Will Steemit, Inc's Struggles Lead to Steem's Decentralized Success?
We're 30 minutes out from Ned's live stream which you can watch here. I put my questions for him here.
I just recorded some quick thoughts on the state of the Steem ecosystem here as well:
I'd love to know what you think. Let me know if you have any questions as well.
To find out more about eosDAC and the tools we're building to help empower decentralized autonomous communities, check out https://eosdac.io/ and the current version of our esoDAC Member Client at https://members.eosdac.io/
If the future of Steem is to be truly decentralized, it will need tools for decentralized governance. I'm happy to have been focusing on helping build those tools since April.
Update: my thoughts after watching the live stream: Where is Steem going? How will it get there?
What, a YouTube video instead of dTube? :-)
I've not really bothered watching the political background of Seem; I've just been occasionally blogging.
What I see missing, from my angle, is really really solid developer-targeted resources. Everything I've found to date is either too high level to be useful, or assumes you're already deep into blockchain lingo, tech, and culture. If the goal is to be less dependent on one company, then making it easier for new companies to bootstrap themselves needs to be a focus.
Maybe it's already there and I just haven't found it yet? I know there are people that have figured it out and launched games on Steem, but I'm still struggling with it.
I have a lot of love for DTube, but I've had technical challenges with using it since day one. IPFS is a great, but it has hiccups often. I should try to use it more, but for now, YouTube is reliable and works well for getting something up quickly in a limited time frame, as I did here.
Have you seen the developer tutorials? They are pretty solid. I tweeted about them the other day, but I don't think there's been much marketing of the tools that are out there.
Also, a year or so ago you were asking about doing your own website with the Steem blockchain behind it. I found out about this at Steemfest3 and you may find it interesting: https://engrave.website/
Ahso, thanks. The tutorials look useful. Bookmarked. (Meaning, will leave the tab open for the next 2 months.)
The Engrave site looks like... a clone of SteemIt? It looks more like a more brand-able SteemIt than a self-hosting thing. Hm.
Just watched Ned's stream and your video. Good stuff. I'm happy to see him communicating better with the community.
I like your ideas of developing tools for Steem and would like to know more about those. Please do some posts about it once you get settled in your new home. You must be excited to begin this new adventure in your life.
Thanks Frank. Yeah, I think Steem as a DAC would be an amazing thing and the tools we're building with eosDAC will hopefully make that easy to set up. I do like that Ned and Steemit is communicating more (which I asked for last year).
Definitely an exciting time for us as a family. Leaving Tuesday!
The whole situation is indeed a great chance for us to come closer together and make this a truly decentralized effort. The new Steem dApp Foundation group is also a move in that direction. So far, we have all been relying way too much on Steemit to pull the strings. The next three months will potentially be a difficult time for Steem but we will come out of that eventually, stronger and wiser. And hopefully, somewhere down the road, richer in Steem Power, when the low price is helping more people to become Minnows and Dolphins. For redistribution certainly a good thing.
Well said. I think the future is decentralized and Steem could be leading the way to show what that looks like.
Very good - I called for similar too - using EOS to create DAC type structure that governs Steem is a great idea! I imagine that there's potential to unite the two to a greater extent too in the future.. To some extent it depends on whether Dan comes through with his plan to destroy Steem or not! lol
You spoke my mind as you usually do. I just hope that Steem Inc will sell at least a big portion of its stake. Decentralization a distribution of the (isnt it over or at least close to 50%?:) is what this place needed for a long time. I happy that some1 finally shared his thought about how "good" the current events actually are in the long run.
Thanks. Yeah, token distribution has been a challenge from the beginning. My hope with SMTs was a path forward to change that, but now... who knows. Even without steemit, inc's stake, we have a lot of other large value accounts which make this decentralized system of social media difficult, but again, if the vision is just distributing cryptocurrency, the system works. It doesn't work all that well in terms of a fully equitable approach for all, but it does function.
From a pure token distribution point of view the other accounts are hardly problematic at all. The largest non-Steemit account has about 3.5% of the stake and the others are smaller still, with only a handful above 1%. This is actually a quite flat distribution in economic terms and in terms of voting dynamics. No one other than Steemit is in a position to exercise a controlling interest and even small coalitions can't dominate the voting.
The social platform has always struggled to work well for various reasons, but I don't think stake distribution in and of itself is really the problem there, at least not if one has any sort of realistic view of what ownership distribution of tokens to expect going in.
In terms of witness voting dynamics, I agree, but the context of my comment relates more to the social media side of things and the current culture of flag wars / lack of downvotes / etc. From the perspective of those who have been on the receiving end of a few whales who flag with the purpose of demonstrating their unrestrained influenced, it feels very centralized. Unless people counter upvotes and downvotes to better match community consensus, it becomes a point of centralization that only a few people can dictate which content is rewarded and which content is hidden by default.
This is all under the "false narratives" mentioned by Ned which I commented on in my latest post. Maybe it no longer applies if we change our expectations concerning what Steem is really about?
I wasn't referring to witness voting specifically, just the general token distribution in and of itself, and how that relates to any sort of voting built on top of it.
IMO the social platform has problems that are more specific to its design than to a 'problem' with the token distribution itself. Apart from Steemit Inc's stake, I think the token distribution is about as good as one could ever hope for in practical terms. If the social platform doesn't work on top of this distribution, it just plain doesn't work and needs revision of its own structure. Changing expectations and narratives is another way to approach it, yes.
What source are you using for token distribution? I was under the impression a lot of whale accounts simply moved their holdings around to multiple addresses and the distribution still wasn't all that good. Maybe it's more a perception than a reality in that those who do have larger stake and use it to excessively self-vote or downvote people they don't like seems more outrageous. When I last looked at breakdowns of minnows, dolphins, orcas, and whales, it sure seemed like the whales owned most of the currency, but maybe I'm misinformed and that was just being skewed by Steemit, Inc accounts.
The original whale accounts weren't even that big anyway 1-2% (mathematically impossible for them to be much larger when Steemit started with 80%).
Now of course it is possible people have bought more and accumulated much larger (but broken up) stakes by now but I've seen no evidence of it (and not even 1% is needed for the kinds of issues you describe with the social layer).
Yes you are referring to the dynamics of how the social layer works. I agree not that well. But I don't think you can pin this on the distribution being excessively concentrated. By general economic standards it doesn't appear to be at all. Rather I'd argue the contrary: the social layer isn't capable of handling even normal and moderate degrees of concentration without causing results that many find disappointing. This is a problem with the social layer.
Probably skewed to some extent (bear in mind that even excluding the steemit account itself, most accounting of 'whales' include steemit team/founder accounts, part of the original 80% ninja-mine), but look, if you have people with 1-2% each, not really obscene amounts, and there are even 10-20 of them, that's going to be a high % of the total. Just how the math works out. This is basically normal. What percentage of the world's population owns 50% of the wealth? How many shareholders of the typical company does it take to reach 50%, etc.?
Expecting ownership of any asset to not be concentrated at all is very unrealistic.
Wow, Puerto Rico man, that’s awesome!
Well, concerning Steemit Inc., eventually @ned is going to need the community to take it al over, wether he likes it or not, it is inevitable to survive as a decentralized Blockchain based community, otherwise it’s just not what it claims to be...
I'm still trying to get clarity on what "it" claims to be and who gets to make those claims. Is it the creators (Ned and Steemit, inc)? The witnesses running the block production and nodes? The users commenting, posting, and transferring tokens? Is it the application developers building real, sustainable businesses?
Who gets to define "Steem"?
Everyone and nobody... but at least it needs to be decentralized, imho!
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"oh the times... they are a-changin' (-:
I really hope that good things will come from this "not so good" situation regarding the layoffs.
Looking forward to the stream. It's going to be an interesting watch.
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Did you end up finding it interesting? Seemed... a bit awkward to me.
Hmmm. Can't say I found it extremely interesting. I kinda started reading the chat window more and more as time went by. Some bits were pretty funny there. :D
I still wonder why @andrarchy didn't really speak at all...
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Yeah, that was the awkward part for me as well. I don't understand how people seem to act around Ned.
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