Just a few thoughts on @Ned’s live stream yesterday, mostly because I couldn’t waste this screen capture:
The stream focused on answering questions in response to the recent announcement that Steemit, Inc is laying off 70% of its staff, as outline in this post.
The livestream, and some very in-depth responses can be viewed here.
Steem Inc has been performing sub-optimally because it’s been ‘trying to do too much’
So the solution is to now cut 70% of the staff so the development team can work on the fundamentals of securing the blockchain so it’s affordable, so it can scale and so it can support SMTs effectively.
The message was that Steemit Inc is effectively providing too much for free to developers (all the data storage for example), and the future has to be developers fronting more of their own costs, like @steemmonsters does.
I get this, cut back, reduce costs, this is more sustainable in the long term. FINE.
This stripping back was generally welcomed in the comments, it’s in line with decentralisation after all.
Although personally I thought this was a bit spinny: the original reason given for the strip back was the fall in the value of crypto currency, now it’s because it’s functional to do so. (Although in fairness, both can be true at the same time).
Shutting down steemit is an option
This is what that reference to Destiny was about at SF3 – It’s @Neds idea for a replacement to steemit, which he seems to view as fundamentally flawed, and not being capable of fulfilling the proof of brain function, hence why it’s been in ‘maintenance mode’.
NB – this is only an option and if all the blogging functions on steemit disappear people could access the blogging side of things via busy and steempeak etc. There was a mention of just maintaining the wallet/ key store aspects of steemit.
This confirms the idea that SMT and businesses being run on the blockchain is the future. No real surprise here.
There was an overwhelmingly positive response to @ned’s talk
OK I don’t understand much about the technical issues, but most developers and witnesses present were of the opinion that they could take up the slack with the rollback of Steemit Inc, but that there needs to be better communication. On this note… I recommend this excellent video response by @urasoul. He’s a witness and a C++ programmer, so it’s very informed!
I got this sense from the live comments, unfortunately though a lot of the sensible comments were drowned out by a constant stream of juvenile banter from half a dozen or so people. I wish they had just shut up, I had to full screen the stream in the end to get rid of them.
Anyway, with Steemit Inc rolling back, hopefully in a planned way, it looks like there’s ‘interesting’ times ahead.
One unanswered question… that will forever remain unanswered – why no buffer?
As @ats-david pointed out in his comment to @Ned’s original post… it is inconceivable that a crypto-business would not put money by in the good times to buffer them through the bad times.
Given that this is a platform/ business with an anarcho-capitalist ethos, a suspicious person might conclude Steemit Inc did cash out a big phat wad of cypto during the boom times, and most of this money went to a handful of individuals, rather than a buffer fund, which is fully in line with an anarcho-capitalist mindset.
Of course we can never prove how much money went to a buffer and how much to individuals, because they have the right to privacy: I don’t know who has been employed by the company or anything about the money flows. And this type of privacy, it’s also part of an anarcho-capitalist mindset.
In the absence of any data, logic might lead a neutral person to this ‘suspicious’ conclusion.
If this is the case, it’s definitely in our interests that the company be scaled back and a more diverse range of people take over both those functions it has been performing, and those functions it hasn’t been performing effectively (yet still paying people for?).
Well somebody had to say it!