Steem's Transparency Is A Two Way Street - Damned If You Do And Damned If You Don't

in #busy5 years ago (edited)

In a recent video update by @Ned Scott where he transparently shared news of a structural reorganization of Steemit Inc. with the community, the response was predictable. Many were supportive, offering their services, understanding, and talent to help us push through these difficult times, while just as many expressed their discontent, frustrations, and downright meanness.

Some could not resist the urge to point their accusatory fingers, slobbering on about his poor leadership skills and lack of focus while lobbying about what he should do or should have done if only he had listened to them.

Given the weakness of the cryptocurrency market, the fiat returns on our automated selling of STEEM diminishing, and the growing costs of running full Steem nodes, we have been forced to layoff close to 70% of the team. The remainder of the team is staying on to focus primarily on reducing the costs of the infrastructure running steemit.com and our public APIs, and ensuring that the community can remain informed of developments. Ned Scott

It's interesting to see this human drama expressed on a platform designed to change the way humans exchange value. Our animal instincts override our common sense and sometimes get the better of us.

"Every time we launch a feature, people yell at us." —Angelo Sotira, deviantART co-founder

I've watched people express their frustrations towards @ned for not being transparent enough with the community and now, when he's being more transparent, the discontent continues. As a leader, it seems, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

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The droning vitriol of the masses do nothing in the way of offering solutions to the many challenges we face moving forward and in the midst of all this bad noise I trust we don't lose sight of the fact that many pitfalls await those who carve a path no one has traveled before. Instead of adding to the difficulty of this journey by venting your anger towards our leaders, perhaps focusing on possible solutions would be more productive.

"I don't think an economic slump will hurt good ideas." —Rob Kalin, Etsy founder

What Steemit Inc. has created is a revolutionary, ground-breaking platform for exchanging value between people and its vision is to have these community-sponsored, reward-based capabilities spread across the internet. Steemit.com was never intended for mass adoption and is only a testing ground, a proof of concept, which is why it has remained in beta.

"If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large." —Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO

Just as the Internet was developed and faced many challenges along the way, so too has the blockchain gone through many iterations. It's easy to forget that the internet when it was first developed had no search engines, no email, no websites, no videos, no mouse. All of these things took time, money, and teams of dedicated developers to make the Internet into what it is today.

Developers can use the Steem blockchain to develop Apps on and some like DTube, Busy, SteemMonsters, and DSound have done so, bringing more value to the ecosystem as a whole. Rewards follow those who create value which is why those apps are doing well.

As @aggroed pointed out in a recent post titled Getting a business going on Steem: 100 Steem Business Plan Competition!

Steem is a turn key blockchain. You have a functioning blockchain that can store your data that other people pay for. You have a functioning community of 50,000 active steemians every day that come here and enter our marketplace. You have a fluctuating currency and a fairly stable currency. You need an idea, a plan, a team, and some execution and you can make it happen.

There's a lot of starry eyed devs I met that want free things to take over the world, but if I have a central takeaway from this post it would be: it's ok to charge money for a good product or service! Honestly, if you want your business to change the world it can't simply rely on a little bit of curation rewards or even a moderate amount of rewards with a Steemit delegation. You have to actually sell something that people want. You have to collect more money than you spend. You have to make an actual business.

If you want to change the world it's going to take some funds. Curation isn't going to scale well enough to help you significantly. You're going to have to earn it like everyone else in the world. Steem makes a lot of that easy, but there's some stuff you gotta do.

However, there are large groups of people on Steemit who seem to think that they are owed something by the platform and it's leader just for spending their time here and fail to recognize that the demands they make, such as features they wish to see added to the platform, cost time and money to implement and may not be a priority the moment they wish them to be. They internalize the perceived lack of a response from management into a personal, self-defeating battle while nothing could be further from the truth.

"Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard." —Guy Kawasaki, Alltop co-founder and entrepreneur

Money does not fall from the heavens and CEO's are not your personal developers waiting to do your bidding because you had this great idea in the middle of the night. Most of the DApps mentioned above took the initiative and applied their skills to implement their ideas at their own expense long before Steemit Inc. knew of their existence and decided to help fund it or add their delegation. Again, money follows value and there is not much value in complaining to a CEO. The value lies in creating solutions, not just suggesting them and complaining when you feel unheard, but in implementing them yourself or finding someone who can.

You like to imagine yourself in control of your fate, consciously planning the course of your life as best you can. But you are largely unaware of how deeply your emotions dominate you. They make you veer towards ideas that soothe your ego. They make you look for evidence that confirms what you already want to believe. They make you see what you want to see, depending on your mood, and this disconnect from reality is the source of the bad decisions and negative patterns that haunt your life.

Rationality is the ability to counteract these emotional effects, to think instead of react, to open your mind to what is really happening, as opposed to what you're feeling. It does not come naturally, it is a power we must cultivate, but in doing so we realize our greatest potential. - The Laws Of Human Nature by Robert Greene

Markets go up and markets go down and any leader who doesn't adjust to those market changes to stay afloat is a fool. For every journey there are steps forward and steps backwards. The key to succeeding is learning to dance each step.

The accomplishments Steem Inc. has created so far are impressive, essentially bootstrapping an economy out of nothing; no small feat and just the start of what is possible. No one person has all the skills needed to take it to the next step and it is up to the community here to take on more responsibility and find more use cases, better UI's and more DApps that add more value.

For those of you who see this journey we're all a part of with a long-term view, remember in these challenging times that ships do not sink from the waters surrounding them. Ships sink from the waters that get inside of them. Don't let the voiced frustrations from the ill-content masses leak into your brain and discourage you from finding solutions moving forward.

What motivates us to be part of this experiment is as multifaceted as the people involved, but I think it's safe to say that we all have an interest in seeing Steem thrive. Together, let's find more ways to do that and take a moment to be thankful we even have the opportunity to do so.

In closing, I think you'll find this video study of what motivates people to be surprising and trust you'll find it interesting and relevant.

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

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A bit of a double standard here as you're offering a vitriol of your own, though attempted to be sweetened with a pro-leadership stance.

What you are seeing is people trying to hold a leader to account for their promises, past and current behavior. Sure some of that is incoherent, some of it down right rude and some very personal, but dismissing it as you've done here is to miss the point entirely.

It is as it should be. When promises are broken and CEOs make statements which shake confidence, it's appropriate to say "what the hell man".

If course the next step is to recalibrate and absorb the new info into better action but cheerleaders such as yourself see to that well enough. That's only a slight dig 😆 you're far more palatable than many.

you're offering a vitriol of your own, though attempted to be sweetened with a pro-leadership stance.

Interesting you should perceive my words this way. It certainly wasn't intended to stoke the flames of the current critisizims, but to quell it and remind people of our successes. If my words fell on your ears in a bitter or cruel way, please accept my apologies.

vitriol
-- cruel and bitter criticism

People, including CEO's, make promises all the time that due to changing situations cannot be kept. No reason to flail the man for trying his best. One step backwards is common and as lonng as it's followed by 2 steps forward then we are still making progress.

As far as being pro-leadership I plead guilty.

The vitriol in your post is best seen in two places:

[...] slobbering on about his poor leadership skills [...]

and

The droning vitriol of the masses do nothing [...]

This kind of distain for the common person and how they react comes off as high and mighty, and is vitriolic in it's own way. Inflammatory verbs as exhibited here are never good, they appeal to the emotions over the intellect.

I've thought about what you've said in the post a little more and considered your response, and I've realized that the kind of relationship you assume is one of friendship with the CEO. This kind of relationship does not exist, the fact is that Ned the CEO of company and the majority are plain users, not contributing to development, community building or anything like that. There should be an amicable relationship between CEO and users, but it's a bit much to expect what you do.

As such the responsibilities of CEO, and indeed any leadership role, should be taken seriously and eating some humble pie when you do not deliver is par for the course.

I should say that I do agree with keeping a level of civility and I will generally call for it but some off hand responses to a very shocking statement, made with no real information even though it calls itself transparency, is to be expected and not entirely unreasonable.

It's what we do next that should count, it's another day.

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I am dissapointed by @Ned lack of leadership, but mostly lack of innovation. There has been poor predictions and not a real enough push to achieve these predictions. I dont 'blame' him, in the sense that I understand is not easy getting it right. But I also didn't see much tangible effort on for example, investing in the child dapps, bringing Steem Inc apps on board.
Steem year 1:

  • Steem Bank, he created Steem Savings, it soon drop to 0% interest and was never touched again.
    Steem year 2:
  • Steem Store, there was a third party app which also did an MVP but no further development/investment was made.
    Steem year 3:
  • Smart media tokens, still on TBA.

Meanwhile steemit.com has had very little change. There hasnt been much more added like:

  • Code highlight recognition
  • New Markdown sytanxes
  • Emojis
  • Mobile apps (1st party)
  • Image manipulation
  • Toolbar menu
  • Formating for DTube
  • Bookmark tools
  • Chat integration
  • Advanced Taxonomy
  • Improved Search engine
  • Notifications
  • Groups and communities

All these things were asked, and even coded and submitted as a patch, but the team did little to have these patches integrated into the main project.

A lot of people asked themselves what was the @ned account for? It certainly was never to act as a whale, or be a community fund, or do VC for Steem based projects. Also it blogged very little, at the same time, I have seen that many of the whale drama was never producing much for the community either. So I am not sure what was their role on steemit.com on the first place. At least miners process transactions, BP in EOS create new stuff, but whitnesses never really did much except for he development type.

I don't think Steemit.com was ever intended to come out of beta and is only a proof of concept website. If it were meant to be used to onboard the masses it would have been worked on more by now.

I'm sure Elon Musk's first version of the Tesla didn't have a nice paint job, a radio, and electric windows on it, that came later once it was proven it could work. It's clear to me that Steemit.com is not ever going to move out of beta, but it has not been communicated very well to all its users, one of the things causing frustration for the users.

He's already working on a new site which he alluded to in this post that is meant to onboard people not into crypto.

While we wait and debate what features it may or may not have, other developers have taken the initiative to create their own superior UI's

SteemPeak.com, for example, has a much better UI that incorporates what users have been asking for with more features being added almost weekly. You should have a look at it and add some of your suggestions listed in your comment. Specifically, chat integration and groups and communities would be a great feature to have.

I'm currently working on my own site to make it easier for users to find active communities on the blockchain that interest them than what we currently have. Don't want to say too much about it until it's closer to release.

I don't know downplaying steemit.com is as reasonable as it is. I mean most of the Steem Inc. costs derive from the website traffic, as well as redundancy and I am not sure how many developes were devoted to mantaining the site, but I am sure at least 1 full developer was from the potential 100 people staff it was said they were at one time.

Maybe it was never meant to come out of betta, but that doesnt mean to get in the way of many of the contributions from the people that wanted to have a better UX with steemit. Like it or not, steemit.com is what people first see when dealing with steem.

But leaving Steemit.com aside, steem blockchain itself didnt really change much in this 3 year process. The accounts and economic model wasn't very revolutionary specially after @dan left.

Sorry for being too negative but this was not a new feeling, I was always suspicious about what are they doing with a fully funded, fully staffed company that didn't seemed to move as much as I though they would. And just like many of the VC people and people from the industry says, giving millions of dollars to a new company is a sure way to kill it. I think this was the case with Steemit.

I agree. For the little I know, we just have to get on with things. The $1 billion valuation was an illusion, let's get real. If there is a solid blockchain here, let's leverage it community wide, it's decentralized, that's the point. It's not up to Steemit to make things happen, it's about everybody else. In networking you aren't auto owed everything, it's an ongoing give and take, so let's STEEM ON.

The Steem blockchain's foundation seems solid with 3-second, feeless transaction. That's a major accompishment and a good base to build on. We have an active comminty behind it of talented developers. Now we just nee to keep building business models upon it and, yes, move on.

One of my favorie quotes by Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, is;

“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”

Gives a whole new meaning to the expression of "winging it".

cool, STEEM ON !

You would die long before assembling it.

Sorry if I took quote literally 😂

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Thank you for this. I needed to read it and check a few of my own attitudes. Very well said and many good points.

I love steemit and believe that there will be a sunshine and rainbow after the storm.
Thank you for sharing your good thoughts.Keep singing, keep steeming and stop blaming.

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I love steemit and believe that there will be a sunshine and rainbow after the storm.
Thank you for sharing your good thoughts.Keep singing, keep steeming and stop blaming.q

Posted using Partiko Android

Very well put together content mate.

Posted using Partiko Android

I think the challenges Steem faces now will make it a stronger, more decentralized blockchain. I also agree that there is a distinction between constructive feedback and negativity. The good news is that there are A LOT of people building on Steem right now, and I’m excited to see what happens.

Posted using Partiko iOS

Totally agree with everything you just said. We'll be stronger and there are some great projects being built on the Steem blockchain.

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