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Hi Bernie. In general, I agree with the assessment that most of the top witnesses should be doing more. If we had all 20 top witnesses doing as much as @jesta, we would probably have a lot different marketcap.

There are a few in your list that I think are actually adding more value than what you have here, but I will leave it up to those individuals to defend themselves if they think it is necessary. (I do agree with more of your comments than I disagree with though..)

For myself, I do feel like I do a lot for the platform (I do run a full node, I am the moderator of the help channel of steem chat, I submit pull requests to condenser, faucet, and devportal repositories, etc.), but even with all of that, I never feel like I am doing enough.

Witnesses get paid a lot, but it is not a “stable/dependable” source of income. As a top witness, I could be voted out at any time, and there are factors that influence the STEEM price that are out of my control. Because of the “instability”, even though I am a top witness, I still hold a “real” job to be able to support my family. This is really unfortunate because after my full time job and a small amount of time to spend with my family each week, I only have a limited amount of time left in the week to spend on Steem. I really do try to do as much as I possibly can in the time I have, but IMO it still never seems like enough.

I know you will probably say that my “personal” life is really my problem to figure out, and for the amount of money involved I should find a way to “make it work” - which I do agree with. I had actually never even really considered that becoming a top witness was even a possibility when I started my campaign, but now that I am actually here (which I consider a huge honor), getting to a point where I can actually do this full time (without putting my family at severe risk) so that I can contribute more is a high priority of mine. I hope to get to that point very soon.

Having witnesses contribute to the blockchain is probably going to be one of the more difficult things to achieve. I agree that having more people (other than Steemit) making changes is something we really need to accomplish. The amount of people qualified to do that though (without breaking things) is probably quite small. Even for myself - I have a software development background, so I think it is something that I am technically capable of, but it would still be a significant challenge for me to actually develop something complicated by myself. Also, right now testing changes is a really big hurdle. Even if I were to develop a change to make a hardfork, I honestly don’t know how I would go about setting up an environment to be able to make sure it works before deploying it to the live network - which is 100% necessary in order for the change to be ‘safe’. I could submit a PR and rely on Steemit to test before merging, but for obvious reasons - this seems to be missing the whole point. I’ve talked to Vandeberg/Steemit about this, and they are working on putting together a test net. Once this is done, it will at least lower the barrier to entry for capable developers to work on changes. It would be great if 2018 could be the year we have our first community hardfork.

The real solution to the problem of underperforming witnesses though (IMO) is competition. When I started there were quite a few in the top 19 that I was pretty convinced were doing absolutely nothing. Since that time, people like @jesta, @netuoso, @followbtcnews, @aggroed, and myself have taken their place. You may still say that many of the ones that are still there (and even the new ones that have taken their places) are still doing very little compared to what they should be - but in my view that is just opportunity for someone who can contribute more to come along and push them out. I really would love to see more people come along and shake things up to create more competition for the top spots. It is definitely not easy to make it into a top position, and requires more than just “working hard”, but if someone comes along and starts adding significantly more value than the ones that are currently there - the stakeholders do seem to notice.

I think this is spot on. Competition does more to spur quality work than anything else. There are some witnesses who are doing some pretty cool things, and they are climbing up the ranks, such as:

  • @ats-witness, who runs a full node all the time, has always only ever done things to contribute to the platform since I've seen him on here. He had a campaign against sock puppets at one time, which was largely successful. He started up a sports and poker league, and has developed a curation system exclusive to authentic users only, he used to do a crypto and steem market analysis, which did really well, and he's regularly (every day) curating good content and sponsoring contests and initiatives, and has done his fare share of flagging and anti-spam contributions.

  • @reggaemuffin is another great one. He is one of the largest contributor to anti-spam crusades that I am aware of. He regularly sponsors @steemflagrewards and @steemcleaners with delegated power and gifted SBD so they are able to flag down abusers as well as reward those who flag. He runs a full node, he is constantly posting updates in development, information, and other ideas that will make this platform a better place, he is busy interacting with the community, and he appears to have every intention of doing what it takes to be a good witness.

  • @cervantes has done huge things to engage the Spanish-speaking community all over the globe. He regularly interacts with followers and friends on steemit who take heed to his comments and posts, and he posts educational, informative, and helpful content on a daily basis. He curates well, he comments often for a witness, and he has excellent voting history.

  • @ura-soul appears to be interested in the platform. I'm not sure what will happen there. I don't know anything about him. But look forward to seeing him make good on some of his promises...

I know there are other great ones, but these are just the ones I know about personally and feel like I can attest to.

@Qurator has just started as a witness and also runs a great community project , educating people how to use content properly instead of copy pasta, and we are still growing with +1000 members

When you say 'full nodes' here, do you mean public RPC nodes with all plugins enabled?

I have no idea. It's just the echo chamber talking.

As far as I know, and this is here say from someone pretty technical who told me "they checked recently", there are less than 3 "FULL" nodes with all plug ins enabled.

@sircork wow... less than 3 full nodes out of.. 200+ witnesses on the entire blockchain? That's crazy... I guess that brings me to the question: Why so many witnesses?? And where/ how was/ is this number determined?

Start by reading the white and blue papers.

Thx

I read both blue and white paper. And while they were both interesting and informative, while also answering my question in part--they did not give any satisfactory explanation, reasoning , or justification for the actual breakdown of the witnesses, per se. For example: how many full-nodes are required to run the platform smoothly? It would seem, given the definition of full-node (i.e; a "miner" which oversees the blocks and "verifies" their addition to the ledger), that having only three witnesses performing this function seems s a bit dicey... There again,
there was little explanation regarding the procedure of the witnesses themselves. Also, if I read correctly, there are 200 "witnesses," yet, only 21 of them are actually mining the blockchain... the remaining 179 are merely waiting their turn, while simultaneously combining all of their "voting power" into the "21st" of the 21 miners as a "time shared" witness slot. There again, I could be mistaken, but that's how it looked to me..

From what I read: Blocks on the steemit blockchain are produced in "rounds." with anew block made every three seconds. Out of 200+ "Witnesses" or, steemit memebers eligible to be a witness, 20 of them are chosen as "block producers," while the remaining ~179 are folded into the 21st spot. From the white paper itself: "The 21 witnesses are shuffled every round." If this is the case, then those 21 witnesses are "shuffled" every three seconds?? That seems pretty wild.. Perhaps I'm missing something.

I really wish there were more transparency regarding the witnesses and their job/ role.

Good to know.
I guess I will have to keep my guess about the identity of your source to myself, but I do take your words.

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@crimsonclad, from what I understand, a "full-node" within the context of a blockchain mining operation, is a participant who, unlike the miners who are merely, blindly chugging along, figuring out the best "hashes" with which to "decode" the messages (i.e., cryptocurrency tokens/ coins), the full-nodes are given the responsibility of actually adding said blocks--after being deciphered by the miners--into the actual, formal blockchain ledger. They are kind of the "gatekeepers," so to speak: deciding here and there, which blocks mined by the miners will become "set-in-stone" and a part of the blockchain forever-more. So they are the real "head honcho," whereas the miners are just blindly working (or, rather, their CPUs are ;)) . The "full-nodes" are there to solve any discrepancies, etc.

That being said, it would seem to me that having only three "people" in this position of full-node--out of how many total users?!?--seems precarious, at best...

I say all of this with the caveat that I am not a "pro" at this stuff-merely learning "along the way" as many others. I am happy to receive any correction or criticism--in fact, I welcome it!! Let us learn this thing together, and grow!!

I understand what the types of seed/witness/rpc node functions are~ the reason I ask is because we do not have enough full RPC nodes (with all plugins enabled) being made available to the public, and if another was to come on the scene I was surprised that many of us missed it, so I was clarifying. The RPC debate is one that has been going on for some time now, as obviously more are better both for decentralization and for stability, but currently, it is more costly than people would like to run something for the benefit of all, versus running a private node to be used only by a single project. This means fewer people take them on and set them up. There are other, private nodes being spun up to back individual projects, certainly, but for devs wanting to work with this chain who can't afford to do that, public resources are important.

So in this case, the 'miners' you are talking about are the witness servers, versus the seed node support, however, I'm talking about RPC nodes. The servers that are witnessing (verifying/generating) blocks are the witnesses, and there are many more than three of those. Rewards are allotted for these witnesses based on each block produced, and ranking is based on stake weighted voting in an election type consensus mechanism, so the term mining isn't really applicable in this case. You have 20 top scheduled producers, and a 21st rotating spot which is taken from all other enabled witnesses based on a schedule that is proportional to DPoS ranking.

Thank you. Okay... so I think I'm starting to (maybe) understand--there are 200+ "Witnesses," though, only 21 of those are, at any given time, "on the clock," so to speak (i.e., "witnessing")..?

And, amongst all these various witnesses (which are also "nodes," if I'm not mistaken?) there are also various types of nodes; namely, "seed nodes," and "RPC nodes," the latter being a particular type of node which is designed to support public functions and operations--as opposed to different "private nodes," which are not designed to interact with the "general" steem chain...?

Is that kinda on the right track??

there are 200+ enabled, active witness servers (thousands and thousands that are disabled and not active.) The block schedule is such that each of the top 20 ranked witnesses produces a block each cycle (which is 63 seconds... a block each 3 seconds,) followed by the 21st. The 21st rotates through all active witnesses outside the top 20, proportional to their ranking. If a witness is disabled, then it doesn't go into the schedule, produce any blocks, or receive rewards for doing so.

Seed nodes don't produce blocks but do store data to support the chain, but the very quick and dirty explanation for the difference between a seed and an RPC node is that not all seeds expose the RPC port for API calls over WebSockets, which is what frontends like Steemit, Busy, and condenser based interfaces use... if you want applications built on the blockchain to be able to take advantage of all technical possibilities, all plug-ins need to be enabled. This is what requires such a skookum server, and what makes them generally quite expensive to run. The more load put on the fewer servers is bad for latency and stability of course, which is why it's important to have more of them. The cost being prohibitive and the fact that they do not generate rewards makes this harder to do for many developers, who then need to rely on public nodes provided by others.

So, as to your last question, the public bit refers to the RPC being available to anyone who would like to use it, whereas a project which is resource intensive or depends on low latency or whatever the case may be may choose to run a private RPC. This simply means it is only used by the developer for the projects they choose, and the connection is not made available to everyone on the chain so the resources are dedicated to particular performance. (For example, Steemd uses a private RPC as it gets MILLIONS of requests daily)

This is awesome. Thank you for taking the time to explain something which I'm sure is probably pretty tedious lol. I appreciate it.

Isn't @reggaemuffin the one who runs @minnowbooster? I have been trying to get my 100 SBD back that was stolen from me because I figured out how to buy more votes than other people using skills I taught myself. I was blacklisted and my money was stolen without warning. Whoever runs minnowbooster isn't replying or returning the money I sent. I read the rules and I followed them. I just used the service more than most people since I am home all day. I quickly became one of the highest in terms of transfers to minnowbooster because that helps you buy the votes that you want. Needless to say, I am pissed that someone with so much money is still a thief.

Sorry you had this experience! Wanna chat me up on discord and we can see what happened?

Yes please, I will contact you in the next 48 hours.

Part of the purpose of my recent posts about expanding the witness voting page to go beyond 50 witnesses, is to do exactly what you are saying is needed here - to give other witnesses a fair chance to be found, voted for and to shine. I'm a bit confused as to why you removed your witness vote for me immediately after I publicly addressed this, since my actions appear (to me) to be in alignment with your stated objective. Maybe there is another reason, I don't know.

Hello @ura-soul, and nice to Steem you! :-) Thanks for your ongoing efforts around democratizing the Witnesses ecosystem, it's much needed!!

Regarding this topic, would there be a way to integrate in steemit.com the platform @drakos built some time ago? (this one: https://steemian.info/witnesses), which is to date the most complete Witnesses vote management tool and overall dashboard.

It's a great tool that I use extensively, and I only control 8 MV of proxy votes.

I find it hard to believe that any stakeholder with enough SP to move the needle is not going to be familiar with third party tools.

Aloha! Thanks! Yes, I posted a proposal for a new design for the witness voting page already, but did not receive any kind of feedback from the Steemit Inc. team - as with most of my other proposals.

I initially voted for you because I saw that out of the up and coming witnesses, you had a lot of potential to do great things.

I don’t really want to argue about the specifics of that particular change - but in my view it is not really the right approach to the problem. If you haven’t made a big enough “splash” for the larger stakeholders to notice you yet, then you probably need to keep working on your campaign. If you do make a big enough splash, then the stakeholders know how to vote for someone outside the top 50. It really isn’t as big of a deal as people make it, and I am speaking as someone who spent many months below the top 50 campaigning to make my way up.

I removed my vote because in my view you are not choosing to spend your time on things that are improving the platform for the stakeholders/users. You seem to be too focused on the things that specifically benefit witnesses, and things that are making it difficult for you move up.

Thanks for explaining. What I am actually focusing on is building Steem Ocean, which is an app that mostly only exists to deliver features that I think should be in Steemit.com but aren't. I have a long list of features to be added in to it that have been collated over a lot of work of talking to users and gaining feedback about what they want and need. Most of my research has sadly had to focus into understanding the black box system of Steemit Inc's feature delivery protocols, rather than on actually delivering features, since I get almost no feedback or answers to questions that are attempting to help the platform. I always get great support from the community for my ideas and they always say that we really need the features and changes I suggest. However the ONLY response I have had from anyone involved with the code is @ned saying that the idea to have witness vote decay was a good one and sneak just being sneak.

Along with having to deal with their tech manager's apparent mis-alignment away from the ideals that founded Steem, I have done what I can to find the time to deliver what the communty wants/needs - which has taken quite a lot of my spare time. I am also busy working with a client and considering SMTs for my own social network. Like you I am time limited here.

I think it's unfair to conclude that I am too focused on witnesses, since I actually only ever mention them in the context of bringing balance that is itself intended to maybe help average users get the features they need and maybe a fairer deal and better experience. I am actually posting as a user first and witness second. If you examine my utopian posts, for example, you will see that witness related ones are a minority.

I did not read your comment until the end.
One of the problems here is creation of "apps" instead of fixing and improving steemit itself.
Granted, creating an "app" is easier and more beneficial, but it does not improve the user experience of the majority, and it usually costs to use and dangerous.

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you are very good at using the bidbot app created by another witness that makes apps... to complain about a witness only creating apps...

I do agree condenser is open source and witnesses can mod it to add what is missing and run it in hopes there is adoption and his changes might find its way into the official thing or the witness can choose to run infrastructure for it.

maybe not everyone is willing to do it for a particular reason ?

When I wrote "apps" I meant interfaces to STEEM which demand active key or posting key from their users.
I did not mean automatized services which at most charge per each use, in a transparent and aware manner like bidbots do.

The reason IMO for steemit/condenser being dumped in favor of "apps" is the corruption in the witnesses election process and the deep stupidity of most people.

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@youtake pulls you up ! This vote was sent to you by @stimialiti!

This is why, you have my witness vote and the other man does not.

Me too

Thankyou! Though maybe if you changed your name to 'supersmartwiseguy' the PR value might be higher here. hehe ;)

Hahaha, in all honesty, the name "delusionalmadman" inspires a LOT more confidence in the concurrent era than does the name 'smartwiseguy', lol. :-)

You have my vote! You're quite active in posting. That's a good thing. You're also clearly a libertarian; the more the merrier!

I'd like to know more about this steem ocean. It sounds really cool!

If you haven’t made a big enough “splash” for the larger stakeholders to notice you yet, then you probably need to keep working on your campaign. If you do make a big enough splash, then the stakeholders know how to vote for someone outside the top 50

Exactly, @timcliff. That's what I tried to tell @ura-soul as well - but I wasn't taken serious due to my blessing with freedom's vote.

No, you are judging me here - I did not say in any way that I did not take you seriously because of freedom's vote. I said very specifically and only that exposure comes as a result of being in the top 50 due to the vote page layout. The data points to corroborate that and testimony from some in the top 50 corroborates that. Clearly it is also important to receive votes from large stake holders and clearly not everyone is going to attract their attention, but the least we can do is give all witnesses an equal shot.

"I removed my vote because in my view you are not choosing to spend your time on things that are improving the platform for the stakeholders/users. You seem to be too focused on the things that specifically benefit witnesses, and things that are making it difficult for you move up." - @timcliff

^ Today I learned ^

But, focusing on things that prevent witnesses from moving up, that are VALID and documentable in the data is EXACTLY what opens the platform up and removes potential "obstruction of justice" so to speak for ALL users.

I'd argue for @ura-soul on the topics he has chosen to take on, as I also take them on, WHILE he still builds SteemOcean and I built a voice for ALL people, ALL communities and ALL inclusive on the @SteemStarNetwork (since the last station fell into the hands of a closet-socialist exclusive elitist who stole the people's voice) and a worldwide steem exclusive, block chain transparent humanitarian aid organization in the form of the @YouAreHOPE Foundation that the meta community at large loves to support. AND we choose to also seek and expose truths and theories about potential truths to the people for the goal of platform operational "righteousness" at the same time, man. And that includes witness gaming, and vote collusion and all sorts of nasty big money at stake B.S.

So there's that.

But now I know why I have never gotten your vote, despite the amount of respect and even, dare I say, admiration, which I have always shown you.

I just don't have it in me to pretend in the face of glaring issues and blow bubbles and rainbows I guess.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Your credibility fell so many notches with me in this one word answer. Turns out you are just another "yes" man who is willing to "overlook" rampant corruption because to do otherwise and exhibit GENUINE conviction would sort of ruin your position among a gang that doesn't have much interest in real decentralization or equality, since you and them already got yours, it would be dangerous to be honest now...

I can understand why you would be upset with my one word answer. I don’t think you understood what I was going for, but how could you since I only gave one word :)

I have gotten to know you somewhat well since I initially met you, and I like you as a person. I think you have good morals and want to use your life to help other people. I respect that.

I was mainly responding to your comment about me not voting for you as a witness. As you stated in your comment, you were correct that my not voting for you is based on the priorities that you are focusing on. I disagree with them, but I also respect your right to focus on whatever priorities you want. I also already know that neither of us is going to convince the other of our point of view on this matter - so there is not much of a point of “arguing”. My one word response was basically an expression of that.

I’m not really sure what corruption you think I should be fighting, but in general “fighting corruption” is not really one of the things that I see as an important role of my witness duties - so if you see that as being dishonest - then this may be another area where we agree to disagree.

As a witness I feel that it is more important for me to focus on what parts of the protocol are allowing corruption to take place, and whether I should be advocating for or against any particular changes based on that. If there are any points to discuss in this area - I’m happy to share my views.

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Tim you have my proxy but I'm going to have to remove it. You'll still have my vote, and learning who I want to vote for will be a benfit though time consuming.

The reason I speak up is to address your point about competition and Bernie's point about witnesses that engage on the Steemit blockchain.

We have a recent new witness: @qurator

IMO it's tough to find a witness that contributes or cares more about Steemit than @scrooger (including his entire team).

My 2 cents, and I hope more people consider them for a top spot.

Thanks for the shout out man! I really try!

Even in this dark times I am buying steem to keep Qurator's leases going. The price will recover and then all will be supporting itself again. The idea for the witness was to show we are serious and we want to help make a change. Promote quality posting and control it, monitor it. Sad to say but to do what we need people and funds to pay them. That is what the witness is for, generate funds so we can pay people to help make a difference!

Viva la Steemit!

No problem @scrooger. You deserve it and it shows. There are two sides (at least) that I consider before giving my support.

  1. The quality of the service. Meaning its purpose and effectiveness. A+ there.
  2. The demeanor of the support staff. A++ there.

It's not all about the service, but the people who run it. I've never seen anyone on your team treat people with anything but the utmost respect and consideration.

Appreciate it man, means a lot. Will be sharing this comment in our meeting room!

Sounds good. Thanks for letting me know. I’m happy to hear that you are taking witness voting seriously, and voting for the ones you think will do the best job.

Hey @timcliff , I read your responses to this thread and I am now voting for you as witness.

Hello @timcliff , I know that the post im referencing to is an eternity ago in this day an age of fast paced , here today gone tommorrow social media /news cycle , but a year ago you created some content about SteemConnect . The links are all current and bring me to an identical page to your example you have shown in the post . It says Create a Username , I did that part ,then store , write down , and back up the generated password provided for the new account . I then provided the steem in the designated section to pay the asking fee to create the account useing SteemConnect . I then fill out the next section providing my Username an Active Key and in the box with my usermame has a green check same with my PW , when I click continue it says the the username or account name is invalid and it brings me back to the first page .... I tryed different Usernames , same thing .
I know you are very busy , judgeing by your following and the quality of the content your posting I can see why !
If you can find time to give me some guidence on the subject , or even just pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated !
You got my follow/resteem/upvote , I am looking forword to more great content . Thank you for your time . STEEEEMONNNNNNN

Can you send me the username you are trying to use, a screen shot of the page with all the values filled out, and a screen shot or text copy of the error message it gives?

TO BE FRANK: 98% of the whales are not contributing anything. Meetups are "Bilderberg" style, just for the rich or for whales that are single or for members who are good at ass kissing of whales.. Witness are miners..
Steemit is becoming a CENTRAL BANKING SYSTEM

The human greedy instinct is constantly at play from centralized platforms and now even on a blockchain. Human beings are a certified cancer wherever they are.

Be a witness mate, my vote is waiting for you

we never belonged to this planet.. it was safer when we werent around.. all we have done is destruction in the name of modernization..

Totally agree with you , only way for them to get rich and powerful is through our creativity and hard work. We should know our worth and stop feeding greedy people that are willing to suppress the flow of information for financial gain

Hello @veerall, nice to Steem you! What I really appreciate in this kind of threads, even more than their initial or central topic, is the opportunity they create to discover like-minded Steemians, as far as the future and the governance of the platform are concerned :-) I'm gonna follow you from now on.

Steemit has a dark side, it could be it's undoing.

Had something to add.

@timcliff funded the creation of @steemflagrewards and has been a consistent supporter.

That 6 Steem has led to much more worth of rewards being returned to the reward pool from scammers and abusers via our crowdfunded abuse fighting system and discord flag mention comment reward mechanism.

It would be awesome if other large stakeholders would be willing to help this flag incentivization iniative so we can further quell and deincentivize abuse.

Also, @berniesanders, thank you for what you do. I can think of anyone that does as much as you do to counter abuse and the manipulative asshats that live on Trending.

Lastly, thank you for your support of @flagawhale in supporting the quest against one of the foremost reward pool manipulator.

Thanks for doing all that you are doing..

Hey @transisto,

Wanted to fill you in on one contribution.

@pfunk has been a delegator and supporter of @steemflagrewards since nearly it's inception so there is that. We really appreciate it and it benefit the community.

There are quite a few using the functionality it is offering to fight abuse. Would appreciate your consideration for support as well.

He's delegating what? 500 SP?

Ha, I wish. We've had 200 SP from him but we have had a couple more from others (@lyndsaybowes, @sherlockholmes, and @pjau) recently thankfully.

We were just starting up so it really helped us deal with the BW issues but now it is part of the momentum for the mentions upvote function.

I know from your perspective the amount may seem trivial but it's made a difference to the flaggers we have been rewarding with it. More VP means we can spread it out even further.

I appreciate that you're opening this conversation, and that you're also looking for people who care about this platform in earnest. Admittedly, as I'm part of the @followbtcnews witness team, I have a bit of a bias towards the work and attitudes we have towards the platform, obviously 😊. What I can say is we've been in the top 20 for three weeks now, so we are absolute outliers among the rest of this collection of people — that the 'rules' for us have been a bit different from others — but I'm okay with that. We came here to work; if this was all about the money, I'm pretty sure I personally would not have gone the community/witness route, that's for damn sure. We just put out an update talking about this sort of thing, so it's timely.

  • we test built a suite of tools including a keyword analyzer, a blockchain explorer, a mentions tool - we don't charge for any of them, but used common wants to better understand how to develop for the chain
  • Jeff is the vice chair of Minnowsupport, and I spend about 10-12 hours a day moderating in the Minnowsupport/SteemDevs/Writer's Block/etc. communities and connecting and developing new initiatives every day
  • we developed, and are re-developing a script and dashboard system that handles the delegations and tiered voting for the Minnowsupport project at our own cost, which is thousands of incoming delegations of all amounts on the fly. We're redeveloping it now to release it to any community on the chain to encourage manual curation efforts in niches, and to bring an easy-to-use spam blacklist system to everyone and anyone... with the ability to "click on" one or more trusted blacklists and make sure no accidental autovotes are given to an account the community at large has identified as a problem
  • we host, manage, moderate, and develop Steem.chat and take on all associated costs with that
  • host upgraded seed and witness nodes and backups
  • host and manage a full public 512GB RPC node, and split costs with MSP
  • we're working on two large scale projects around greater adoption and better ease of use of the blockchain — one complimentary to steemit, one in place of steemit. These are huge labours of love and they have taken enormous amounts of our time and most of our "profits"
  • we've been plugging away at completing pull requests for Steemit for things that people really want that no one has been willing to do or pay for (case in point, a recent one for on site avatar and banner uploads. The little things that really turn people off about this platform that just keep getting ignored)

Is it enough? Honestly, like @timcliff has said here... compared to @jesta? Nah, it probably never will be. But, in a few months, we've not actually made a profit: we put it all back into the chain in one way or another. Our power-downs basically pull just enough from the account to keep paying the thousands of dollars a month in servers alone, and for all the of the dreams we have to make the chain better. We know we have to prove ourselves as the "newcomers," and you better believe it's not a complaint, but I also know we've had a much harder climb than some others and I'm proud of it. I look forward some day, that if we have the chops to stay up here, maybe getting enough profit to power up my account so I can also do a bit more content creation and voting around the platform to reward the people who make this place great.

I for one really appreciate the work you do @crimsonclad and @followbtcnews. MSP was a really great introductory to Steemit, and you personally helped me a lot when I was first learning how it all works around here. You two seem to take on so many projects and responsibilities, it's admirable.

Honestly, @jesta is on a different level. Reaching for the top is always great, but some people are just a step ahead. I'm still fairly new around here, but if we had more folk like you two and @netuoso in the top 20, I could see Steem really thriving as an ecosystem.

Attagirl :)

I think we take you guys for granted, frankly.

I'm glad to see this, even if I think the msp tie isn't going to impress Bernie much, but as for speaking up about how hard you work, excellent! Well done. I knew you had it in you!

It wasn't lost on anyone that Follow and you got the nicest assessment in the OP.

Not trying to impress Bernie; just addressing Bernie. He, like everyone else, will make his own decisions to vote regardless of what proselytizing is done by myself and the masses, and regardless of what anyone may be saying they're going to do here on the chain.

None of us here expected Bern to read our stuff, I'm still glad to see you owning all you do out loud, for some well deserved notice.

@gtg - WHO?!? (Hasn't used Steemit in 25 days)

You mean that I haven't posted for that long?
Yes that bothers me too.
That's because I'm busy working on a better and faster infrastructure.

I heavily disagree

but I'm upvoting anyway, as voting for witnesses is a really important thing... and that's kind of a promotion after all.
Asking question: "what are those guys doing?" is also important part of a decision making process during voting.

OP updated - when will this "better and faster infrastructure" see the light of day?

Most of its parts - never. I'm not a fun of the light of day.
It's my infrastructure for block production.

But of course that's not all, some of it can be accessed actively (like RPC services gtg.steem.house / api.steem.house) some are served as test-drives for various entities that want to run their services on steem (you've used one of such endpoints directly at some point, remember? :-) )
I have huge delays with switching to json rpc 2.0 and that's because I'm still serving to some obsolete clients (bots, and services) suffering with poor performance for the sake of backwards compatibility (yuck!). Preliminary tests are very promising (including upcoming appbase and rocksdb).
But hey, that should be in my witness update post, not here :-P

Btw, that looks like @timcliff's Evil Brother's "The Reports from the Witnesses" ;-)

Really appreciate biggies answering to basics. Thanks and stay blessed

Good question

That's a very high road position to take man. Super respectable and admirable.

Generally a good idea to highlight this issue once in a while. A bit more research before would have been nice, but who expects nice from you :D

My projects are listed behind my witness link. Alone the full node costs thousands, not counting in the time for upkeep. Of course a lot is automated, but I still need to keep it running. Check the availability of my services, you don't get there by slacking.
And it's taking heavy load, so it's not just for fun.
Steeminvite and steemdice are used a lot, I keep trying to spread the reward pool out, and I work with several parts of the community. More things are planned, not announcing them though.

If all this is nothing is luckily up to the community who actually knows about those things to decide, not just you.

I agree with your point that PEvO doesn't move fast. That's because it doesn't get the support from the scientific community that I hoped. I paid someone full time last year who went around conferences, and while he got some nice words about how great the idea is, in the end all scientists really care for is funding for their own research. Can't blame them, but he threw the towel.
The idea stands and I'm still up to realizing it with the right people around, but I won't force a project into existence that isn't designed perfectly, I always made that clear.

@pharesim I've been voting you for witness. I'll continue to do that. Thank you for supporting the science community on Steemit.

PEvO is something I'll have to check out. And soon. It looks excellent. Was told about it by @lemouth; but I've yet to check it out.

One issue which I suspect you're running up against is that those who are tenure track are required to publish one to three papers a year in a small list of appropriate journals. The list is according to the field.

Then open access preprints will be placed on arXiv, bioRxiv, or a university homepage. Or if it's desired to publish the peer reviewed copy without a paywall, an institution will generally subsidize the 1500$ to 2000$ open access fee. Therefore many scientists have an unfortunate lack of incentive to make the switch.

I strongly agree with you that getting peer reviewed journals on a decentralized blockchain basis is the most sustainable and cost effective and transparent way to do academic publishing with peer review and handle priority in the future. Free archiving of the paper and comments. (I wrote my first Steemit post on this subject.)

The good news is that the above incentives problem applies only to those who are not financially independent or have not yet gotten tenure . . . I'll come and chat after I learn more about the project. I may have some ideas about making use cases and getting around the incentives problem in general. If the user experience you've planned is good, I'll try to get information about it placed in several journals, and see what happens.

Thank you! I'm looking forward to talk to you when you've done the research. If possible please join the discord linked on the website.

@pharesim, sorry to commandeer a little here, but did you notice @art-universe made a pretty sexy painting of you?




here's a link to the original post if you wanna go give it an upvote.

Omg no. Thank you for the notice!

@pharesim i'm new member.l have heard many of about you.you are one of helpful person in steemi.i post introduceyorself and have details me.support me in this platform.

Yep, That's why I voted for him as a witness!

One issue which I suspect you're running up against is that those who are tenure track are required to publish one to three papers a year in a small list of appropriate journals. The list is according to the field.

I think that people are ready to change, if they have options. Options are coming. They are even there (check scipost.org).

Where PEvO could also help is with respect to the referee that no one cares about (and who worked like hell for free). I should maybe write about that, one or the other day.

I don't know what you do on steemit @pharesim. All I know is the fact that with the help of steeminvite, i've been able to get 3 people instant accounts and I'm not stopping. So I don't know where @berniesanders 's sources are.

Curie does indeed try :) 24/7 that is. Thank you.

Hey @berniesanders, I actually think curie deserves a lot more than At least they try. Curie is the reason a lot of users stay on this platform, by rewarding mostly under rewarded people. I'd say a lot more, but I believe you know already. Cheers.

-Ras

I'm very familiar with Curie and their history, much more than most, hence my pessimism about their project at this point.

I may not be familiar with curies history as you @bernie but i second this dudes notion, curie is the reason why most authors are still on this platform and if we have 5 more of then witnesses doing same project as curie i believe our vision of hitting that amount of people on steemit which would in turn increase the price of one steem would be achieved.. Curie stabilizes most authors to a point where they can stand on their own and not get discouraged he deserves to even go upper than the position he is.

Well then i guess you know something i don't, but the fact is undeniable. Btw why don't you run your own witness, might be a way to get you to show the kind of genuine love you did for the community in the past, and guess what, I'd totally vote for you!

I do run witness @nextgencrypto which is sitting in slot #51 current - I don't do THAT much to contribute so don't promote it to try to go higher.

Your secretary does.

Bernie's Secretary / Vote For @nextgencrypto At Witnesses!
https://steemit.com/witness/@berniesecretary/26tfbn8u

Entertainment counts. :P

I used to think your were someone to be avoided.
My support is nothing but you have it from now.
🦄

I didn't know you run a witness. You have my vote!
And I had one vote left - perfect!!
You do more than most, don't sell yourself short!!

@rasamuel I agree! I think @curie is the best. They are the biggest reason I stayed!

See, Bernie. Cheers, @artopium.

This is my observation of Curie. I think it is a great concept, but, like every other part of this platform it has checklists that get gamed. I have seen people who are curators or reviewers making comments to prospective submissions to the effect of "This is a great piece, I'm on the line and its probably @curie quality but I'm trying to move up in my rank and I need to get a 90% or 95% accepted to move up in rank. ". What may have been put in place as a way to discourage spammers from overloading curators with shitposts seems to have turned into a disingenuous kiss-up to try and play politics to certain curators. I don't know any of these people very well, and am not familiar with who might be more disingenuous (and I had some friendly support from some people in their discord chat when I got phished), but please tell me HONESTLY that you feel there is just a genuine " we celebrate quality posts " thing going on and not another , as Bernie calls it 'circle jerk'? I want these things to be real, I love cool, interesting stuff , but I just got the feeling after poking around a bit that it was just another pecking order game :/

We genuinely are here searching for quality posts and that is all. There is no circlejerk or ranking. We do not accept suggestions of which posts to submit for review, all of the searching is done ourselves manually. It is a meritocracy. Curators perform well, find good quality content and they get to submit more posts per week for review. That's it. There are many curators working really hard as we believe in this platform and that quality content should be helped to be made visible as much as possible. If you would like to chat more about it and understand what goes on, then, by all means, pop into our discord channel.

I'm totally with you @markangeltrueman and the @curie team. You've helped me get the word out on more than a few occasions and i thank you for that.

"It is a meritocracy."

Other than the massive, socialist bias that you must have a tiny rep.

Thanks for replying,

Sorry, I wasn't clear; internally it's a meritocracy - you perform well as a curator at finding posts, you benefit from more submission slots.

However, id like to make a point on the rep thing with a recent example....

https://steemit.com/video/@marinauzelac/cymatics-film-about-the-states-of-water-exclusive-on-steemit

Rep hasn't been part of the guidelines for a long time. It's all reward based. There is the inherent probability that high rep authors receive more reward, hence they tend to not get curie upvotes but it does happen. It's not like the current curie upvote would particularly help out the majority of high rep authors anyway; the average curie upvote at the moment is around $30-$40 which is pittance compared to what most high rep authors are getting (high rep being 60 or above from my point of view)

Hi @lexiconical, you have been on the platform for a while so I assume you formed your opinion about @curie when there was in fact an upper REP limit. For some months past now the upper REP limit has been removed entirely; Curie now upvotes exceptional content by authors who have been persistent/consistent with little reward lately (any REP). I invite you to join the Curie Discord server if you want to see the most up-to-date guidelines. For reference the old REP cap was REP 52 - I just ran a query on Curie upvotes from past week.
Curie upvotes on REP less than or equal to 52 in past week:

Curie upvotes on REP > 52 in past week:

Lest you think I cherry-picked the data by choosing REP 52 as the cutoff, here is same thing (past week Curie upvotes) for REP 60+:

I don't think this fits very well with the narrative that Curie "only supports lower REP". As I know you to be a thinking person I hope you take the time to inform yourself of Curie's current operations. Cheers - Carl

That's a rather absurd claim.

"This is a great piece, I'm on the line and its probably @curie quality but I'm trying to move up in my rank and I need to get a 90% or 95% accepted to move up in rank."

Do you mean a curator comments on a post, that it is fairly decent BUT that s/he wouldn't submit it because he has a score to maintain? That sounds really ridiculous as curators would typically skip posts that fail to pass their personal judgement of exceptional and good enough for a curie, without having to write that stuff you made up. I think it is unfair that you used that as the sole basis to discredit a system (the curator scoring) put in place to manage Curie's very very limited voting budget. A dynamic quality bar adjusts according to the quality/quantity of posts under review at any given time, and the available voting power. Trust me it's a difficult balance to maintain in a community where all the influence is battered while there is a pressing need to reward actual creators who put in the time to create valuable content. I will implore that you take the time to go through curie guidelines and read her white paper; and talk to a few curators in the Discord server and have all your doubts and uncertainties dissipated.

I agree, that it is not fair to pass judgement on the whole system. I did see the version of the comment I wrote several times. I'm not sure of the titles of people (ie reviewer vs curator etc) exactly but it was in this way: 1. a post was submitted in the chat 2. Somebody who appeared to have authority to allow submissions or deny them to pass up for further inspection did actually write out the explanation that the post was very great and they were tempted to select it, even saying that it might be picked up by someone else, but that they were going to pass because of a percentage they were trying to hit. Like I said, I don't fully understand the system, and I also %100 understand that there had to be 'funnels' put in place because people who really just want to make money will burden you with low quality submissions- I have seen what you deal with, just as i see what Steemcleaners and others deal with. Its tough. But, I am very observant and noticed that underlying, disingenuous sort of political game play and it kind of turned me off. The idea of helping point out great content really appealed to me, but I don't want everything I do in life to become a game I have to play with people clamoring for some sort of inorganic authority. I honestly thought long and hard about even mentioning it , and I thought about bringing it up in the chat itself, but pointing out that someone is being pretentious publicly is not a way to come to an understanding, and honestly I thought I may get on some 'bad list' if I criticized and Curie is a large presence.

I think you misunderstand how the process works, that is where the confusion is coming. May I invite you to read the whitepaper at curiesteem.com which explains how everything works in details. Also, as others mentioned feel free to drop by on discord and ask anything. I will be happy to help.

Only curators can propose posts, and posts are not proposed in chat. They are proposed on streemian.com/guild/curie. Anybody can become a curator, just need to be recommended by one of the top curators. I hope this helps.

But my claim is not absurd, it is what I saw on several occasions. I don't appreciate you saying I made it up . I am not a troll or any sort of an antagonist, and I have nothing specifically against Curie. I just said above I shy away from those sort of political games and that really stuck out to me.

Well, I do understand your stance. With what I see you say, I believe it's a case of you yourself trying to "game" the system in some ways. Ordinarily, what curators do is to look for deserving posts all around (organically). When it comes to the case of you suggesting a post to a curator, you probably are putting them on a tension. Note one thing. curators are paid for each posts submitted and accepted, soa curator would ordinarily want to have "submittable" posts in his reach. Apart from getting paid for each post, your level of accuracy in your suggestions would open up more priviledges to you (at least, no sin in an encouragement for a good work done). Conversely, your poor performance would only invariably earn you a lower position (those checking posts, i.e reviewers can't afford having undeserving posts submitted to them by a large number of curators all around). I have felt this when I told a friend to suggest posts to me and it looked like i aas wasting my time in checking them. So, for me, if anyone trully told you what was said, they have the right to it as yhey are working with a stated standard (which is openly stated in the curie guidelines).

Ordinarily, all i tell anyone looking for a curie vote is that instead of bringing your post to me, use the appropriate tags relating to your post (there are many curators out there hungry for unrewarded quality posts) and if I don't see it or I couldn't decipher what the quality in the post is, another curator would see it while doing his own search and do the needful. Infact, this has happend to a user I know. He received 3 curies right under my nose (i couldn't decipher when his post is deserving mainly because I am not an authority in vetting his type of content.

In the end, @kilbride, I advise that you just keep makimg your content (quality) and do so as it there was no @curie guild in place and when your post is deserving, someone would gladly come for it. You are still young on here, just about 2-3 months in.

I dont think you understand what I was saying. I wasnt trying to game the system or really even very concerned with participating. The comments I saw were not in response to anything I submitted, I was just checking out the chats and asking questions, along with seeing what people were doing. I was recommended to steemit from a friend who had not really spent much time on it, she just thought I would like it because Im very active in creating discourse on FB and she liked my writing. I had no intention of this being my job . I found Curie one of the more interesting aspects and spent some time checking it out, just the same as I did when I found steemcleaners. I saw a similar gaming there, but it is no reflection on specifically Patrice or even the moderators. If I come across something organically I report it, but I noticed people who were 'looking' for particularly large accounts to report so they could make money. I may have submitted two things to Curie and I had no expectation, and my thoughts were that I would just organically submit when I came across stuff, which I still probably will. Once again, I just felt like those comments made it feel disingenous, and no matter how pure the intent is with anything there will be people who create a disingenious experience trying to move up a 'ladder'. That was my comment and Ive seen plenty of response from people that seem very sincere, so that is a good sign ✌ I dont even like the mentality that people are 'making content', it actually feels like one of the most inorganic things about many of these types of social media. I feel like we should just share when we have something we feel is worth sharing, not because we are on a regiment of content making. I am in no way 'making content' specifically with the idea of any specific parameters except interesting and comprehensible, or because I might learn something and want to pass it on 😉

I see you actually write a lot...lol. it costed me much to do what I did up there but it kinda comes easily with you. Thanks for understanding my stance as I have understood your stance too.

Also, I remember names, but people seem like good people and just like they were behaving i n a not uncommon way to a reward system, so I prefer not to do it like that :/

Ive been curating for @curie for 3 months now and must defend any accusations of wrong doing here.

I seek work that deserves more than a $ and which should make our trending pages shine.

Sadly, and even with the support of @hendrikdegrote, the @curie trail cannot get close to a 'promoted' article.

This is a sad state of affairs in my opinion.

I would hope that everyone finds room in their 30 votes to support this project.

Feel free to find me at the curie discord server at any time, I'll be sure to clear all the above misconceptions.

Cheers,
Ras

If you were chosen to be excluded by curie perhaps your opinion of them would be different?
Having been excluded from the very beginning, i was here when they started, they can kiss my,....

Excluded? Curie, to my knowledge, excludes nobody. There was an upper reputation limit but even that is no more. There are guidelines, however, put in place to make sure the deserving user gets the vote, given the economics of voting power. But please how were you excluded?

This is an ongoing dispute between me and the reward pool rapists, it began when they announced that only approved speech would be promoted.

If you care to take the time to look back to see my posts about this topic from the fall of '16, be sure to reference the links so that i can use them in some new posts.
I know what happened, and dont care to waste my time looking for the posts.

Curie was invented to pick winners and insure losers made no rewards on platform, it continues to do so today.
Although i have reason to believe they did find some shame, at some point, and stopped acting so shamelessly as to vote themselves exhorbitant salaries from the reward pool on crap posts, but they have never supported dissenting opinions that i know of, and certainly not mine.

So, again, @curie, and all the other gangs that pick winners and losers, can kiss my,...

It seems you have some deep hurt feelings from the past, that I am not aware of. While I am not interested to dig into the past to find out your reasoning, I can assure you Curie's mission was and remains to be "discovering promising authors with quality content that add value to the platform who constantly create quality content without much success and empowering quality curators". Curie tries to reach as many authors as possible with limited resources. I hope to connect more with you in the future, and perhaps you can tell me the stories of the past.

Wonderful, would you care to opine on my content?
Perhaps you would be more comfy with my nonprofit, they are less contraversial?
@freebornsociety

lol most of your posts look like fall under politics or steemit related categories. Those wouldn’t fit the guidelines. Following you to get to know you and your works, but not for Curie purposes.

Exactly, but when @curie votes it's favorites the votes i do get are diminished in proportion to the sp involved.
When a whale votes everybody else loses money.
Dont believe me?
Ask @paulag, she didnt believe me either.

Thanks for what attention you give me in the future, if any, but the effort you put into @curie is taking bread out of my mouth, so forgive me if i dont stop proclaiming that fact.
Like i forgive you for hiding your head in the sand to get your own bread.

Loading...

These are the witnesses I vote for:

aggroed
ats-witness
ausbitbank
fyrst-witness
lukestokes.mhth
neoxian
nextgencrypto
patrice
pharesim
steemgigs
teamsteem
themarkymark
therealwolf

I would never vote on someone just because others told me to do it, so I carefully vote for witnesses and I do it for various reasons. Things I consider to be contributions.

However, it's not that easy to figure out what some witnesses are doing nowadays, even if I knew what they did earlier. I'll make sure to look into these witnesses I vote for and update the list if and when I believe it's necessary.

Thanks for writing this bernie. Hopefully, some of these witnesses will respond.

Interesting. I love Bernie's post and like yours though it's in considerably less depth of course. Being relatively new, I don't really know half of these characters so can't vote for any of them in good conscience, I feel. And if the system's as screwed as Bernie says it is then I'm glad I'm not doing. I must admit to voting for resteemable (who mustn't be on the list I guess) as I use that for resteems for everything I'm trying to curate / my own posts. At a push, I may vote for steem-cleaners (and their staff) but the jury's out right now for them for various reasons.

Should a good steemian do his bit and use his 20 votes? Is choosing not to vote worthy (if you think like Bernie above / have no real idea as to who you might be better off voting for)?

You have a total of 30. There's absolutely no need to use them all, only vote who you're comfortable with.

If you don't feel like you want to keep up with all the characters, you can also proxy your votes to someone you trust.

Yeah, I heard about the proxying. But then again, other than resteemable (whose personal politics I know nought of but who I feel I may forever be indebted to), I wouldn't have a clue who to choose to be the one.

Hence, I guess I'll go with your first suggestion for the foreseeable future. I just wouldn't want current voters to suddenly decide they might not know enough about those they're currently voting for (on seeing my comments here or Bernie's, even), decide to remove the votes they've cast and the whole thing then falls apart.

I'm sure it'll never quite come to that though! ;)

You can chose up to 30. You can also retract your votes or change them at any time.
20 most voted witnesses are those called "active" they take part each round in a block production.
Yes, good Steemian is expected to vote for good witnesses (or as @pharesim suggested - use proxy to delegate such judgement to someone else you trust to make a good choices on your behalf)

it's hard to argue if we are clouded with emotions, what would be the most efficient and productive engagement to solve this issues?