The monthly ‘witness chats’ hosted by @shadowspub are one of the best ways of learning more about how steemit works: the last two chats have been well (?) attended by over a dozen witnesses, and the format consists of witnesses introducing themselves (which takes about 15 minutes!), followed by a summary of projects some of the witnesses are working on, and then a more general and open series of discussions addressing some of the ‘issues’ on steemit.
update: the latest recording is now available here.
The chats allow steemians to ask direct questions of the witnesses, or if you want to be more passive then just spending 2 hours listening in/ following the chat still gives you a real insight into ‘what’s occurring’ here on the platform!
If you want to learn more about steemit moving forwards then I thoroughly recommend listening out for future chats, which seem now to be a regular thing around this time of the month. Here's the link again to the last show and past shows from @shadowspub: 'steemit witness chats'.
In this post, I'm just going to summarize what I learnt from my two hours (well spent) in discord yesterday and offer a brief analysis of the chat-discourse. I mean it's been three whole days since I last wrote a post about steemit, and it's about time I got back to my 'first rule of steemit', which is to mainly talk about steemit....
(And a handy excuse for a picture to front the post with*)
What I learnt
NB I’m writing this having just woken up with my brain working at a million miles hour at 1.30 a.m. so these are semi-random, selected personal and sociological observations rather than an attempt to accurately systematically summarise everything that occurred, I’m fairly sure someone else will do that anyway.
Spamming and how to stop it
This was one of the first topics under discussion, and there seems to be a near-consensus view that limiting the bandwidth of new users is the way forwards to stop spamming, although a lot of people expressed their concern that this would also prevent newer users who cannot afford to invest in the platform from engaging.
I got the impression that these concerns were largely dismissed, with the feeling that genuine new users should ‘work their way up’ with downward delegation for 'worthy' newbies being the solution to initial bandwidth restrictions.
In general, it seems that witnesses are very comfortable with high levels of inequality and would rather seek a quick fix technological solution to spam which disproportionately disadvantages the poor. NB - this is merely a sociological observation on the nature of the discourse in the chat, not a criticism.
On reflection - this would have been a good question to ask on this issue: I personally haven’t really had a problem with spam, so is this issue no.1 on the agenda ATM because witnesses get more of it?
Or to put another way: is spam a platform-level problem or just a ‘witnesses and other rich and powerful people’ getting irritated by spammers’ problem? (Because there aren’t that many of them irritating me!)
Delegation - good or bad?
There is also a near consensus that delegation is a positive thing, which I guess follows on from the consensus of the likely-coming ‘limiting bandwidth’ solution to spam. Many of the witnesses delegate, and @crimsonclad is especially involved in delegating.
Two useful tools which allow you to check whose delegating to who (thanks to @abh12345 and @ura-soul for the links)
@ats-david was just about the only voice speaking out against delegation, by pointing out that it undermines one of the central premises of the platform by encouraging individuals to not take responsibility for their SP: In his own words:
Delegation removes responsibility/accountability from users. The entire point of PoS is defeated by it. It's probably the number one reason why the platform has gone to shit so quickly (combined with linear rewards) since last spring/summer.
I’m going to have to take this away and think about it - personally I can see the benefits of delegation, especially for newer/ poorer users, but I am also extremely uncomfortable with the ‘patronage’ aspect of delegation.
There is also something feudalistic about it: it does sort of create ‘fiefdoms’.
(In fact I see many parallels between feudal society and steemit… and I’m claiming ‘techno-feudalism’ as a descriptor of the platform here and now!)
Voting, rewards, flagging
This wasn’t majorly high up the agenda but there was a brief discussion of how most people are afraid of flagging because of retaliation, and that something ideally needs to be done to make downvoting more usual… if this were the case then ‘retaliation’ would be less likely.
@aggroed suggested three vote options - upvote, downvote which doesn’t affect reputation and flag, which I think has general agreement.
The idea of having a separate ‘power pool’ for downvoting was also mooted.
Hardforks and (de?) centralised power?
The bit I’m most likely to mis-explain!
@timcliff managed to increase my knowledge of Hardforks exponentially in just 5-10 minutes of monologue (/dialogue) - basically Hardforks have to be agreed on by 17/21 of the top 20 (+1) witnesses for them to take place: and ‘voting’ on Hardforks essentially involves each witness either applying a proposed change to their server (a yes vote) or not (a no vote).
17/21 suggests there needs to be an extremely high level of consensus to make any changes to the algorithmic techno-architecture of the platform.
@timcliff also reminded us that although most (all?) previous hardforks have been instigated by Steemit Inc, this is only because they are the ones who have the coding skills to suggest and implement such changes, and one of the things he’s currently working on is ‘coding out’ some changes which will possibly be implemented in future hardfoks.
He’s also planning on writing a future post/s to try and demystify the whole process and get more people involved in developing hardfork changes. As I (mis?) understood it, 'anyone' is free to write some code which instigates a change and if 17/21 witnesses implement these changes, then change happens…
I say ‘anyone’ - somewhat obviously you’re going to have to be known among the witnesses and trusted for them to implement changes.
Witness Liability
The show actually started here: with @ura-soul highlighting new legislation coming into effect on 25th May concerning the liability of witnesses about data on the blockchain…. it’s actually quite an interesting issue about whether or not they will be liable for the content stored on their servers - it isn’t yet clear whether or not they will be according to new legislation coming in on 25th May.
What surprised me was that some witnesses were quite blazze about the issue and maybe fail to realise that what I think @ura-soul is doing in this ‘boring but important research’ is highlighting the fact that relatively minor changes now (maybe even just in what the witnesses technically label themselves in writing) may save massive litigation issues further down the line. But having said that, it seems that it’s just frustratingly ambiguous.
Further sociological observations
Most witnesses are American, with a smattering of Europeans, and this seems especially true of the top 20,. I didn’t raise it during the chat (didn’t seem much point) but if we consider steemit as a techno-social phenomenon taking into account offline realites, power seems to be decentralised mostly around the state of Tennessee.
If you don’t speak fluent English, you’d struggle to keep up with the discussion, let alone join in with the bants/ understand the humour, which is subtle at times, but necessary to get a feel for the ‘witness vibe’.
@timcliff mentioned the 17/21 consensus thing, but it was also mentioned that five of the witnesses are basically ‘bought’ (no names mentioned) - that is controlled by Whale accounts. Now I’m no mathematician, but if those five want to collude to stop a hard fork, they can! Funny kind of decentralisation?
correction - made an error here, according to @timcliff what he actually said was (see comment below):
there are around five large accounts that have a large influence over the witness voting, and you basically need to get votes from at least a few of them if you want to be in the top 20.
A comment by @ura-soul suggested that you shouldn't publicly agree with anything @jerrybanfield says if you want to keep your community witness upvotes.
Anyway, just a few comments, for what they’re worth… all in all it was a very informative two hours and kept me distracted from the damn royal wedding which was nice.
Final final words…
All of the above is to the best of my knowledge, and my interpretation, hopefully I haven't misrepresented anyone due to being a bit tired @ what's now 3.00 a.m. !