Listener Review: Steem Witness Forum
In today's show which takes place monthly and is hosted by @aggroed, we the had opportunity to listen to the following people discuss a variety of topics surrounding the STEEM Blockchain and Steemit.
@timcliff - Witness #5
@carlgnash - top @curie curator, representing @curie - Witness #6
@aggroed - Witness #10
@furion - Witness #18
@pgarcgo - representing @cervantes - Witness #28
@exyle - top vlogger, representing @blockbrothers - Witness #36
@andrarchy - Community Liaison for Steemit / Director of content
Firstly, Witnesses...
A Witness plays a crucial part in how the STEEM network functions; what are their key tasks?
They're the main producer of blocks (not miners)
They maintain a price feed, which is how SBD functions
They play the role of consensus (decide whether to hard fork or not)
A witness is paid proportionally to how high they are in the witness ranks, and they get voted in, by people like you.
Cast your 30 votes here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Show format and contents
Firstly, @aggroed asked the attendees to introduce themselves, discuss their roles in the community, and talk about projects they are current involved in.
He then asked a couple of questions to the group to which anyone could respond.
These are my notes taken during the show which lasted approximately 2 hours and can be listened to here.
@andrarchy
The previous @steemitblog post was an attempt to put right some of the communication, or lack of, that took place of the past year.
Much time and energy was used re-engineering solving practical and critcal problems, and communication had to take the back seat.
The recent @steemitblog post is the beginning of a continual process of improving communication and sharing 'our' vision.
2017 was a challenging year, but 'we' are through it.
Appbase - Should help querying the STEEM Blockchain quicker.
Question from @aggroed: Where's the heat - where are the pressure points for the Developers?
Agile methodology is new to the team. Work is focused around 'Sprints', allowing short meaningful progress to be made.
'The best way to communicate is to put out frequent content and engage and comment on that...'
I think this stands for all members of the community.
@timcliff next on the mic
Shifting his focus since becoming a Witness over a year ago from producing content to now providing support to key areas of focus.
One of these key areas being the promotion of the STEEM Blockchain, to bother new users and investors.
@timcliff's recent blog: The STEEM "Shilling" Contest - 150 STEEM in prizes!! is an attempt to encourage more members to promote the currency and the Blockchain.
'If we can convince people that Steem is the currency that will take the blockchain to the masses...'
I agree that we are onto a winner if this happens.
Tim sees the need for communities and better 'hand-holding' as we grow, and believes the platform is on a good course right now.
@aggroed
Since starting out as a blogger in the main, @aggroed now runs the Minnow Support Project, is a top 10 Witness, and has 3 main objectives:
- Spread the values of PAL - Peace, Abundance, and Liberty
- Train and encourage new users
- Promote STEEM inside and outside the community
@carlgnash (@curie)
Curie is a community curation organisation and community witness with an aim to find and promote authors who have found little success thus far on the platform.
'Making sure Proof of brain is not just an empty slogan'
Voting on exceptional content, giving promising authors a stake
@curie Witness decisions taken by a general consensus and vote
Curie top curators, reviewers and operators have an equal vote in witness decisions regardless of SP - many of the stakeholders are Minnows.
@furion
Furion is a Witness and a developer.
Hi main projects right now are steempython (https://steem.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and steemdata (https://steemdata.com/)
At any one time, there can be over 200 open connections to steemdata, which is testament to the popularity of the project.
The plan for this year - more applications on the way, solidifying steemdata.
@cervantes - @pgarcgo
@cervantes is a backup witness with a focus on curating the spanish community, which has grown massively in the past year - 50000 - 60000 users - 4500 discord.
Recent involvements with @steemcleaners as part of a 'collaborative cleaning community'
@cervantes recently released the 21st volume of it's weekly magazine
Helping to support Steemit meetups - Universities in Venezuela
'The average income of a teacher in Venezuela is $4 a month'
It's easy to see just how big an impact STEEM could have in that part of the world.
@exyle - @blockbrothers
@exyle is a life blogger and vlogger focusing mainly educating listeners on the current status of STEEM and the projects surrounding the Blockchain.
He is 1 of the 4 members of the @blockbrothers team which as well as being a Witness, is focusing on the development of apps and tools:
- nozzel rpc client
- Open source voting bot with a unique feature of 1 vote per user per day (even if they post 4/5/6 times)
- steemify notification app for IOS, with a nice feature to switch user to and receive notifications from another account. Steemify is currently being developed for Android.
- Turbine - early warning system for witness nodes - coming soon - open source
A question to the forum
What are some of the biggest challenges on the STEEM Blockchain right now?
@timcliff
- efficient signups
- scalability
- fair distribution of rewards and getting noticed
Time believes the first two to be under control, and that communities and SMTs will be an aid towards the balancing of rewards
@carlgnash
- Curation isn't incentivised so well
- No Front-End currently focused on curation.
@curie are developing an application to aid in curating content which will include search filtering
Any curation community will be able to use the front end. It will have a submission system and is likely to replace Streemian.
@aggroed
'It's a hard time getting started'.
How I made $0.07 in 5 posts and how you can too!
(He must be happy, this one made 17 cents!)
A concern about user retention if people don't find a home or a community.
@aggroed quoting another MSP user discussing spending all day on a post which receives no feedback:
'Like singing your heart out to an empty auditorium'
@furion
A potential problem in the future is how the blockspace is being used - Posts consuming blockspace forever - could be a problem in future
A possible solution: A fee for the blockspace (to produce a Post) and or to penalise spammers
Images are currently off (Block)chain, it could be an option to ould take the posts out too if their are space issues in future.
@cervantes
Content discoverability.
@cervantes is looking into a 'Content Publication Pipeline'
It seems the Spanish community is not waiting for 'Communities'!
@exyle
Very happy, the 'dark ages' look to be in the past.
Curating the home page is impossible, Communities could help solve this.
If any of the speakers feel misrepresented by the notes above please let me know!
My thoughts on the show
To me, this monthly show is the next best thing to being at Steemfest. So much of the latest goings on are covered in this 2 hour slot, and I think you should try to attend if possible.
Generally, it sound like good progress is being made, both buy Steemit.inc, and the Witnesses working on their individual focus areas.
I find the show comforting, as an (small fry) investor, and member, and it's great to see the presence of @teamsteem, @neoxian, and even the @thejohalfiles who was showing off his Spanish this week! :)
My one gripe is that (occasionally), good questions are put into the chat during the show but are missed due to the speed of the chat, and the focus being on 'talk' and not reading.
I wonder if it would be possible to have a 'question box' which is reviewed by a channel mod to pick out the best questions for the speakers to answer at the end?
I shall leave you with 3 questions and statements which would perhaps be of interest to hear feedback on.
In relation to onboarding Merchants:
In relation to support from Curation teams supporting up and coming authors and the apparent lack of support for those 'in the middle' of the reputation scale:
I hope you found this content useful and wish you a good weekend
Asher @abh12345
great stuff!
Hey @abh12345 great write up and I think summarizing the panel discussion like this is really valuable - of course people can (and should!) listen to the whole thing but getting a snapshot of the talking points is great.
There may have been a slight misunderstanding of something I said here, RE the low, medium and high stakeholders voting on Curie witness decisions. I probably should have used the familiar terms minnow, dolphin and whale :) What I was trying to convey is that unlike most (all?) of the other top 20 witnesses, which are in fact high stake users (if not whales, big dolphins), many of the stakeholders who vote on Curie witness decisions are in fact minnows. I think minnows as a group have very little representation on Steem blockchain and I wanted to point out that the Curie community witness does in fact include minnows in the decision making process. All Curie top curators, reviewers and operators have an equal vote in witness decisions regardless of SP. (what I hope the words I said in the interview did NOT convey was that there are different tiers of importance within the Curie voting hierarchy - as there are none, it is a straight democracy with equally weighted votes).
I would also love to address @crimsonclad's point. I think it is a valid point for many authors that they may still not have the following needed to support consistent earning from posting despite hitting REP 60 or thereabouts. I personally think there is room for more curation efforts on Steem blockchain. But it is not the case that Curie ignores authors of higher REP completely, despite the focus on rewarding newer or "undiscovered" authors. @abh12345 you asked if I had any stats on this, so I ran a query :)
@crimsonclad you may in fact be surprised to learn that in the past 30 days Curie has upvoted 1152 posts by authors with REP 60+. Many of these have come through the sub-communities that Curie supports and through the direct follow curators (I did not cover this in the show but Curie curators who maintain an extremely high curation score for 6 consecutive months earn a "direct follow" from Curie meaning they can upvote posts through Curie with no review process). The sum total of pending and post payout for these posts in past 30 days is 33558.943 Steem token units (or whatever you want to call the units displayed as pending and post payout - supposedly SBD but obviously not when SBD peg is failing).
Here is the complete list of all posts upvoted by Curie in past 30 days with authors of REP 60+:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f4AEfLUALGmU8nfOteWPvTbUJN8JO4Gdl4V3E3xwyC4/edit?usp=sharing (the SQL query used is also included at that link)
Cheers - Carl
Excellent, thank you Carl.
That is much clearer for me now and I have edited the notes above.
I wasn't aware of this and it's an excellent thing @curie have going here, long may it continue this way.
Thanks also for the stats, I thought you might not be able to resist. I'm glad to see some support coming in for 60-70 reps, now I must find the popular tags/authors 😊
I really enjoyed the show yesterday and you presented yourself, and represented @curie excellently.
Thank you!
Hey thanks, good to hear that from you!
Very Interesting and informative post.i already read steemitblog post which give the idea of steemit community vision of 2018. Thanks for sharing.
Yes the blog was a good effort and much better than previously. Thanks for the comments!
It was interesting reading everyones opinion. Thanks for taking notes for us. I think @aggroed has uploaded an audio file one his steem account. Going to the post to listen to it.
Yes there is a link above to @aggroed's post containing the audio to the show - perhaps it isn't so clear.
Thank you for the feedback!
@aggroed has added a link to the youtube video. My headsets are able to pick up every word. The audio is clear. I am already 15 minutes in. Thanks for sharing. I could have missed this discussion if you would not have made a post about it. Thank you again.
That's great, I'm glad you are taking the time to listen in!
I have been joining Discord radios and townhalls lately and found them to be great places to know a lot of things and connect with people.
I know I started late in the engagement in discord channels but I am getting there.
Very interesting takes on some of the issues that we have especially in terms of retention. Even my community that we try to help people get some recognition and votes if a piece that they worked on all day receives little to no votes it is disheartening.
People in their first month really needs to be guided and mentored until they have sufficient bandwidth to stand on their own and hopefully found their niche and community.
Regarding higher reputation getting a curie is still possible but needs to be truly exceptional. We see this a lot in the 58-60 range that may have a lot of followers but usually their followers vote value is about .01 or even lower. Which is disheartening.
Hey man
Yeah I've struggled a bit with discord, there are simply too many servers and channels.
PAL is one to keep on your list though, for this show in particular.
Retention and recognition are pretty key, and as you know I think the main solution is engagement.
Got to make it fun, interesting, and a place people want to come back too. The cool thing is, we can get some cash for doing that too!
'Truly exceptional', that's a tough one :)
I don't blame @curie for hitting the new accounts and content, even if the new ruling has changed that a little.
Perhaps there is room for a curation team in the 60s rep - @sndbox are one but their community is invite only.
Thanks for the engaging comment, i needed a few looking at what's below!
I was talking to @futurethinker about @sndbox because their upvote is massive and the @promo-mentors would be a good fit for what they are trying to do. For most people it is hard to get in but I know that he can do it if he decides to join it.
I had a friend who tried to join and was in the final stage but she wasn't accepted. She took it hard.
I still have hope that this platform will find a balance to how people are rewarded.
Currently in 4 active Discord groups and 2 of them I am moderating but I will try to be more active in PAL.
Great idea summarizing the show - I've come to the conclusion that written summaries are just so much better than audio-visual. I think this is why my revision blog does so well compared to all the vodcasts on the same topic on YouTube - at the end of the day, it's just more efficient to read rather than watch/ listen!
Of course it's also nice to just 'be there' in the audience.
Good job.
P.S. You forgot to mention all of the clever word play on spamming in chat... I thought the 'spammit' comment as an alternative platform was particularly hilarious.
Cheers!
Yeah this is a few minutes read and the show, which would give you more, is a 2 hour listen. It's nice to have both I guess.
There was certainly a lot i missed in the chat, I could barely keep up with the chatter!
Thanks for the positive words, I guess I'll be doing the same next month then!
Well I guess you were too busy typing, I was kind of joking about the chat: entertainment value, for sure, worthwhile suggestions and sensible comments about the topics under discussion, very little of that!
Then again, it's chat, there's something about chat rooms that just makes you want to be mischievous rather than constructive.
I missed the show last time. Thank you for posting and the links. The show really help me to better understand the big picture and the way moving forward. It also gives a lot of steem topics for my further studies. Thanks a lot.
Wow that's something great to read about this witness forum you really did a great work :)
i am watching this for the first time so kind of really new experience and it was great to learn about the witness :) big thanks to you for sharing this
All are my favoutite steemians here this is fantastic post by you @abh12345 very detailed one sorry my comment does not make any value to your content