Justin Sun, This is how you win our support...

in #tron5 years ago (edited)

@justinsunsteemit

You are probably already well aware of the degree of skepticism the community has about this acquisition or partnership or whatever you would like to call it. We are an intelligent and diverse community, and we can be a bit difficult, but we are a capable bunch, despite many of us being a bit rash and over emotional at times.

While some are calling this a takeover and have written you off immediately, most of us just want assurance that you are going to be better for us as a community than Ned was, which really shouldn’t be hard on your part.

If you don’t win us over, you’ve added a new tool to your arsenal. You have a recognizable name on your list, a few headlines to raise prices, and a platform for your current tron family. Not a bad deal I guess. If you do win us over though, you have a new wave of cavalry who believe in your vision and have thousands of hours in experience running communities and creating valuable content. We’ve been experimenting here for a while so we know what works and what doesn’t work and many of us are very good at what we do, whether that’s tech, community building, making art or writing great content. If you win us over, you can fast track many of your future plans because we will help you build this place into something that can compete with the likes of Facebook and at the same time you’ll be able to fix any problems Tron has had with its image.

I don’t know what the Tron community is like, but the steem community cares about things beyond money. We like money, we want money, there are no illusions about that, but we care about the bonds we’ve formed here and take personal responsibility for its success and failures. Part of the reason Ned was not very popular was that he did not seem to recognize how much of the blockchain a success was due to the community members. He didn’t address many of our biggest concerns, and many might say the best choice he made was to put someone else in charge of interacting with the community because he was awful at it.

We will not be swayed by fluff. That’s why we didn’t like him much. He treated us like we were stupid, or he avoided us because he couldn’t handle the pressure of having to listen to the people who care more than he did. During the livestream, we wanted to hear from you and get real information about what this all means, not “你属什么?” although, once we know we can trust you, those kinds of topics will be fun to learn about too. Right now we are worried about the future of the place we love and could not care less about that.

You strike me as an intelligent and capable guy who can read people and situations very well. You are obviously very ambitious and tactful. These could very well be what makes steem and tron a huge success, but it could also destroy everything we’ve built. If we don’t trust you, you basically bought a name and a blockchain which could easily be replicated, perhaps by some traditional social media company or a competing blockchain. If you gain our trust, you will have a huge army of people working for you who are not even necessarily on your payroll. We can be your Unsullied Warriors who send you straight to your iron throne, but we need to know you won’t burn down our city. You need to prove yourself to us.

Here is how you win us over

Give the community a balance of power

The most essential thing for you to do to gain our trust is to prove that you are sincere in your promises of true decentralization. This means a decentralization of power. We want the community at large to have more say than you do when it comes to the steem ecosystem. You be the captain, but a captain that trusts his crew.

The fact that steemitinc has always had such a massive stake (and the way it was attained) has always been a problem and it’s a reason many good developers, witnesses, and community contributors left. (You probably know that we once had far more active users than we do now.)

Telling us that you won’t vote out any witnesses you don’t like and vote in your own people is not enough. We want some kind of proof, whatever you can give us. Making it difficult for you and a few of your tron supporters to even do so is what we want. This is how you gain instant support from the majority of the community.

I’m not exactly sure the best way you could do this, so I’d love to hear from witnesses and other tech savvy members or people who have put a whole lot of time and energy into debating the technicals and economics.

From my limited understanding, one thing you could do is distribute the ninja mined stake to the community. If you don’t know what it is, just search for it, it’s been one of the community’s biggest complaints from the beginning until now. Whether or not this will create a sufficient balance of power, I hope others will chime in on.

You could also commit to burning a certain percentage of your stake at regular intervals.

In any case, a guarantee that you not only won’t but CAN’T run this place like a dictator is really the fastest and easiest way you can keep us all here and excited, bring old steemians back in the hundreds of thousands, and quickly attract lots of new users.

Get to know us a little

I recognize that you are probably extremely busy. That’s ok. You don’t need to read every post on trending. What we do ask is that you do keep in contact with our witnesses and community leaders, listen to their input and respect their opinions. My sense so far is that you will be good at this. I got a sense that your EQ is higher than what we are used to around here.

Leave as much in place as possible

We have had a lot of problems over the years. We have solved most of them, and and we have mostly done it as a community, independent of steeminc. One of the best things you can do for the community is to get out of its way and let it run itself whenever it can, and it usually can.

We have seen many hard forks and how everything plays out under a variety of different rule sets. The community understand this ecosystem better than you will for a few years. Leave as much as you can to us, but please support us when we come to a consensus about what we need.

We want someone who carries out the will of the community and if you do that we will give you more support than you can imagine. There is so much untapped potential in this community and the more you respect our ideas, the more you can tap into it.

Do what you do best at

Get us some positive press. That seems to be the one and only thing we have been lacking from the beginning until now and it's one of the areas where you really shine.

We won’t be bribed....easily

Money won’t be enough to win our hearts but I think most of us would be pretty sour if Tron users were the only ones getting airdrops, or if the airdrops were tiny. We feel a bit sold out right now the way Ned didn’t engage with us well, and then disappeared when the price was down. Now he’s sold us off and we just have to deal with it. You can imagine how that feels. Large airdrops won’t win us over as devout followers which is what you really want but it will probably get us complaining less and way more open to hearing your vision, so it’s definitely something to consider carefully how to approach.

After you give us some reassurances that go beyond words, and show us that 你不会跟独裁一样控制所有的,then you can tell us about your damn zodiac. 😝

—-

I can’t speak for everyone but I want to like you. I’m very skeptical of people with huge ambitions, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt until I see a reason not to.

And to fellow steemians, please share any additions about what you hope to see from Justin and any improvements or additions you might make to my suggestions. 😄

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@ned's stake made this an inevitability. I'm glad he waited to sell as long as he did. There were two possibilities in the sale: sale to a Goolag or bankster, or sale to a visionary that wanted to make Steem transcendent. @ned did good by us by choosing a visionary, and now let's hope Justin Sun has a great vision.

A problem we will face is that stake @ned sold is the ability to centralize Steem. The only reason it wasn't used to do that is @ned's philosophy, and now Justin Sun's philosophy is the controlling factor.

I think there is a way to resolve the issue that @bryan-imhoff suggested, and that is to change how we vote for witnesses. Presently our stake is undiminished on each witness vote we cast, and this is why 75M Steem can simply replace all the witnesses. @aggroed revealed that @yabapmatt had ~50M Steem in votes, so 75M is enough to install even top witnesses all by yourself.

But making witness votes 1 Steem 1 vote means that every vote you cast depletes your VP for witness votes. If Tron cast 20M votes for one witness, they'd only have 55M votes left. While Tron could probably control who gets to be consensus witnesses with 1/3 of the VP on the platform in normal conditions, they couldn't simply force all top 20 into power. They could force several, particularly if supported by whales like @freedom, @pumpkin, @blocktrades, and @berniesanders.

Thanks!

That's interesting. At first glance the math goes over my head but I get the main point. Ideally we can put as much power into the hands of community consensus (regardless of stake) but since we are working with DPoS, I don't have many ideas about how to do that which I am happy with so I tend not to write much on these topics.

My feeling is always that if we keep the right people around and keep working together, we will figure something out. The bidbots going really made me a believer in the witnesses. Perhaps it was naive of me, but at least things are much better than a year or two ago and its not just about the bull market.

Thanks for the insights. Enjoyed reading your post mate

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If you do the math, they would just have to spread their stake to be able to vote in 20 witnesses. However, what you can't forget is that with 30 votes, you create more overlap making it more difficult. We have to get more steemians to vote and we have to get more people to powerup and vote.

This is the only way to "take controll"

You are correct. If we don't vote for witnesses, it doesn't matter what rules govern how our VP applies to witness votes.

I hope Justin really takes the time to really understand how our whole eco system works. Steem is the best blockchain in the world in my opinion. It works awesome and so much has been built on it already. If I was Justin I would not do ANYTHING for an entire year just to learn how we work here. Then.....collaborate with the community and make a smart move and smart decision. Lots of good ideas will surface on both sides between now and then.

This this and more this! If there’s one thing I hope Justin takes away from my post, if he so happens to read it, it’s exactly what you said

This has been on the cards from almost day one at Steemit inc. I said in my article 3 years ago that somebody would come along, takeover the company and improve it. Now let us wait and see!

Cg

Sure, it was always a possibility but one that most people seemed to skip over. I skimmed over your post because I wanted to go back and edit out some typos on mine first. I'll go check it out in a bit.

'You be the captain, but a captain that trusts his crew.'

Think I've read most of them now. All those post about the "take-over". Positive, as well as negative ones.

This post of yours is to me by far the most sensible one I've read sofar.
Thanks for (finally) some common sense. Lets hope mr. Sun will read this one. Resteemed!

Thanks, I really don't understand why some people get so polarized over and over again. You'd think eventually they would learn that they can influence things for the better if they keep a cool head. It seems a lot of us are on the same page though

Ned went to bed, Just in time for the Sun rise, Steem is not dead. I wait.

Well said. Though I think we also need to win him over to some degree too. We need to show how we can go forward together and the value that we can bring to him and TRON. We need to be realistic but also strive for a good win-win endgame.

Sure! But he has all the cards right now, there isn't much we can do except try and reach out to him and really get a feel for what he's about in a more personal way that we can in a few interviews. I've been watching the Chinese interviews to try and learn what I can.

"...there isn't much we can do..."

So, you weren't speaking factually in your post?

Frankly, I vehemently disagree with the quote. We can reveal our actual strength and abilities to Sun and Tron by continuing to move forward with the improvements and continue to make Steem an acceptable platform for mass adoptions - which it has not ever been and is not yet.

If we get a wave of new users, our current retention rate of ~5% will squander that resource. We'll blow off all the expense and marketing Sun can deploy to bring us new users.

Steem can focus on retaining new users and bring our retention rate up to industry standards, and we don't need to await dispensation from the Pope to do that. We need to rein in profiteers that sacrifice authors for their ROI. We need to create communities for the purpose of easing the transition of Fakebookers, Youtoolers, and Twatters to Steem's culture and SOPs.

There have been attempts to do this, but due to several factors, they haven't been persistent or comprehensive enough. When new users with potential have come here in the past, various bots and trails have been aimed at supporting them for a limited time. It was a common phenomenon during the boom days that such users would get enough support to seduce them into thinking they could become full time bloggers on Steem, and quit their day jobs.

However, this curation effort was time limited, and cryptically undertaken so that those users wouldn't know they were being seduced into becoming dedicated to the platform, which was understandable, but sorta backfired when those it worked best on did quit their day jobs and then saw that temporary support dry up.

Such transitional support for high quality new users needs to be undertaken openly, so as not to fool them into quitting their day jobs and making it clear that it is time limited, because this will prevent them from rage quitting and feeling they have been betrayed.

It is ten times more expensive to get a new user than to keep one already here. Retention is not Sun's responsibility, and not what we need him for. We need to handle our business, and make retention acceptably supportive of the expense of marketing and bringing in new users.

Thanks!

You don't hear people admit that very often. There was a concentrated effort to upvote new users just long long enough to get them to buy steem. Its one of those shady things not enough people condemned, like vote selling, or like automated upvoting. These things couldn't possibly be good for the ecosystem.

There is a certain viewpoint that sees any purchase of Steem by a new buyer as good for Steem. I disagree, because if they become deeply disenamored of Steem as a result of that experience, they'll never buy it again, and that is bad for Steem in the long run.

While we can't control folks buying Steem and what they end up feeling about that, if we deploy duplicitous means of getting them to buy, we strongly raise the likelihood they'll regret that decision, and then we did influence whether or not they'll buy Steem going forward - in a bad way.

The most effective weapons to control a people are indoctrination, propaganda, and fear. We see where these weapons are used most, the people suffer the most, and are least devoted to their leaders. We shouldn't follow that path. It's stupid.

What I could have said is “this right here is what we can do”. We can always do SOMETHING but I was responding to this idea that we need to impress Justin Sun, and I say “What for?” He bought steemit, if he actually figures out what the hell he just bought he will be impressed and want to listen to the reasonable members of the community about how to move forward. I just don’t like the idea of people kissing his ass and trying to curry favor with him In order to get on his good side which I already see some people doing. I think we can be above that and I think being above that is how we build a relationship with him

As for how to stop the problems you mentioned, perhaps it’s hard to stop because everything is so grey. Some of the most obnoxious abusers have protected us from even more obnoxious abusers. Some people help others immensely but benefit disproportionately, so it’s not so easy to manage. I’m not saying give up, but that’s why I think we should be proud of how far we have come already

A lot of things seem grey when not viewed from extreme positions. I tend to extremity =p.

I also note the obsequity of so many. I quiver with revulsion at the pandering I've seem aimed at whales hereabouts, and Sun is THE whales' whale. I certainly don't advise we do any such thing.

But I do advise we undertake an extreme position regarding retention. For me it's natural to take extreme positions, others may find it uncomfortable. Sun's gift is marketing. He has suddenly become available to our community, and I reckon we should maximize the benefit to Steem potential from that gift.

A lot of folks realize that Steem token value derives from the market for it, and because of this they desire mass onboarding. Well, they're absolutely right about value, but we have had a spurt of mass onboarding, during the pump. I got here in May '17, just before a lot of others. Almost all that cohort are gone, because Steem isn't able to keep them here.

A primary driver of retention is rewards, and folks that expect rewards from their posts that see others better rewarded for lesser quality posts (everyone is biased to favor their own work) get disappointed and proceed to try stuff to get that paper. They'd try bots and learn that wasn't quite as profitable as it looked, and most try pandering, which is just annoying to all but the most narcissistic whales. When all that failed, they'd ragequit.

Nothing works because financial manipulation via stake weighting sucks ~90% of rewards into whale wallets. Whales can back that off and allow ~30% of rewards to go to actual content creators. Something that works on gamblers is occasional jackpots, and whales might consider dropping big votes on folks that have put up something of higher quality than normal from time to time. That rare remunerative event is far more retentive than it should be, but that's the human condition.

If we can get retention up to industry standards, that sacrifice of ROI by whales can be more than offset by marketing from Justin Sun's expertise bringing more folks to the platform, and actually driving up the price of Steem.

While this is not to prove anything to Sun, it is going to prove that Steem will make him money if he doesn't break it. He is a Tron booster, and his immediate vision for Steem seems to have been something like folding it into Tron, to make Tron more attractive. If he realizes Steem is better as an adjunct to Tron, rather than a component, we'll be happiest with that relationship, I think.

We have been pioneers in a new frontier, and while Steem has been through rough spots, it's still here and we should be proud of the community that has kept it going. Lets not rest on our laurels though. We really ought to find a way to manage governance and retention such that we can onboard millions of new users that won't ragequit AND keep them from voting Kardashians for witness.

I'd like to retire on my presently paltry Steem income someday, and the price will have to moon for that to happen. The involvement of Tron can be very good and facilitate that growth, or it can turn Steem into an organ of a centralized crypto competitor that turns my dreams into dust. I'd prefer the former to the latter.

Wouldn't you?

I do not feel that rewards are the most important thing to look at when it comes to retention. Many of the people who had the rewards quit and many of the people who didn’t have rewards stuck around and eventually made things work for themselves, some have stuck around despite never making much.

Rewards are just one aspect of retention. Feeling like your voice is being heard Can be just as much of a motivator. Most of the people I know who left (and I know tons of them) did so cause they felt the witnesses and dolphins weren’t listening to them and they hated bidbots. Before this acquisition I had a feeling many of them would come back and in fact many did.

As for retiring off my current stack, sure I’d like that but that’s not a guarantee no matter what we do and I agree with you retention is the way to do it, but I think giving more power to the community is the real way to do so. There will need to be some mechanisms put in place to control reward place abuse. I hope it will be the community that comes up with it and Justin just helping us to do so smoothly.

I don’t care what chain we are on.
I don’t have many preferences about how he decides to decentralize power. I only care that he makes attempts to decentralize it, otherwise Facebook or someone else is going to come along and do the same thing and do it better. We need something that can’t be replicated.

I agree broadly with what you're saying. @jarvie has just posted regarding this exact issue, that it is the independence we are able to have from censors on centralized platforms, and the coming communities we can build to improve our growth in the directions we want to go, that are the really important values people have that Steem can provide.

While the few cents we make aren't important, as you point out, the bidbots and profiteering really rankles. Even dogs care a lot about fairness, which may seem counterintuitive. Dogs will literally fight to the death over scraps even when well fed, if those scraps are distributed unfairly. For dogs, food establishes dominance and their social value, and rewards are sort of similar for people.

I need a censorship resistant platform to speak my mind on, or I'll get censored. I'm censored everywhere else. I'm a decentralization booster, because I think it's the basis for freedom. I have concerns that the CCP is somehow linked to Tron, and I don't think either free speech or decentralization will long be permitted on a platform the CCP controls.

I’ve already been self censored on this issue :-P

Yep and if you get people to come here for other reasons we know we can control and that will always be a part of the Steem experience then they'll always have a reason to be here. If it's reward money then retention is based on something we kind of can't control because it's more speculators or the price of bitcoin which we can't control either... Don't put your dependency on things you can't control.

I don't think he has all the cards at all. He has a lot of things, but if he doesn't have the community here onside then the steemit stake will get forked out by the witnesses and the users will just walk away - rendering his purchase of Steemit Inc worthless. This is his investment too.

Agree. Justin completely aware of this. He aware of that he not only bought steem inc shares, the community in steem come as a package too. I don't think he is that dumb to mess up with the community. If you listened to their AMA video he still experiment with this steemit and steem blockhain. He wants everyone win-win. Let's see if he walks his talks. Time will tell..

Sure, but that's a nuclear option and we will walk away with .....essentially whaleshares, which was fun, and full of people I like, but doesn't seem to have a path forward. We will be hurting ourselves as much as we hurt him if we do that. I don't think we should put it off the table, but it's also something we should avoid if at all possible. But this situation is constantly changing, so who knows how we will feel next week.

Yep. He will protect the value of his stake. People seem to be ignoring that.

I should probably have something insightful and intelligent to say about the actual post (which I thought was really good and level) but all I've got is a mild excitement that I could almost read the Chinese (once again I got stuffed by characters I haven't learned yet XD) and I really need to go to bed so you just get your usual upvote and silly fyn comment and heart and a bonus resteem tonight. I'll try to do better next post ;D

We can be your Unsullied Warriors

No fucking way I will cut my balls off for Justin Sun....

I wanted to add that point, but i thought this post was not the right place for ball jokes :-D !!!! The metaphor was too good besides that though

Thank you for writing a clear cut thorough post on this. I’m sure most Steemians feel the same way about what they want to see moving forward. Sorry I don’t have any additional ideas as of the moment but wanted to stop in to tell you thank you for this well written and easy to follow post :)

Nice post; anything is better than the previous ownership structure and all the emotional baggage that entailed.

Hard not to think this is positive.

Might as well give it a chance!