Well here is the gist of it. Basically the Witnesses are running the servers that are processing transactions, posts, upvotes...etc on the STEEM blockchain. They are basically the miners.
They are voted in based on the voters Stake Weight. So if someone has a bunch of Steem Power and they all vote for someone for Witness then they will end up in that spot. Well there are a ton of these Witnesses that aren't even involved in STEEM anymore but are just collecting the funds day after day after day. When others can't really get into that spot.
It isn't even really worth me attempting to run a Witnesses because no mater how technical you are and all of that if you don't have whale buddies to vote for you then you will just be wasting their money.
Check this out and your jaw will drop. @furion is a witness in the 22nd slot. He has totally been inactive here for the last 4 months and is actually working on another video platform called Viewly. But Every hour his STEEM Power builds.
Does he vote for anyone with his STEEM Power? No he delegates it out to vote bots so we can buy his vote. How nice.
Look at all the STEEM power coming into his account like clock work
https://steemd.com/@furion
I calculated 51 SP in the last 24 hours. This isn't including his earnings from delegating to upvote bots. Sounds great and we would all like to earn passive income like that but the fact of the matter is there are other people currently running Witness nodes who could actually contribute to the ecosystem and work on projects associated with this blockchain to improve it.
Then guys like me might as well forget about even pissing with it because I'm not in the "club."
Is there any way to solve this problem or is this platform just forever fucked?
Personally I think it can be fixed but Steemit INC and the large stake holders aren't willing to do what it takes to fix it.
STEEM served it's purpose already. To make the founders and early people rich. It already accomplished that.
Now doing something that would make all those large stake holders who are reaping great benefits from the system aren't going to want to do anything to fix it because it wouldn't immediately benefit them.
It would possible help the platform's survival and let it flourish but I think that is going to be hard.
There is a ton of good things about the platform and it is a proof of concept of what can be accomplished with blockchain.
What I want to do is have a platform that corrects a lot of issues with this system and incorporates advertisements as well to provide additional revenue streams and allow the platform to be more about content creation than this one is.
This sale of my house is going to have to go through and I would have to land additional funding to make it a reality.
How much would it cost to build a platform like Steemit? If you wind up doing something lemme know, I'd love to be an early user or beta tester and would be happy to promote it on my Youtube channel and try to bring over some early users.
It is a good question. Everything we are looking at just with STEEM and Steemit.com is literally 3+ years of development expense. That is a lot of man hours and none of that is including the work 3rd party people have put in with DTube, DLive, eSteem, Busy.org, Steepshot.....etc.
Having the existing code base is a huge advantage and speeds up development times a ton if someone is going to go off of this code base. To rebuild this on EOS would take a ton of talent and a ton of development cost.
There are couple of different routes a person could go with it. After Hardfork 20 some of the onboarding issues should be solved and also being able to comment every 3 seconds instead of waiting 20 seconds will solve a main bottle neck.
Then a person could take that code and rework the interface and pick which direction they wanted to go. They could pick for the thing to be more like Instagram so taking what Steepshot already is but allowing 1 Minute videos and all that kind of stuff or they could pick to go with someone like Busy.org with DLive / DTube type ability built in. Going purely with a DLive / DTube type platform I feel is tougher because the hosting expenses get out of this world expensive. That becomes a tough cookie to crack. That is why other platforms have a hard time even attempting to compete with what YouTube is. Essentially you have company worth Billions eating the cost of running that platform at a loss or barely a break even some quarters. they are playing a very long term game with it. Most can't afford to do that.
But to build what STEEM and Steemit is on EOS could easily take Millions of dollars to be honest unless someone was unbelievably talented and got a couple other core guys who were ridiculously talented and had a very wide range of skills to put everything together.
Use Vice as an example of how easy things can go wrong. They raised like $22 Million in the first 24 hours and raised a bunch of other money and then had a joke of a team and made a bunch of promises. They seriously don't know what they are doing and just hire people that know nothing about what is going on so they still haven't actually launched anything in reality and are getting sued from every angle by companies like PlayBoy.
It can go wrong real fast.