If we have a valid criticism of anything, we should fully understand it first in order for our input to be valid.
Uhmm, really? Not valid because we don't understand it? You are sounding too much like the Priest Class in religion which doesn't listen to the laity because the laity just don't understand how things work. Kind of reminds me too of when Marie-Antoinette (bride of France's King Louis XVI) was told her French subjects had no bread, she sniffed, “Qu'ils mangent de la brioche”—“Let them eat cake.” Sir, we can all have an opinion about our user experience, or lack thereof. And Steemit Inc.'s ~$300 Million stake in SteemPower gives them no excuse for not hiring a small army of developers to make the user experience second to none.
Are you familiar with the Mythical Man Month? Hiring more developers doesn't mean a project will get finished in less time. In some cases, the exact opposite is true. You can't have a baby in one month using nine women. It just doesn't work that way.
You make an interesting analogy but to me it has a fundamental flaw. Anyone can learn to code. Truly, anyone can. This isn't like we're speaking in Latin and only the upper class can access Latin education. Coding is quickly becoming the universal language and anyone who cares to offer useful criticism is free to learn it as long as they have a computer and an Internet connection. Unlike a priestly class claiming divine, gnostic revelation openly only to chosen class, anyone can access and contribute to open-source projects. I've spent many decades learning to code. Others chose other paths. I would be out of place telling a surgeon how to do their job, even if I was the one using their services. The same thing applies here. For those who want to criticize, I'm simply advocating they become informed before doing so. That's understood and expected in every other advanced field of study. Why not here as well?
Not everyone is qualified to give useful feedback. Whether or not we are comfortable with that is not relevant to the fact.
As to Steemit's Steem Power holdings and their use of it, I throughly agree with you that they are open to criticism there, as is any company putting out a product with a public understanding of the resources at their disposal. If you have suggestions (other than just hire more developers because, again, that might actually make things worse), let's discuss them and do what we can to help. That's the point of my post. Steemit, inc's focus is not just Steemit.com (see my STEEM is more valuable than Steemit post for more on that). They are thinking long term and that strategy involves Smart Media Tokens and a massively scalable and modular STEEM blockchain.
I guess it depends on what the criticism is about, and perhaps I jumped to conclusions to what exactly your "put up or shut up" comment was directed . I just know I don't need to know anything about coding to have a valid opinion about how Steemit can be or should be improved from a user experience standpoint. I've designed websites, done SEO professionally, have my own blog, and spent a ton of time on Facebook and theologyonline.com which has 18K members and where I can sign up, make a few posts, get noticed by the owner, and get voted as the best new member by the community, so I guess that should be enough credibility to make suggestions about how not to lose people in Steemit.
Someone like @dan could come along having hired the right people to put together a kickass social platform, riding on a blockchain, with financial incentives, and suck the wind right out of Steemit's sails, just like Facebook did to MySpace which did the same thing to Xanga. It doesn't take a coder to see that.
BTW, you make learning the code sound easy. What's the best code to learn to understand this platform or better yet contribute to its development? Or to understand the flow of digital assets within the social media?
Exactly!
If you criticize the next hardfork without having any coding background, then maybe you're on the wrong path. Still a blogger, a content creator, a curator - a Steem user - would definitely be able to have a solid opinion about user experience. If there were no people using this currency and believing in it, then it would be of no value. So I definitely think that the average user - as we have been categorized here - has a right to voice their opinion about user experience.
Steem has always been advertized as the gateway coin to mainstream cryptocurrency. Well if you want to bring non-crypto people in touch with this currency and "tokenize the internet", then you might let these crypto newbies talk about their user experience then.
Couldn't have said it better! The killer argument of "learn to code, before you speak your mind about the platform" is a very lame way of trying to silence the "stupid masses". Steemit Inc should listen a lot more to the users and investors here and the fact alone, that we need users to highlight advancements on GitHub instead of the Dev team communicating (at least) weekly with us, speaks for itself.
I hope my post didn't come across as trying to silence anyone, but I see how "shut up" pretty clearly implies that. I was more hoping to emphasize how important it is to understand context before telling others (who may have far more context than we do) what they should be doing and how they should prioritize their resources. Unless we have experience and understanding, it makes us look silly. I prefer we not look silly and instead work to understand and be helpful.
I've been talking with @corinnestokes about the language I used in my post, and she reminded me it's not accurate to say a criticism isn't "valid" unless it really isn't valid. It would have been better for me to say something like, "valid, but possibly not helpful right now without more understanding and context."
Here's what I mean:
What if Steemit, inc is more focused on the underlying blockchain performance and scaling and needs to get that done before more people join Steemit? So many people are frustrated with the retention rate, the lack of marketing, the UX/UI issues, etc, etc. What if Steemit focused on all that first and then turned their attention to performance on the blockchain? From my perspective, that would cause a lot of problems right now, and we'd probably have even more bandwidth and blockchain bloat problems.
Based on what I see going on, it seems they are focusing on important things. If we think "They should be doing A right now!" but "B" is way better and doing "A" might actually hurt the whole ecosystem right now, then saying "A is broken, go fix it! Why aren't they fixing it yet!?!" doesn't actually benefit anyone.
That said, they (IMO) should certainly focus a lot more on communication. I've been saying this for a long time now.
Thanks for your comment. Sorry it took me a while to reply as I've been at a conference the last few days.
Thanks for clarifying. The thing is, that there seems to be no reason to work on a blockchain, that is No 1 in Tx and has a network load of <1% - outperforming every other blockchain anyway. Yes, I´m no dev, but then again it would be the job of Steemit Inc to explain what they are doing instead of us speculating on the real reasons. It´s great if there are really lots of people working on the performance of the blockchain, but as with any other company, you have to hire some Marketing/PR person who does this job of informing everyone what´s going on - even the smallest companies do that (and for a good reason).
Thanks for your reply. You may also appreciate my reply to @surfermarly below.
I probably should not have said a criticism isn't "valid" but instead could have said it may be valid but not helpful and, from that perspective, not valid right now as far as prioritizing what Steemit, inc should be doing.
It's easy for us to focus on Steemit and the problems there (retention, UI/UX, onboarding, marketing, etc), but it's much harder to get a good perspective on the issues of the underlying blockchain which they are focusing on to bring us to millions and millions of users. If that's not ready yet, fixing the front-end issues will only make things worse if done right now.
Here's an analogy:
Let's say we're building a bus. The passengers get on and are like, "What the hell? There are only egg-crates for seats? They need to fix this right now and put in more comfortable, padded seats so people don't get off the bus right away. So few people are using this thing right now because of that."
That would be a "valid" criticism for sure. But... with a little bit of perspective, it may not be very informative or helpful or even valid in terms of setting current priorities. To stay with our analogy, what if the bus actually had a small car engine in it just to test things out. It can only pull about 5 people. From that perspective, adding amazing seats for another 100 people doesn't make much sense before upgrading the engine, right? In fact, if they did fix the seats first, and those 100 people jump on board, the bus might stop working completely.
That's obviously an extreme example, but the point being the underlying blockchain engine is the most important thing Steemit, inc is working on right now. That's what will lay the framework for many years from now. That's what has to be rock solid. Once that's done, as we improve the front-end, we'll have the capacity to handle it.
Again, thank you for your comment and for disagreeing with me respectfully. I really do appreciate that.
Edit: I forgot to answer your question. Learning code in general is easy. You can start with building games in Scratch as an example. Learning blockchain C++ may not be as easy. That's pretty advanced stuff and though I've programmed in a half a dozen languages myself since 1996, I don't have much experience with C++ which is something I plan to fix in the future as I continue to dig into this codebase. I plan to start with some C++ tutorials online.
Have you used Lynda.com before? $30/mo. and you can take as many courses as you want during that month. Here's the link to C++ https://www.lynda.com/learning-paths/Developer/become-a-c-plus-plus-developer
Thank you Luke for the explanation and analogy. I was unaware the blockchain was at risk from increased usage. So they really don't want to make steemit better until they make the blockchain more robust? OK, good to know, and had I kept silent I wouldn't have learned that from you because steemit inc. doesn't even have a corporate website to post such information.
However, I'm still not convinced steemit inc. can't or shouldn't improve steemit. Can't that be done offline so a better version will be waiting in the wings for the moment the blockchain has been improved, instead of waiting for the blockchain improvements before allocating resources toward that end?
Do you agree with my contention that the longer steemit inc. waits before upgrading to a world-class social media platform the more likely someone else - like Dan Larimer - beats them to it and ends up sucking the wind out of steemit's sails?
I agree with your last sentence. They should do that just to show us that they care about our opinions.
I'm hopeful Steemit, inc will prioritize communication in the future.
They should realize that is very important for the happy community. Thanks for your time.