 which user interaction is shrinking month over month.
Any testing regimen that does not involve testing these three things first and foremost, right out of the gate, is not a testing regimen for the Steem blockchain. It's a lie and it's a joke, but it's not a testing regimen.
You may think this is overly harsh and phrased too aggressively, but let me tell you that I am deliberately turning it down a couple of notches over what I really think. When I say this is a massive, massive failure that reflects a complete disconnect between what the Witnesses should have been doing and what they were actually doing, I'm being kind and grandfatherly.
You literally have three jobs. Make sure the content can continue coming in. Make sure the content can be voted on. And make sure there are new people coming in to help drive the platform. Everything else is secondary at best and way down the line at worst.
I'm not saying to wait until everything is perfect, though with the amount of obsessive crypto cultists hanging out on Steemit, that might be a good plan considering that I've heard people saying that the Steem blockchain is the salvation of mankind, but I am saying that if I were employing you, and this were my business, you would be out on your ass. No if's, and's, or but's.
But I am a tiny stakeholder and ultimately meaningless in a world where proof-of-stake is the only major differentiator that matters a damn. It doesn't matter what I write, it doesn't matter what I do, it doesn't matter what I vote for, it doesn't matter how eloquent I am – I simply don't matter. And since that's the case, I have an amazing ability to speak freely and not care.
I want to be really clear, this is not personal. You seem to be a perfectly reasonable human being who is extremely devoted to what you're doing. I respect that. As far as it goes, and as much as I respect anybody who's doing this, I respect you – but that doesn't have anything to do with the job that I see having been done on hard fork 21 and now hard fork 22.
I would expect someone to fall on their swords for this sort of thing out in the real business world. Someone would lose their job. Not being able to onboard users for even an hour, much less a day, is a death sentence. It's a social media platform first and foremost, and while onboarding has been outsourced to some tiny degree, the numbers don't lie. All of this delegation mechanical breakage is an active detriment.
Again, it's not personal. It's purely professional. Which is more than I can say about how the last couple of hard fork sudden pursued, and someone needs to say it openly.
So I'm doing so.
You mean 20?
By all means, vote against all of the current witnesses (indeed especially the witnesses at the time of HF20) but it is my sincere belief that other witnesses could do no better under the circumstances, and could certainly do worse. It is not even clear to me that you know what witnesses do. But that may not matter to you and wanting to seeing someone fall on a sword is a defensible response to bad outcomes.
I was going to let that one go, but -- yes, yes, that one, too. The last several HF have been terrible from a mechanical point of view and really hurt the overall set of platforms that have been trying to leverage the blockchain.
I absolutely agree with you that other witnesses could have done no better under the circumstances and could have certainly done worse.
That is a problem. When the best that I can hope for as a user of the platform is that the people who are ostensibly most invested and most interested in that platform being stable, growing, and improving its financial returns so that they are financial returns grow in common, end up repeatedly failing to maintain the basic operation of that platform that they are at least ostensibly charged with preserving for their own best interest not just mine – it's deeply troubling. When I agree that, given the circumstances, I can't figure out how someone else could have done a better job (except in testing very basic functionality which makes up some of the most common transactions on the blockchain, which any reasonable engineer would have tested first), that makes me terribly aware that the underlying technology and "circumstances" themselves are aggressively against doing what I consider as both an engineer and someone with a financial interest to be best practice.
Ultimately this is a bad situation for everyone, but it's particularly bad for the Witnesses.
And I'll be honest, even after several years on this platform, I'm not sure that I can reasonably state what Witnesses do – because not even the Witnesses have a consistent, reasonable answer to that outstanding question beyond "get paid to run servers which maintain the consistency of the blockchain and, theoretically, decide collectively on when to accept the deployment of a hard fork" – which they have never denied, even though we have had several which have been absolute, complete, unquestionable debacles.
There's a lot of talk about trying to pick Witnesses who are invested in the community, who have good ideas for future development, and all sorts of other crap, but none of it ever seems to really make a difference. All that really makes a difference is whether or not their servers deliver blocks and how much of the money that they get (theoretically) from skimming the top of the rewards pool gets reinvested in vote buying directly or indirectly vote buying through delegation.
And I don't even care about that part. I leave that for other people to care about.
When it comes to bad outcomes, what I really want to see is the people who are responsible for them to feel some pain because they have negatively impacted the people who believe in the product. In the corporate world, someone would get sacked. In the crypto world, we've seen on multiple occasions if you screw people over and make a run with their money, people compete all the more to give you more money, so it may be that I'm simply poorly conditioned for the development environment I find myself in.
Regardless, the right way for the maintainers of the blockchain (such as they are) to respond to a situation in which a technological deployment which they were responsible for testing for several weeks which ended up effectively making onboarding impossible for the biggest creator of accounts should be abject horror and not a sort of plodding complacency. I don't want to read a carefully phrased and disconnected technological excuse followed by an actual mischaracterization of how the platform actually works. I want to read how the company/responsible parties are actively horrified by the fact they can't bring people on board. I want them to register that, from an investor's point of view, this is one of the worst possible outcomes for what is effectively a mechanical patch to the database. And I don't want to read them telling the people who should be most emotionally invested in the platform that unless they vote on the safest possible content with the most restricted possible topics, they can expect their votes to be meaningless at both the macro and the micro level.
I would like somebody to realize that these are big deals and that they are being dealt with in exactly the opposite of the right way.
As I said, I don't expect that to be the case. I don't expect a representative of Steemit or one of the top 20 Witnesses to come out and say, "This is really fucked up and we are terribly sorry. We blew this. There is no way in a reasonable universe this should have happened. Here are the people who are responsible for this happening. Here is what we are going to do to make sure this never happens again. And by the way, everything you do on the platform matters, please keep engaging with the content that you enjoy and want to see more of and ultimately want to see rewarded."
I will never see that happen. I will never hear that happened. That will never happen. The Steem blockchain has had three years for someone to step up and do that. To step up and say that. They have chosen not to at every opportunity.
This is a terrible shame and the users deserve better, but they won't get it.
This is not true. There have been at least two releases which were fully pushed out by the developers and blocked by the witnesses. There are other situation where developers have discussed the situation with witnesses prior to release and it was clear that some course correction needed to be made. This then avoided the situation of getting to a final release which is then blocked (ultimately a waste of time and resources).
Again you keep going back to "basic operation" when in fact basic operation isn't good enough. If all we wanted were that, we'd need almost no updates (occasionally there is a bug or security issue found but that has been very rare and usually addressed without too much disruption, and it would happen even less if we weren't pushing forward with enhancements). With no major updates or forks basic operation would be damn close to 100% uptime and might well actually be that for years on end. But I personally don't think that is good enough. We need to push forward with improvements and that means taking some risks.
As far as taking responsibility, I felt that the post-mortem posts from Steemit after the HF20 screwups were pretty reasonable and that progress is indeed being made to improve the process over time. There wasn't even a public testnet at all until fairly recently, now there is. That's not everything, but it is something.
This is not true. There have been at least two releases which were fully pushed out by the developers and blocked by the witnesses. There are other situations where developers have discussed the proposed implementation with witnesses prior to release and it was clear that