reason an issue with funding something like that.
If steemit could implement something like TenX does. They appear to be upfront about the problems they are having and just doing Q&A's on a regular basis to keep people informed really can do a lot to keep things running smoothly with users even if there are problems. @steemitblog is there, but it's more of 'steemblockchainblog' and focuses a lot of its scarce posts on hard forks and SMT's. 3 months ago they requested input on improvements and there has been nothing really since. That's a long gap to keep people guessing what's going on.
That's the thing with a part corporate and part community project, the norms are thrown out of the window - which is a good thing - but there definitely appears to be a lack of 'social' focus from Steemit Inc. and perhaps the cause for that will forever remain a mystery.. Maybe it's fear of some kind that holds them back, I don't know.
It is necessary to have a certain kind of team to pull off a good social/technical bond with a community and typically coders don't have that ability, while more 'people' oriented folks lack the technical awareness needed. It wouldn't hurt to get more coders involved to allow more space to be opened for them to develop more people skills and engage the world beyond their own team/mind.
One of the ironies of this project is that Utopian runs on it and is intended to maximise engagement with open source projects, yet if you look in the Steem repository on Github, when you post tickets/issues for Steem via Utopian they basically go nowhere because there's a note in there that says 'Email all suggestions to Sneak' - which of course no-one really does because they don't read such notes!
I really don't think Dan/Ned believed Steemit would take off the way it did.
So no real thought was ever put in for a Support Team or a Marketing Team that actually done some Pro-active work. It was pretty easy to signup in the early days and support & any good marketing has always been from the Community it self. It is a fabulous concept that seems to be held back by Mad upvoting Bots. (They should be curbed) and a lack of interest by the founding fathers. I like and admire both Dan & Ned. But Poster Boy images for this emerging market, they are, most certainly, not. Nice Post by the way. Keep on trucking
You are welcome, thanks for your comment. I appreciate what you are saying here, but they have had over a year to adapt and accelerate! I could put them in contact with one of the best web marketing groups in the blink of an eye but ned has so far not replied to me on witness related topics - even after it was him who initiated the conversation!
What kind of bothers me is that I found bugs weeks/months ago on Steem and those are still there. Not major ones, but still the site doesn't work as smoothly with them as it could.
I wonder why they aren't fixed. Don't they have enough people who update Steemit? Lack of proper option to report these bugs on Steemit(only possible on GitHub and most people don't use that)? Devs don't have the time or have to focus on something else? I really don't know.
I've seen a picture of someone asking Dan to make a "better Steemit on EOS", and he replied, "Will do".
We shouldn't forget that Facebook wasn't the first social network, and Google wasn't the first search engine.
I am not able to comment on the project processes involved with support coding and bug fixing. Typically issues are assigned a priority for resolution so if they aren't being fixed then there is either a lack of resources, a mis management of resources or an agenda that is not publicly aired which means that fixing the bugs is less important than the other agenda. If I was running things I would have at least 50% of coding resources assigned to supporting and improving existing code/features.
I can only imagine the price of STEEM if there was actually a Team that was supporting it and marketing it close to what LiteCoin or TRON gets.
I have no idea why this hasn't been done beyond the idea of 'leaving it to the market' or some such bold agenda. When I have worked in launching projects like this before, support staff is one of the earliest considerations and is factored in to the early cost projections.. Here.. not so much!
They actually had a mention for a team in the white paper update. I posted that somewhere. Anyway, they are supposed to start getting things done in 2018. I'm guessing the closer to the launch of SMTs.
The big thing with any coin/blockchain is having the working version out there first and getting people to accept it. Of course, there are opportunities to come in late and then take over.
Just like anything else in tech.
This is, I have actually already gone through the process of designing and making a social network from scratch - with no funding - which then got some help from big money people.. (I left, maybe for similar reasons to dan). My point is that we got further with finding a support team in 2 weeks than Steemit Inc seem to have done - even though we had almost no money and no working prototype. Social networks require a strong social capacity.
Apologies if I'm missing something, but if you were thinking of launching an SMT why would you do it on STEEM when you could do it on EOS? It will be faster, more scalable and have a lower inflation rate. SMTs still seem some way off and EOS is only a few months away from launching, therefore it's unlikely that the STEEM blockchain will get to benefit from much first mover advantage in this respect.
The fine points of EOS are not clear to me yet and I think SMTs will be live before EOS is live - but they will have to move fast!
Maybe by a couple of months at best! There seems a lack of SMTs announced so far, maybe this is why...
I don't know much about the state of EOS app development, but there is certainly a race!
Great article,good information hopefully the price of EOS will benefit from this. Cheers mike
All smells a bit fishy to me. Although fish probably dont smell that much until they've been murdered.
fish can only smell when they are alive. when they are alive some have remarkable sense of smell, once they are dead there sense of smell no longer exists as with all there other senses!
Steem and EOS are completely congruent applications of blockchain. They are far from direct competitors.
EOS can support any number of Steemit like systems.
this post was a good read two of y favourite cryptos in one blog!
snyway, is it true that @dan leaft steemit due to moral reasons of which he did not agree with?