Good evening @thecryptodrive. Thank you for reaching out to me. I know my diatribe comes off as harsh, but I'm catching up to everything just now and realized that I have a serious problem with this whole thing and the attitudes from some of the other witnesses has me concerned.
When I read through the justifications for these omnibus changes, I am not convinced that the reasons given are sufficient for making them all at once or at all. Nobody is focusing on making Steem easier, the singular reason all my friends have left the platform. It's just not fun for anyone outside of someone like myself who is very much into Crypto and a risk taker. Most people just want to have fun. When are we going to make Steem more fun for the average person?
Some time ago I was creating my own social network, which I'm going to write about in more detail in my next post on this matter. We had a 96 page business plan demonstrating every aspect of the platform. From the UI to the economics, we had to justify everything to the venture capitalists and heads of corporations we were meeting. Now, the plan wasn't a success, but the amount of detail provided a level of clarity I've never achieved in a proposal before or since. We even conducted a nation wide poll to determine our market and audience.
Now maybe the 50/50 split will in fact be better for the Creator, but what I want if we're going to be trusting witnesses to make these huge economic changes to the network is a degree of clarity that borders on crystal. I want concerted outreach on Reddit and Twitter and YouTube, scientific polling, off-chain testing if possible or simulations showing the predictions in practice, incrementalism and a real dialogue. The comments section isn't enough. The Witness statements aren't enough for me. The Witnesses have a massive responsibility to us the Creators and to the users who just want to enjoy the platform, but I'm not getting the sense that they have any doubts or humility about their position... save for you.
There just isn't that much of a formal process that Witnesses have to go through to earn our trust. I've only given my vote to 3 witnesses because I believe they've earned my trust and none of them are in the Top 20. Maybe you'll be the first. :)
I'll have a look at Neosteem.
Thanks for your time and have a fine evening.
Hi @distantsignal, yes please engage on neosteem.com and add your thoughts on the HF21 changes, the problem is the community currently has a fragmented voice, posts like yours pop up everywhere and then are no longer discoverable. If we can collate discussion in one place we can truely see who is onboard with the changes and who is not.
Also such changes can't really be tested in a testnet because users won't behave with fake money as they would with real money, so you kind of have to just launch and iterate from there. Luckily the rewards split can be reversed back if it really sucks, but then we would be playing catch-up getting users back. It would be good if the rewards splits were controlled by witness parameter or by SPS proposal consensus so it doesn't require a HF every time and upset exchanges.
Oh I just remembered https://palnet.io have launched a frontend that has PAL tokens which have the 50/50 distribution and a 4 week powerdown as well as a free downvote pool, so theoretically you can test the theory there.
I hear you on the complexity of Steem and end users have lives and families and no time to dig deep into complex mechanics, it needs to be easy. We are trying to do that with neosteem.com and create a nice easy way for communities to interact and ensure discussion and evergreen and discoverable, one cool thing we will do is make it possible for topic creators to earn part of the beneficiary rewards so that they are incentivised to keep the discussion flowing on their topic.
We should have this by next week. The neosteem token has also been reserved on Steem-Engine to give out as a supplementary engagement token, but we haven't enabled that yet as we would like to give some thought to the tokenomics
I am interested in the 96 page business plan you did, I often pitch Steem to exchanges and payment integrators and could be of use. Feel free to DM me on Discord thecryptodrive#8144 with the draft.
Have a good evening as well.
Good morning,
I think you've hit the nail on the head with Palnet. As an experiment we should let people migrate there and run that experiment with that specific reward structure and then report on the results. If positive, then make the changes here. Will continue my thoughts on Neosteem. Thanks!