Steemit Update: Leaving "Survive Mode" ... and Beta!

in #steemit5 years ago (edited)

Since the company's layoffs last fall, the Steemit team has been focused on infrastructure cost reductions and advertising sales on steemit.com. By releasing two state-of-the-art pieces of software (Hivemind and MIRA), reducing operating costs, improving the efficiency of our AWS infrastructure, and beginning our paid advertising program, we are now hitting our cost reduction and revenue projections.

We have picked the majority of “low hanging fruit” with respect to cost reductions and restored the organization to a financially sustainable condition with a worst-case scenario operational runway that is more than sufficient to begin scoping future enhancements to the Steem blockchain and steemit.com.

@elipowell & Christi White

eli + christi.jpg

These changes began with the decision by @ned to hand over the reigns of Steemit Inc. to Elizabeth Powell who became Managing Director of Steemit about 6 months ago. In her efforts to turn the organization around she was aided by our indispensable Head of Operations, Christi White.

To learn more about Elizabeth Powell, check out her appearance on the latest episode of The Steemit Podcast, available now!

New Leadership

In order to shepard the organization into this new phase of growth, we have restructured the company and assigned four new team leads who have demonstrated exceptional judgment, skill, work ethic, and commitment to the Steem ecosystem.

team leads.jpg

Justin Welch - @justinw

@justinw has been leading Steemit’s DevOps efforts since its first year in operation and is now leading the team as Head of Engineering. Neither the Steem blockchain nor steemit.com can function without the stable, secure, and scalable infrastructure that Justin oversees. Unfortunately for Justin that means that whenever anything goes wrong, he is absolutely indispensable. Since he is also critical when it comes to just all around "making things better," that means he has gotten very little time off, and very little sleep. If we could clone just one person, we all agree it would be Justin. Since we can’t do that, we’re putting him in charge of our engineering efforts.

@vandeberg

@vandeberg has been with Steemit since before its inception and oversees all blockchain development as Senior Blockchain Engineer. Michael has had a massive influence over the direction that Steem has taken and with the benefit of hindsight we have all seen the wisdom behind the difficult choices he insisted be made, and the folly of ignoring his warnings. His insistence on pursuing the utilization of RocksDB to migrate Steem to commodity-hardware well over a year ago is just one example of his foresight.

@roadscape

@roadscape, Senior Product Engineer, was one of the earliest additions to the Steemit team. He was also the developer behind steemd.com, the first user interface for accessing the information stored on the Steem blockchain. @roadscape went on to architect Hivemind, software that not only dramatically reduces the cost of running a blockchain node, but which also unlocks a universe of possibilities for social apps.

Whether people realize it or not, Hivemind also has the potential to offer the strengths of so-called “Smart Contracts” with almost none of the downsides. Hivemind will enable us to create Communities on Steem (among many other features), which is why it will play a critical role in the future of steemit.com, and the Steem ecosystem as a whole. That’s why we wanted to empower its developer to push it to the limits!

@andrarchy

@andrarchy has been a part of the Steemit community since before he was part of the Steemit team, creating content on the platform that helped educate new users on the complexities of the Steem ecosystem. Originally hired as Community Liaison for Steemit, he would go on to become our Content Director, and now Head of Communications where he oversees everything relating to content, marketing, and of course, communications.

Thrive Mode

While these last few months have been incredibly challenging for us, these hardships have not been able to stop this organization, nor this community, from surviving. Thanks to the many hard decisions we’ve made over the last 6 months, and the amazing software our engineers have managed to release, we feel that Steemit Inc. is well-positioned to transition from “survive mode” to “thrive mode.”

Thanks to Hivemind, and the splitting of Condenser into two separate applications (Social and Wallet), we’ve been able to improve steemit.com at a rapid rate, while maintaining our rigorous security standards. And we’re just getting started. For these reasons, we feel the time is right for steemit.com ... to leave Beta!

The Steemit Team

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ITS ALIVE, ALIVEEEE !!!

Hellow @elipowell. STEEM is steadily slipping down in ranking compared to other coins. We are no longer in the top 10. It is more like close to 60. Now that Steemit is no longer in survival mode, Are we to expect that Steemit will now actively pursue listings on new and existing exchanges?

No Response. I'm not convinced that Steemit has left "Survival Mode".

wow roadscape official!

Thank you for everyone and special thanks to @roadscape, @vandeberg, @justinw (i guess your GH id's jredbeard :) for reviewing and merging my PRs (my GH id's economicstudio). I also thank @ned, my all time favorite example for many utopian bug-hunting and dev posts :)

ps. Don't forget to merge "show beneficiary setting"
https://github.com/steemit/condenser/pull/3310 How to test? Make a post and set 100% beneficiary to @blockchainstudio :)

ahaan ;) It's never too late ;) Happy to hear that we are leaving beta ;) Hopefully, steem inc will stop selling steem now :'(

would be nice when after they found a source of money (advertising) and sold enough steem for a buffer they would just simply burn the rest of the steem inc held tokens...

Alternatively they could power back up and use the SP for rewarding what they consider good projects. Wouldn't that be better?

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I definitely think it would not be... who decides what is good or bad?
Its a bit like central planing/socialism vs capitalism...
If they burned it, they would give the current stakeholders more power...
.. and just looking at it mathematically the steem price should double.. what should attract even more users...

Thanks for all your work and the new features!

Here is a first !BEER for the team and there will be more for the team members soon.

The steem beer community says thank you for all your efforts to keep us running our weekly #BeerSaturday since 102 weeks in a row on the steem blockchain.

Greetz @detlev

i remember gmail was in beta for like 10 years

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Congratulations on leaving beta and survival mode! The timing couldn't be better with the crypto rally happening right now.

All the best with Steemit.inc's next chapter!

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Congratulations to the whole team at Steemit Inc.
Conducting such a corporate turnaround is not easy.
Developing state of the art software in the middle of a period of austerity is difficult.

You have revolutionised your own company and the Steem ecosystem, empowering others to take the lead in areas you were not able to (Steem Engine, SCOT etc).

Steel is forged in fire and Steem is a much stronger ecosystem than it was 7 months ago.
Ready for the next Crypto bull run!

Now that you are out of crisis mode, perhaps its time for Steemit Inc to sign up to @jpbliberty's class action lawsuit against the crypto ad ban of Facebook & Google.
Steemit Inc could win tens of millions of dollars in damages - wouldn't that improve the balance sheet!
It costs nothing but benefits not just you, but the whole Steem ecosystem and Crypto community as a whole.

Just send an encrypted memo to @jpbliberty saying "Join Crypto Class Action. My [email/Telegram/Skype] is [xxx]."

Maybe that lawsuit is a good idea, but I think a better one would be to just build a dApp on Steem for advertising and then just beat them at their own game.

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Need to do both. The lawsuit will bring big $ into the Crypto space which will allow the competing DApps to be perfected and money spent on attracting users.

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I think joining a lawsuit like that would conflict with the culture of the Steemit, Inc. team. At least that's the impression that I have of them.

Now this is what I am talking about, comms like this is what will help Steem to get taken seriously. The price went up to 42 cents today, not sure if it was like that before the announcement or not in terms of exact timing but I'm sure the announcement helped. Keep it up!

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