The State of Steem - August Expansion

in #steemit7 years ago

Growth!

Growth has been so huge, and across many countries. There are now over 300,000 Steem accounts!

Our focus on scalability is paying off, but now it’s time to return to the product. That’s why we’ve hired a full design team, lead by Pon Kattera. Pon has worked for Deloitte, R/GA (where he worked on a diverse set of clients including Google, Samsung, Equinox, Victoria Secret, Nike and more), and Warby Parker. Though he is a user experience and product design specialist he has worn many hats including: information architect, web developer, UX designer and user researcher.

Development Progress

In an effort to be as communicative as possible we have recently launched the @steemitdev blog. @steemitblog will now be dedicated to communicating with the widest swath of Steem users, while @steemitdev will be dedicated to communicating with Steem developers: the people who will be designing and building the applications that will help bring Steem to the masses.

Growing the Front-End Dev Team

We’ve also added many front end devs to the team. Why? Because a redesign is coming. We’ve heard you. Condenser (the steemit.com front-end) needs love, attention, and a far better UX. And it will get it, with a mobile application alongside it. We know many are eagerly awaiting a way to utilize their STEEM and Steem Dollars on-the-go and we’re happy to say: It’s coming soon! So prepare yourself for the changes to UI, UX, and branding going forward!

Mobile Application

Progress on a MVP is going smoothly and we’re confident that we will be launching a truly best-in-class product that won’t just be a major step forward for the Steem Blockchain Protocol, but a major step forward for cryptocurrencies as a whole. It will be beautiful. It will be easy to use. And most importantly, it will be secure.

Next week we’ll announce the launch of a huge addition to the Steem ecosystem, so stay tuned.

Team Steemit

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Everything above sounds GREAT! But....Not ONE Mention of fixing the ate-up sign up process on Steemit.

Would be great if they can get the sign up process fixed. My Father in law has tried 4 times to register and can't get approved and has basically given up. I told my audience over at Youtube (50,000) to come here and not a day goes by that someone doesn't send me a note that says their password doesn't work or they are still waiting for approval.

From a marketing perspective, this is horrible. You only get one chance to make a first impression and many of these people will not try again.

Great! We have 300,000 accounts but we could have 500,000 accounts or more....but we don't. C'mon Steemit, FIX THE SIGN UP!!

thatsit.jpg

You can use AnonSteem, which is the 2nd largest account creator on STEEM: https://anon.steem.network

It accepts Bitcoin and Litecoin for those who don't already have a STEEM account to pay for it.

I decided to test-create an account through https://anon.steem.network

Counting all the transaction fees, the cost was 15+EUR and came with 6 STEEM in. I am ok with that and thank you for your service.

Still, it pushes the cost of entry way up when one doesn't want to give any personal information in the process.

And suddenly signing up for Steemit is not free anymore. I'd pay the fee but a LOT of people will NOT. That is a negative. The positive would be to FIX the Sign up process.

ive had the same experience. My brother has tried 3 times he thinks its a scam now.

It was never free!
you were compensated for your information, and I am guessing that you didn't read what you agreed to...

Signing up for steem WAS NEVER FREE! We've just ben hiding that fact from you children since you can't handle the trith! haha look sory buyt this comment is abouyt to be very harsh and dont get upset its just me getting m,d at your entitled attitude in ur comment,.. its a BLOCKCHAIn please do NOT angry at people for simply having limitations of a blockchain! You ned more education on the subject before making such ignorant comments! THAT is negative!

You can't just "FIX" the FACT that it costs 9 steem to create a new account on this blockchain @mericanhomestead iuts not that simple but if you have an actual solution Id like to hear it! You should stop ur entitled attitude! people work ful time on this shit man come on, so negative ur comment, so unhelpful!
And you can already use steemconnect.com and you can delegate steempower to help people geta new account, theres ways to "Mine" teh steem to create a new accounyt you see? EVentualuy thre will be money set aside to create teh stem

Here is an over simplification, but In the beginning the steem was just steem not money it wasnt worth as much so mining it was easy to do to allow the creation of many accounts, but now that steem is actually money and worth something, we see that as "steem accounts costing money" But we are not going to ever outright charge people to signup for steemit on steemit.com because people dont pay for a youtube or facebook or reddit account.

Yea, I agree that people need to get a bit more educated about #Steem, before just blindly commenting.

There are at least 4 different ways to open a new STEEM account. All these ways differ one from another by anonymity rank (personal information release), #security, and level of computer savvy needed in order to accomplish it.

READ MORE HERE:
https://steemit.com/steem-help/@primus/how-to-register-steem-account-in-4-different-ways-a-complete-comparative-analysis-of-security-and-anonymity

Be aware about Account #Security -- you should read up about creating a truly STRONG Password (don't simply keep the 1 you started with - at least, not if You've much money invested)

steemit account security will become one of my biggest fears when i am a whale
Its why I have my money in steempower! this way a hacker would need to steal my account for a whole week just to get 1/13th of my money! By then account recivery can happen right?

Thansk for the info tho!

Why anonsteem is able to create an account in minutes where as it takes days in Steemit. Are they given some special privilege ? like using some special APIs ?

I understand they charge, but are there two different APIs, one for free and one for charge ?

No, the reason the "free" one is slow is because the people who pay for it haven't yet found an easy way to make sure it isn't abused for spam accounts. The actual time and cost for anyone to create an account are the same.

I don't agree to your statement that "people who pay for it haven't yet found an easy way to make sure it isn't abused for spam accounts", I am sure people pay and create many accounts to gain popularity in the early stage.

The other day a guy was telling me in general chat that most of the people even do not read any post, but some posts end up with high no of upvotes, because they have bought power and use that to make it popular. And I don't see any reason why they can't do it, its a kind of investment they are doing.

What @troglodactyl said is correct: steemit has to pay the blockchain for the accounts that it gives away for free. And it's difficult for them to be sure they don't hand out a lot of free accounts to the same person, they need to verify their identity to avoid that.

There's no payment when I signed up in steem and even my friend the other week. So, people are getting advantage of the situation by asking some payment. It's the same in steemvoter. Lazariko12 and Pavezi are in charge to have you registered under their supervision for auto vote (for them) but they won't bother to follow you or visit your blog after you have been registered. That is negative.

Ok. Why can a Bitcoin accont be free, and a Steem account can't? What is the reason?

because bitcoin i just a wallet
Steemit acount i san account that requirs more than just sending and receving steem

anyone can have a steem wallet u can signup for poloniex or bittrex and havea steem wallet
but a steem account is more than a wallet!

I am pretty sure thats why!

The thing a steemit account can do costs money on our blockchain! if steem was free or worthless like a testnet u could do it all free but they made steem have value now! so your account needs the 9 steem to be created because of the way steemit works!

Its not easy to explain to people , theyll assume it is a major failure of the system

I agree. There should be no cost to join. It is backward thinking.

There is always a cost to get onto the blockchain, since tokens have intrinsic value. Right now, Steemit Inc is bearing all those costs. We're working on solutions, but this has never been done before. We're trailblazing!

Why do you need to spend or burn money when we could burn bandwidth allocation? That seems much more fitting with the Steem Power system.

https://steemit.com/steem/@demotruk/account-creation-should-not-cost-steem-it-should-cost-bandwidth

Rightly said!

same thoughts too. i dont think its time for steem to start charging for signups yet.

I believe they (steemit) are now uplifting the processed for sign ups. They are now approved in less than 2 hours.

damn fuckin straight!

I only joined a few weeks ago mine was approved quick :)

Anyone with a few minutes to spare can make an account for "free". IMO anonsteem is a scam (albeit a smart scam). Accounts cost 6 Steem to create, but if you do so yourself, that Steem is transfered to your new account... so it is free. Anonsteem realized this and charges you 10 Steem to make a nice little profit. I had an easy account creator tool but took it down because I was changing laptops.

You need to pay to join steemit? That ain't gonna work ;)

How much exactly is the fee?

Steemit can only go up towards north.... The future belongs to Steemit...

How can you do it faster when Steemit can't? Or is this a kind of profiting form loopholes?

Via the network, accounts cost a certain amount of STEEM to create.

Steemit doesn't want to give the idea that it costs to join, so they give away the accounts for free, at a cost. This means they put in stringent verification methods that make it slow to get a new account.

When you pay AnonSteem, we have no reason to slow the account creation process, since you're paying us for the account fee.

Get More Upvotes and Followers : https://steemfollower.com/?r=1966

This is the perfect tool for create new accounts!!! We use in our meet-ups in Berlin to create new accounts for people who come and do not have a user.

Indeed ! It workd for my 2nd account and some friends

Hell yeah! thats the prfect soluition to that problem i had of having to wait tull peoplehad accounts untill I could host a meetup! Because showing steemitto people whgo cant signup doenst work they dont stay interested, but yeah I forgot that i could use steemconnect and just delegate some of my steempower. hey when u delegate the steempower to help create an account, do you get it back later once the person with new account gets osme steempower of theuir own/ or do you just pay the 9 steem fee?

Well I see how much is the price of the user and depend of who he or she is I send more or the exact ammount of Steems :)

Sorry but I flagged you. You should not ask for Up-votes in my post. Make one for that yourself

they are just posting that everywhere! it must be a bot!

I know... I really do not want to spend my VP in flagging comments but... it is too much honestly!

Thanks, will check that out.

Upvote me I will Upvote you.

This is awesome @stellabelle Thank you!

So you've pissed off the father in law, and now the wife is pissed at you for treating her dear old dad so shabbily, so now you are on no nookie timeout for the rest of 2017, and your life has turned into a living hell. Damnable STEEM !!!! LOL

'nookie timeout'!?! Love it. You must be from the UK. :-)

And not married (or not for very long)... that goes away! Right? Please tell me I'm not the only one... :-)

Ha ha! No comment. :-)

'nookie' must be canada or USA surely?!

Fair point but man I would hate to see this place flooded by bots and pure spam...

But right now, real people are being kept out. There has to be a better way. I have confidence the steem developers can figure this out.

No one is being kept out! what are you talking about? Just because a few people have had to wait a week or two doesnt mean theyre being kept out. if they really wanted an account they would be able to ask someone to delegate some steem to get them an account on steemconnect.com

They don't know enough about Steem to know that they can ask for delegation. We have to work on the assumption of zero knowledge for new users, and work within their expectations.

yopure right ive talkd to peopele in discordand seen comments recentlyand the bottleneck is real! i have also seen that they have gotten approvals down to 1 hour, AND we should never ever ask new users to pay 9 steem when first of all where do they fucjkin get steem ithout a stemit account? we expect them to go on poloniex or bittrex too?!?! haha crazy man so crazy the level of arrogance of some people here to want to tell new users to go pay for thir own account???? thats the worst attitude to have for public relations and customer service! som people just dont belong as front end developrs and should be kept behind teh scenes! Its tru! not everyone has the skil of customer service!

and sorry but no mre excuses! facebook and twiotter dont give excuses, and YES those arent BLOCKCHAIn based websites BUt steemit is SUPOSD TO BE a social media site! and we cant live with this childish notion that steem is "Good enough' and its new users faults for not knowing how to make thir own account? Nah thats no good
we need steemit to be as easy to signup as it was for me in Marchg! I mean wtf were going BACKWARDS hre!
When i joind in march it was instant! I didnt hve to wait! hah then all of the sudden we had a waiting lkist and some poeple acted like it was a "god" thing kising butt brown nosing making excuses

sorry but it was a total fail;ure and still is!

we need to hold developers more accountable i mean theyre paid so much money and should be todl when they fail! sorry but no mroe excuses! im sick of hearing some technical excuse as to why its "too expensiove" to create new acounts??

Oh im sorry then someone lied or was incompetitant becausei remember hearing teemit was meant fior 2 billion users! and "Gets strongr asmoe users join" so wtf happeend? where did all the steem go that was AL:LOCATED fro new acount creation? or whats going on? So its not a cost problem? its an approval problem because of noganoo right?

and has anyone trid actually talking to noganoo to see if he would stop onhis own? and maybe he did us a favor by rvealing a culnerability early on? better we fix it now than later?

SORRY if my comment was too crazy and harsh on teh devs! I know they work hard but I sometims doubt that hen i see such bug problems and I think that since we put our MONEY into steemit and LOT of our money is at stake,m e are basically stakeholders 9almost liek shareholders0 so we have a fuckin right to complain! everyday if we want

we have a riught to cokplain when we are worried that the system that promised to be a good place for our coins, decides not to create solutions to simple problems like fucking account signups! sory i knowitsa blockchain but if u cant fix new account signups, the system doesntgow, and we endup loosng our investments and savings ad it really sucks i dont wantto power down, every, i want to believe in this platform!

I totally agree with you men!!

@faissalchahid you can start by uploading a profile pic ! Without a profile image it seems that you dont care about your account! make sure you hve an image!

@ackza speaking on that subject, a paste possibility instead of URL would be sooo cool :-)

we do havethat! u can paste an image right in here!
OH u mean for the avatar thing? Oh just paste and image into a text field like righthere! it will auto upload to a URl u can then use!

But yes it does seem kind of lame to not have an image uplaod feature there for the profile pic option, but it willeb added eventually!
sometims it feels like steemit devs arent being held accountable at all, and they have no real responsibility in a decentralized website, its ultamite corporate liability shield

weneed Ai and bots in control of steemit!

only AI and bots can make logical ratioinal decisions and allow for free speech and not censor peopel based on emotions!!!!!

Well said!

You are the hero I want to be like you and I would be grateful if you supported me

stop posting spam, this is spam! Its not helpfiul! Why would i want uour upovte? U have 63 cents u have nothing to offer, save some stee power and tell people you will upvote for an upvote, isee how thatw orks, dont ask for upvotes! it doesntw ork! who TAIUGHT you to say that?? where did uy learmn suhc bad behaviouir??

please grow up! Dont spam !

You have to work for money! u want upvotes? Create helpfup comments! make blogs of your hometown shpw phoptos of your village show us your area your land go outside take photos and show us! thats how u can start! make blog posts!

yeah and if you are lucky some day some whale might give you an upvote maybe not !! you may earn only few cents in here but it is few cents more than what facebook gives you !!!

u just earned 3 cents so ur dream came true! lol
enjoy the upvote! bOh and here I upvtd ur whole wall! gave u a few centrs on each post!

I might not be a whale but yeah .......@chapterclosed returns all debts (and i read them too )

:D a few cents from a minnion wont hurt :)

If someone's password doesn't work, that is a bug. Please send exact steps to reproduce the issue to [email protected] and I will see to it that it is fixed immediately.

As for the signup queue, that is by design, and is working as intended for the moment. We have some changes planned there for the future, too.

I'd have to go back through my messages but I've had at least a half dozen people email me that they paste the key exactly as is and it doesn't work. Most of the people just never get a key or approval...EVER. You say that is working as intended?

Did they check their spam folders? We approve the vast majority of signups.

If their email provider doesn't deliver them their incoming mail, that is a different matter.

As far as a half-dozen goes: we sign up thousands of people successfully each day, so if we are to identify or address a problem with the signup app, I need precise and exact step by step instructions to reproduce the problem to be able to fix it.

Thousands? Yeah, right. I'd love to see some data to backup that bullshit claim.

You and @ned are notorious for spewing bullshit you can't back up yet you expect anyone here to believe you?

That was kind of rude sounding there @berniesanders. Here you have a person that is trying to address the issue and problem, and all you can do is throw vitriol at them. If you don't want to help, or have a suggestion, then go in the closet and piss on yourself, no need to piss on the people genuinely trying to help solve the issue.

it's nice how none of the comments have anything to do with what the blog post is talking about, and is focused on what steemit inc has been promising with hardfork 20, steemit users keeping steemit inc. in check and demanding accountability

I think if you offer a step by step video to the users, they will follow them and have no problems. I signed up last month and I did not have a problem. But I don't consider myself an average user. My friend Julio tried to sign up and he had to tell me come to help me sign. So, there is something there a regular user does not see or does not know what to do. My best suggestion will be to have a video on how to do the process and don't mess it up with too much music and talk. It has to be light music and mimic because you have clients who don't speak English.

Ask some of these other channels with big followers on the emails they are getting about steemit. They are getting the same feedback. Many people are not getting approved...ever...no its not going to a spam folder. 5 years ago that might be the case but people today are savvy enough to usually check their spam folder. This needs to be fixed. I want Steemit to succeed and I'm very excited about the other upcoming changes...but this needs to be addressed.

Can I just post my daily emails that come in from my audience that are telling me they can't sign up to show you that I'm not exaggerating? Here is one I just got on facebook:
"Jenn Fowler: How long did you have to wait to be "approved" by steemit? Ive applied 2 times and no replies."

There's more than one private key and that is possibly where the problem might stem from. I'm not sure but I think people can't log with the master password on Steemit. They need to use their posting key.

As for the working as intended I think @sneak was talking about the signup queue. I'm not sure why Steemit Inc chose to create a signup queue and I'd prefer if people wouldn't have to wait to get registered but I can also see some possible reasons why this is the way it is right now, one being the current cost of creating new accounts.

Cost of creating new accounts and having to do some checking up on new accounts to try and limit bots being created. Some people here have created thousands of accounts before Steemit Inc had to put a stop to it and make it manual.

exactly its people like noganoo and others who basically ruind it for everyone else...but all they did was sytrengthen our system, what doesnt kill it only makes it stronger unlike biologial life...the AI that is the steemit blokchain only grows more resiliant as steemit whitehats and black hats build up defenses and try to break them down like noganoo, and the devs then go and fix things and then blachats go and make botnets and just reemmber everyione

icertain people have made thousands of accounts before most peopel couyld make 1! and they dont take any responsibility! they will claim it was their right to create that many accounts, when actualy it was very unethical to make that manya ccoiunts (And theres no reason for them EXCEPt for stealing money) because you can do everything from ONE account awith bots! u dont need multipel accounts to run multiple functions u can make ONE botthat does al the functions of multiple bots, u dont need a new account for every new function....and i HIGHLY doybt that anyone is going to really NEED to make more than 50 bots ad i doubt they could make 50 useful bots that are actualy used a lot

otherwise bot armies are stuipid bcause u gt same result of flagging or upvoting frm ONE account with all the combined steempower!

so one of the tonly things hcreating multipel accounts would be for is to get all the free steempower they come with even delegated steempower allos somkeone to upvote themse;vs and their own posts, u see? Its fucked, its kjust theft or money thatssuposed to go to other people! to the masses!

Anyway thank you @igster your post was very inciteful and seemslike we have a lot of un fgrateful spoiled brats here on steemit! entotlement is a massive issue on steemit!

Minnows logve to act like thre is a problem with teh whales when honestly the whales are angels compared to minnows! Itsthe minnows who have MOST of the problems here on steemit haha so if pepel ant to generalize then lets be honest about where all the problems on steemit come from! so many minnows quick to jump onto apeals yto emotion posts about how steemit whales are somehow stealing from the 'community"n (that THEY created lol) its like hey u cant steal from a blockchain that you fuickin helped creatye AND any upvotres steemitusers get are FAIR by DEFAILT becauseits a blockchgaiN!ok im getting too heated! Steemit is about to grow so much peopel will make so much money they wont be upset!

MOST of the people upset on steemit are people not making much money, and they see othe rpeoples posts and think "Wellmy posts are just lik their posts! I SHOULD GET that much money too! Wah Wah 'And they dont get that its because they jusr dont have the folowers! an ALSO even if you DO have the same number of followers, ome followers are created more equal than others! some followers are high steempower followers!

exactly its people like noganoo and others who basically ruind it for everyone else

Bingo.

I know from trying to login to DTube last night that the login form on that site doesn't work at all in Microsoft Edge, a browser which a lot of users would be using since it comes preinstalled with Windows 10. Had to shift to Chrome. Logging in on the main site works fine for me though.

Please also do something about the bot sign ups. These bots are degrading the quality of Steemit.

Can we expect to have a Bitcoin and Ethereum and other altcoin wallets inside the internal SBD/Steem exchange?? That would be so fun ! So many steemit users would get to learn Bitcoin trading AND get their first bitcoin wallets all "in house" maybe we could just connect openledger accounts to do it? abut by having one steemit key for your bitcoin and ethereum wallets people would find it so useful to actually have bitcoin and ethereum and altcoins in their steemit wallets/exchange

that is probably far down the line but when we have that, people will just be force of laziness use steemit! there are aLOT of people who would rather just use one website for all their crypto wallets and for many people having altcoins and bitcoin in their steemit wallet would be so useful!!! i wish this was possible but there seems to be so many obstacles to this, hope it can happen one day

they cant cause steemit inc. is located in the USA

well then busy.org or some other website can have it? Wait what does steemiut inc being in the US have to do with adding Bitcoin? nah man we can have bitcoin wallets I wasn't taking about USD just bitcoin and ETh we could have wallets, being in the uSA doesn't have anything to do with it

HEY but anyway man its a BIG deal that you showed people how u an sell bitconnect coins on many different exchanges, and so even when bitconnect is down u can STILL do a withdrawal of money with bitconnect !its just another crypto currency and people dont understand that, any altcoin can be valuable if you pump fiat into it

You forgot to mention that fact that the number of account means absolutely NOTHING. I can create many accounts, every single day, and guess what? None of them will ever be used.

yes the number of active accounts is actually around only 25,000 or so right? I cant tell because steemd.com/distribution is down and yeah the number or actual active users is probably close to that! But its still growing but yes this is why steem price hasn't been going up as much as we expect, the new accounts mean nothing exactly!
What we need is more active users! And THEN with more active users and people who earn steem and see the value of steemit we will have people buying steempower which will finally start us on our way to $10 steem.

yes, it always gave me a very bad feeling when i see the claims of 100s of thousands of steemit accounts, when in actuality there are about 3000 active, to say there are that many accounts like it means anything is very shady, cause its a lie

It'll be cool if we can see the new app before a new year coming)

Yes, yes, yes!

Don't get me wrong; I'm ecstatic about the formal dev updates you guys have presented here. They show just how awesome this platform will soon be. However, I've been trying to get my mother onto this platform for a week now to no avail.

I understand there are many factors to consider and you are likely working on the botpocalypse issue, but signups truly are a priority for any social platform looking to flourish.


I've written a post on the late, great Chuck Berry's music. It's pretty musical. :)

I 100% agree this is the main problem to user adoption.

very true -- upvoted

You are right I waited for 2 days to get my account approved. I was also hopeless when I saw my account is under approval process. There is also no approval criteria I think. Correct me if I am wrong @ASMSayeam

Our approval criteria is anti-spam combined with manual review. So sometimes it takes us a bit, sorry about that. :(

Any chance we can help, as members of the community, with the review process? (Perhaps this is in place, and I'm unfamiliar.)

You can use AnonSteem, which is the 2nd largest account creator on STEEM: https://anon.steem.network

It accepts Bitcoin and Litecoin for those who don't already have a STEEM account to pay for it.

i hope that steemit is the future

good post thanks
I am a new steemians, maybe i should study first with you, regards know me
https://steemit.com/@yogawithadriene
please follow me
I followed and upvoted.Would you like to follow and upvote me.

You know what they say...5th tries a charm!

You may also want to use this tool to open accnt for friends and family members: https://account.steem.vc/

Steem should remain a little exculsive. Not totaly exclusive. As we say in German klein aber fein. None of that xxl shit.

Yeah..! The Sign Up process is weird. When I knew about STEEM I jumped and started filling sign up form. After three days I got the email and I could not signup as the server was throwing a conflict error. I got the account only the second time. No one will have the time and patience to wait and try...

Steemi in the future could be even better, I really like with this social media.

I'll openly admitted I don't know a lot about the blockchain, but when I signed up last October I was approved immediately and even given 5 Steem as a reward for signing up.

I also got assigned a password and didn't have to make my own. It seems like it would be impossible to hack the password they gave me as it was huge.

Also, I was told specifically to never lose my password or I would not be able to get back into my account.

I'm wondering now if I should change it...

I applied 1 day ago and got approved within 24 hours.

can you make it so that a mute have negative impact on someones reputation , that would make it a lot easier instead of flagging all those unwanted bots.

Agreed. Reputation system is long overdue an upgrade.

Yes absolutely! Bots need to be addressed structurally or it will sink Steemit!

Clever and simple. Brilliant.
Following you now.

This sounds very exciting! I am very much looking forward to the mobile app.....and just wondering also: is there going to be a better way to find articles? Like a search method, because that is one of the most important things, and which currently doesn't exist....
Good to hear about these improvements in the pipeline.

I totally agree. There is asksteem.com but we'd still need something more powerful and friendly user.

agreed

The new @steemreports website index has a recent search function too, which will be improved over time. This might be useful until something better is integrated into Steemit.

http://www.steemreports.com/

@steemitblog

2 very important much needed fixes

  1. FIX SIGNUP PROCESSS

  2. FIX ISSUES WITH POLONIEX and other exchanges OR TARGET THE PROBLEM ON THE STEEMSIDE

Thankyou

For 2. I'd be curious to know if the problem is from Steem or exchanges (and especially Poloniex).

I believe its lack of communication from the exchange.

That might true. At least for Poloniex. They seem to be really bad at communication.

Thanks for the intro! I’ve been inspired by Steemit and the community for a while, so I’m excited to join the team. I hope to help push the brand forward and make all aspects of Steemit easier to use.

How about the STEEM core (steemd)?

Currently, a full RPC node uses 104 GB of RAM (with shared memory in RAM), I've found that not even NVME SSDs are enough to brunt the intense load of the shared memory, so forced to hold it in RAM.

Is anything going to be done about that? In the next year if nothing changes, it could require 1 TB or more RAM to run an RPC node.

Yes that's a critical focus - we've added several guys to the steem side to scale this thing and bring down those requirements.

Ned, positive to see you engaged and commenting on areas of focus and improvement. Lack of engagement previously was leading to concerns on whether your heart was really in steemit, or were getting ready to jump ship like Dan?

You have something in your hands that has the potential to be as big, and much more influential and positive than Facebook. No need to chase after Dan and his focus on new technology - which is fine

Your focus on making steemit better and bigger and more useful is also a VERY USEFUL pursuit.

Dave is so right, the potential of Steemit is huge and could literally bring facebook to its knees. People scoff at that possibility but there was a time MySpace was thought of as invincible. Combined apps like Dtube or others could seriously together overhaul the entire existence of social media. There is so much upside here and so many people are wanting an alternative to the heavy handedness of other outlets. If Ned is the one that eventually gives them what they want, history will be made.

Others have made great suggestions so far. One that I would like to see is the ability to have 'groups' similar to reddit, so people can form mini-communities within Steemit. That will enable people to stand out within these mini-communities much more, whereas now we're all 'shouting' in the 'New' section trying to get through. I know you can search all posts per tag, but it just doesn't seem to do much community building in it's current form.

We will be releasing a feature called Communities in the near future. We have outlined timelines for all our major feature releases in our 2017 Roadmap and development of that feature is going as planned. We have no new announcements on that. If you would like to view the roadmap to get an idea of the features we have planned you can find it here: https://steem.io/2017roadmap.pdf

Oh, that's awesome to read. Thanks for the link and mentioning communities. It sounds like exactly what this platform could use!

so this means i can create a community for bitconnect and not get flagged, yay

Just read the PDF

The Communities Idea sounds pretty exciting :)

Looking forward to it.

Any updates on this? I've got a PR regarding schema.org markup that would like to include the publisher attribute: https://github.com/steemit/condenser/pull/2170

I'm optimistically hoping this is the big announcement on tap for next week. Steemit Inc. has announced they were coming but the timetable moved back a bit to address other issues.

Any news/changes on Steemit/Steem will be beneficial I think.
With the altcoin market going crazy lately, Steem seems to be overdue for a price-rise and I think new developments might trigger it

Edit: I only spotted the massive upvotes on my comment after posting.. thanks so much everybody! :)

I agree that the market is due for an upswing. It's hard to see but its steadily rising anyway. The tide is slowing coming in. The number to watch is the market cap as a whole. Do you realize that in January, the entire market cap of Crypto was only 17 billion? In July, it passed 100 billion. That happened in 6 months! And today, its up another 50 billion just one month later. The crypto market is pulling in liquidity from all over the planet and its pulling it in fast. It's like a black hole for fiat. Hang on. The ride is just getting started. The fact that Steem is even in the top 50 coins is going to mean amazing things.

Oh, I am fully aware. I've been in crypto since late 2013 when the first major boom hit the news.
Regardless, crypto is very new. I have been trying to get many RL friends to try, or atleast look at Steemit and frankly, nobody really seems to care to even look at it. Only people who see value in crypto get into Steemit, and those who don't, don't. At this point, the majority of the world still sees no value in it. I think Steemit has massive potential if it can keep up, but we won't be hitting real critical mass for another year IMO. So for this reason I see Steem doing a 4x in the coming months maybe, but it will take longer to go much higher.

Only people who see value in crypto get into Steemit, and those who don't, don't.

I am not so sure about that statement. I came here for the social/real sharing/ freedom, experience. A lot of the people I see in the homesteading community seem to be here for the knowledge base, not the money base. The artist, seem to be here for the exposure, and the money base it has the potential for. I think the non monetary aspects of steem needs to receive greater attention.

Yes/No/Maybe.. I think if it's exposure you're seeking, perhaps a relatively small 300K userbase is a suboptimal choice and it's likely that the monetary aspect did play some role in deciding to join up. As for the homesteading community part, again, Yes/No/Maybe. Right now the Steemit community as a whole is 'one' community, but there are not many niches inside that community because the features aren't there yet. I don't think many people have bookmarked their favorite tag to visit every day, like they do with Reddit?

I have a feeling any big changes on the site will go largely unnoticed for a while by the investment community. At some point there will come a "what the hell have we been missing?" moment, not necessarily tied to any timely news.
I feel like there's a real chance for broad based value growth due to regular people actually using and interacting with the Steem currency. I'd prefer that scenario any day over investors "pumping & dumping" for quick profits.
And you pretty much just have @topinvestor2021 to thank for the comment cash! That vote was 95%+ of the rewards so far. I "chained" together 4 accounts I own for ease of voting but it's not worth that much!

Well, the D-Tube stuff seems to have driven the price up a little bit, not too long ago. I think news might spread faster these days than we realize..!

I agree @pandorasbox. Steemit is a community so that all members should help one another by creating small communities in order to learn, get fun and grow up over time.

I agree @pandorasbox. Steemit is a community so that all members should help one another by creating small communities in order to learn, get fun and grow up over time.

keep on trucking