Every 100 posts I write about my core principles for making decisions on Steem. This is a method for keeping my action directed well toward my goals, and documenting my understanding of the platform and my plans for participating in it over time. You can read the first edition here.
I've arrived at my 200th post at an interesting time, as I'm in the process of re-evaluating my commitments to Steem projects in reaction to the philosophy, process, and actuality of Hard Fork 20, each of which has its own information to absorb in order to make good decisions about my future on the platform. Hopefully arranging my thoughts in this way will be useful in integrating that new knowledge into a plan.
To make this easier on me these are ordered chronologically, with the ones from last time first. If you don't want to read 2500 words about what I think is important here, I totally understand.
Principle 1: The Core Game should be simple and accessible.
I think what I said about this last time is still good:
I am really, really good at using the overcomplication of the system to my own advantage and the advantage of the users I want to vote on. I am good at that now, I will be good at that when it changes. I promise you I have a huge edge over users who don't figure out all the intricacies of how voting works, who don't do math and build spreadsheets and snoop the blockchain and run separate accounts just to do experiments.
I think that's a bad thing. That edge I have is a giant curb that new users have to jump to be competitive here. I've encountered many users who've been here far longer than I have who still haven't jumped it, who are still frustrated and confused. We need to allow people to come in here cold and be on an even playing field with the experts, at least in the very simple game of creating, finding, and voting on content.
1. All votes should be equally effective, relative to stake.
Basically, if I put a 1c vote on a post, and you put a 1c vote on a post, they should both take the same amount of Steem from the rewards pool and apply it to the post. I shouldn't be able to distribute more value than you do simply because I'm more informed about the underlying complexities of the system.
2. All information for optimal voting should be easily available.
All information that matters to how much a vote is worth should be within the post's display in the condensers. If
wants to change that in the back end they should also change it in the interface. Conversely, if it's so complicated and non-intuitive that putting it in the interface is a bad idea, putting it in the voting structure is also a bad idea.
3. SBD should be fixed.
This is much less of an issue today than it was in the first post - but there's still no mechanism for either holding SBD down or adjusting the ways that the blockchain assumes it's valued at $1. While it has an actual valuation in that neighborhood is the best opportunity to make some changes that remove the immense overcomplication that comes from the system's perception of SBD value diverging from its market value.
4. Basic functionality should be available to all users.
Last week I wouldn't have thought to need this one. But Hard Fork 20 has shown us that it's very possible for efficiency-minded changes to the blockchain to lock out human interaction on the platform, and that obviously needs not to happen. The primary change necessary for this at the current time is a fairly simple one: remove the assumption that resource credits should be distributed linearly by stake. Everyone benefits from new and small users being able to interact on a basic human level, and it makes sense to "tax" some resource credits from large accounts who don't need them in order to support that, by way of a non-linear curve.
Principle 2: New users should have an easy path to effectiveness.
With this on our minds right now it may seem weird, but even with resource credits we're still way ahead on this than we were when I joined, thanks to a more-accessible Steem price. The subsections in this principle have not changed.
1. Encourage smaller buyins.
My days in online poker, free-to-play games, and on Patreon suggest that there are some inflection points in people's willingness to put money into a system. For USD thinkers those seem to be at $5, $20, $50, $200, and $500. The smaller numbers especially can be things people do as a weekly or bi-weekly investment.
Even with the price drop, someone who puts in $20/week isn't going to see an immediate, week-by-week benefit of that buyin. Which means even if they try it once they aren't going to get the reward cycle going and become consistent small-time investors. If Steem is going to be successful long-term we need to be more attractive to those people.
2. Encourage powering up.
Some of us can see the long-term value in powering up our account to increase our effectiveness here, but that's a sophisticated attitude, and one that requires a certain amount of real-life privilege. We need to get more authors powering up their rewards rather than cashing out, in order to take roles that include voting, community support, and participating in decisions about the future of Steem.
3. Create more structures of consistent support for excellent new users.
Once someone is here, and producing good content, and interacting, and looking like they could be a long-term asset, we need to treat them like a long-term asset, and make sure we offer them enough rewards, social and financial, to keep them here. We especially need to be training more people into leadership positions, and making the people who build leadership positions for themselves more effective.
This has been my primary focus so far, and will continue to be one of my most important roles in the community.
Principle 3: Rewards should narrow the class divide, not increase it.
That is to say, we should support participation-weighted rewards over stake-weighted rewards whenever possible. Stake will always be a dominant force here, but currently the class gap is too large for the system to function well. The subsections in this principle have not changed.
1. Support egalitarian rewards over stake-weighted ones.
Rewards that are determined by the power of your stake simply drive the class gap open further. We should direct as many of the rewards as possible to participatory actions available to everyone rather than to stake. In practice, curation rewards are incredibly stake-weighted, while author rewards are more egalitarian, so I support author rewards whenever possible. Hopefully we will see an expansion in the universe of participatory action rewards when SMTs come.
2. Broaden the rewards base rather than narrowing it.
Many of the proposals you may have seen around have the end goal of distributing more rewards to the most popular posts. They tend to be obfuscated in different language. "Superlinear rewards" means distributing more rewards to the most popular posts, and they're at least honest about it. "Returned to the rewards pool" also means distributing more rewards to the most popular posts, and that one isn't as clear.
This is backwards. A healthy system is one in which we have a wide variety of content that gets voting support, and many users who are able to grow through producing that content. Giving more rewards to popular posts distributes power to high-stake, sophisticated, experienced users at the expense of everyone else. It also currently means that the few popular topics we have stay popular, and any topic that doesn't have substantial support has a hard time getting traction.
Principle 4: We should embrace automation.
By being on blockchain at all, we are early adopters of the most-easily-automated system ever invented. We need to treat this as a feature, rather than a bug. Easy automation is one of the most important characteristics of a system based on on open ledger, and fighting it is essentially trying to turn that open-ledger system back into a closed-ledger system.
There may come a time when blockchain-backed social media is the only social media. (That seems unlikely; one feature Steem can't have in its current form is private posting, and people want that.) But until then, what's special about this platform is the very fact of its open ledger and open access, where anyone who wants to can access the back end of the system and write software to interact with that.
This is awesome, and revolutionary. It will allow us to build things that have never been built before, to do things on social media that have never been done before. Like any brand-new engineering field, a lot of the things we do might end up not being particularly good ideas. But this is not a reason to scrap the concept of automation.
Principle 5: A single path to success is a single point of failure.
This started out as why I support vote-buying while also supporting people who don't buy votes. But it's larger than that - it's about making sure that there's a diverse base of interests with stake here, and that the loss of that any single program by any single person can't leave users out in the cold. It's why I support multiple social and curation initiatives on a variety of topics, and it's why I'm focused on making sure that initiatives and community leaders are able to grow their stake.
In order to have a robust system, it needs to have as many paths to success as we can manage. This is number five because of the chronological nature of things, but I think it's the most important. Or maybe the next one is.
Principle 6: Steem's power is in Steem's people.
What's more appealing to me about Steem versus the current crop of popular social media sites is the level of interaction here. We actually talk about things rather than flinging emojis and memes and one-liners at each other, and while this can lead to conflict it can also lead to actually getting somewhere. In years on Facebook and Twitter I can only think of one person I've met on those platforms whose perspective really matters to me, and he was already friends with my partner so we would have met eventually anyway. They're OK for keeping up on people you already know, but poor for meeting anyone meaningful.
In six months on Steem there are already dozens of those people. Some of that it probably the ways in which I prefer to interact, and my personal preference for giant balls of text like this one. Some if it is probably fundamental to being an early-adopter community. But a lot of it is just that there's more room here to actually get to know someone beyond knee-jerk reactions, and it's important to preserve that.
Principle 7: We need a more mature development process.
1. Communication is key.
One of the largest criticisms of the hardfork 20 process has been the lack of testing, but I'm going to take a step farther back from that and suggest that the problem doesn't lie in the fact that no one was testing, but in the fact that no one knew no one was testing. The closed-doors nature of the process really harmed the final results, as many of us with the skills to do some of that work were left under the impression that it was already being done by the people whose blockchain roles included it. We only found out otherwise when everything broke.
The entire development process needs to be carried out in public view, ideally on Steem as well as on Github, so that it's available for everyone to judge. This is the core ethos of open-source development, that the more eyes you have on a project, the more likely you are to find flaws before they're put into production with unhappy consequences.
2. We need a new structure for compensating developers.
Following from #1, once code review, documentation, testing and so on are in the public eye, it becomes practical to reward them in Steem through the power of voting, in a similar way to how Utopian rewards contributions to other open-source projects. This will attract more development talent to put its eyes on Steem, and lead to a more robust development cycle, and thus a more robust product.
I strongly believe that tying this into the witness system is a bad idea, but I'll go into that more in a future post, given how long this one already is. Developer and System Administrator are typically separate roles for a lot of very good reasons.
3. We need analytics.
The argument put forth that the only way to discover the cost of blockchain operations was to drop a payment system suddenly upon the userbase is, to be as politic as possible, complete and utter bullshit. This analysis could have been done on the two years of blockchain data we had available, and then if necessary a purely-data-generating RC system could have been dropped to record the price of actions without actually restricting them. This is what analytics are for: so that decisions about how to deal with limited resources can be made with data, rather than simply assumptions.
4. We need a pre-determined plan for when to roll back.
And in particular, that plan absolutely needs to include a hard line on rolling back anytime user assets are lost. Voting power is an asset, and the loss of VP and response to that has led me to conclude that Steem is not suitable for soliciting serious outside investment at this time. That's led me to shut down the one project I absolutely know is going away, 
As we intend to increase the number and complexity of user assets in the not-too-distant future, this will become both more complicated and more necessary.
This section has been the last section because it is where I expect the greatest amount of my time to be going in the post-HF20 world. I sometimes feel like I'm the one programmer in the world who actually likes doing documentation and unit tests, which makes me the hero we need in these dark hours.
(Or something.)