More Talk About Oracles, But This Time Thankfully None From Omaha

Hey, @ned talked again!

This would've been almost shocking a few weeks ago, but now, it seems like normal business, as it should be. :)

No, don't rush to his blog, there's nothing new there (yet).

Unless you're a developer, no need to check out @steemitblog either today! They published an update a few hours ago, but it doesn't relate to what Ned said and it's not meant for a non-technical person. However, anyone can understand right from the title they're working to improve Steemit user experience (that's what UX means in case you're wondering), as well as the experience of programmers, by providing more Javascript tutorials. There are some more technical details in the update if you want to go deeper.

Back to Ned Scott now.

(this is a captured image, don't click thinking it's a video!)

If you saw the presentation Ned had at GOPAX meetup, he finished it by making a brief introduction about the intention to change stake-weighted to account-based voting with the introduction of the new SMTs. He didn't go into details, so by what he said then, one would have drawn the conclusion their intention is to make every vote count the same, regardless of the stake of the account on the platform.

@brandonfrye remarked this in his post and we started a conversation in the comments which led to an interesting piece of information that I didn't know of. Thanks to @mountainjewel for sharing it! Allow me to expand on it.

If you read my post from two days before, Ned was in Japan (Tokyo to be precise) from where he gave an interview to Bloomberg TV.

Probably afterwards, he also had a presentation about Steem in Japan (I think it's the same one he had in Korea; I didn't see the speech, but I saw the whiteboard at the end, and it looked like the same presentation).

At the end of the presentation followed a "Q & A" section. And @kafkanarchy84, who participated at the meetup in Japan, asked for more details about what account-based voting would mean, and shared the answer on his blog.

Ned expanded quite in detail, and if you watch the answer, you'll see account-based voting is only a fraction of the changes.

From my understanding, and I can't say things are very clear for me yet, the new voting sub-systems that will be introduced with SMTs, and will run on top of the classical voting and reward distribution system we have right now, and involve special tokens created for the SMT communities, which will not affect the reward pool, as we know it right now. I may be wrong about that.

It's also in the SMT communities where account-level voting takes place, in my opinion, after listening to Ned's answer, and this classic voting we have right now will remain as it is (but the more adopted SMTs will become and the more people join Steemit, the less rewarding it will be).

The new voting sub-systems will allow for a much more flexibility in terms of how rewards (or tokens, to stay consistent with the language that should be used) will be distributed to members of the communities.

That will bring more control over the voting process (by the oracles) and less possibility to cheat, I think. On the other hand, new questions arise: how will the oracles be selected? Will they be objective?

And another thing I'm quite confused about is: how will SMT communities relate to Hivemind communities? Are they the same? Will Hivemind include additional functionalities? If they are different, that would introduce a major confusion.

As I said, I'm not very clear myself about what the changes would imply exactly, but I thought I should relate them as I found them out.