Steem: Scalability before scaling

I do a lot of work within companies and there is resistance whenever changes are made, whether it be a new system or program, changes to the parking lot - or a new staff room microwave. Whatever it is, change management tries to address it and smooth the transition, but soon a new status quo is reached.

However, while employees throw up their arms at how bad all the changes are and how they don't make sense, what people do not consider is that if they didn't have their routines and habits, the changes would be accepted. It is easy to visualize through the eyes of a new employee who comes in and learns the new processes without knowing that there were ever old processes, or if what they are learning changed only a week ago.

Humans adapt.

In the transition period to a "new normal", there are going to be mistakes made and experiments with what is possible. In time, new routines will form and solidify to be points of resistance the next time changes are introduced. Currently with Communities, there are a lot of new things to learn that introduce a lot of dynamics. Things like cross-posting, posting to communities and resteeming own posts, are going to cause various challenges and some people are not going to foresee exactly how they work, and community reactions to them.

This is natural and experimentation should be encouraged and hopefully, discussion around what people are trying on what works, what doesn't and what is scammy, spammy and abusive. These things have to be addressed, but in the early days, they also have to come with some kind of leeway for attempts and errors.

For the new users coming into Steem however, they are like the new employees and all of this is going to be quite easy for them to pick up. In fact, I am guessing that while there is a great deal going on, a lot of what a new user has to do is much easier than it was for example I joined 3 years ago. Essentially, everything was very, very manual back then and there were very few information gateways to get in.

The feeds were filled with questions that no longer need to be addressed, as applications and interfaces have built the answers into their experience. For instance, when delegations were introduced back in mid-2017, actually delegating was a nightmare, and I think Vessel was one of the only places it could be done. How many use Vessel now? Probably the same number that used it back then. There are likely hundreds of examples of things that have improved here over the last years.

However, there really is no pleasing everyone, which is actually part of the innovation process as some people with the skills will say, "I can do better" and, perhaps they do. This is part of the value proposition of Steem, as anyone can try to improve it without having to start from scratch.

These new changes to the Steemit and other interface UIs are going to take some time to get the head and hand around, as well as for a while likely affect engagement in some areas. Communities are content buckets that separate by topic (for the most part) and they separate and compartmentalize information. This creates a challenge in a small community in some ways, especially for those who have already established a following.

However, this is what needs to happen for content and community scaling as while there aren't many here now and the main feeds have been slow, that would change if many people arrived and there was no way to separate. Imagine going into Reddit or Facebook and having no kinds of filters at all and how fast the feeds will scroll. There are 300 million photo uploads to Facebook a day.

Sure, we have some way to go.

But, at some point, we have to assume that we are going to grow and develop the ecosystem for that growth, rather than wait to grow and then try to catch up. This also has a chicken or the egg problem in some respects, and I think that people have aligned themselves to the wrong half of the equation in the past. Many want the community to expand of course, but many do not visualize what that would look like if for example, 5 million posts streamed in a day, instead of the 20,000 we currently have.

Yet, the development has been happening in the background the last two years with scalability being a major focus through Mira and Hivemind, as well as interface and application building to handle the UI and UX needs of users. These platforms built on the Steem infrastructure may be a little empty today, but not building them means that if tomorrow attracts many users, those users would face the same problems I did in 2017, and with such an influx, there would be no way to address the issues.

I guess what I am trying to say is that for the first time in a while, I feel that the alignment of Steem development is in the right order, where the infrastructure for mass adoption is being laid, before the city fills with residents. Rather than information slums, we can have healthy and vibrant suburbs that offer opportunity and value.

There will be teething issues.

Taraz [ a Steem original ]