Thanks for keeping us informed with the current ongoing discussions of the witnesses and the Steem dev team, @timcliff. I can see why this is a much debated issue, and I get why some of you witnesses are skeptical to increasing the bandwidth, since it could easily lead to less interest by exchanges, as well as more spam.
I don't really think new users will be annoyed by bandwidth limitations if they 1) know it's there before they hit it, and 2) they are able to preform a reasonable amount of transactions before they hit the limit.
About how many transactions would a brand new users have to do before getting limited?
That last part is a really important question. Unfortunately the answer right now is we don’t know. It depends on a lot of factors, and it changes.
Defining what the limits are is a really important part of this to get right IMO.
Oh, that makes it really complicated then. Would it be possible for someone to create an app/website that could display something like "current number of available transactions"? Or is this a metric that is too complex to display in such a manner?
I believe it is too complex with the current rules unfortunately. That is one of the biggest problems.
Ah, that's unfortunate! Would this be something that could be changed/"fixed" at one point? Because I believe we would solve a very big part of this problem if we were able to tell exactly for many transactions a user has left.
Right now it's flaky but I have always relied on it to keep tabs on my bandwidth and VPGenerally, you can see this if you go to https://steemd.com/@[your username]
Ah, that's good to know. Maybe it would be possible to display this for those who run out of bandwidth in the Steemit UI, so they know what's wrong.