The last few days have given me a lot of respect for @ned and the steemit team. They clearly have had some hard decisions to make, and are trying hard to communicate better and learn from the community. I really encourage everyone to watch the livestream that steemit and @ned put on earlier today.
His responses to @smooth were considerate and high quality, I think this can really be the start of a turn around for the steem ecosystem.
Please focus on the core base layer of steem this is the best idea to come out of this!
Everyone should check out this thread and the video if you have the time.
https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/third-livestream-test-tomorrow
A partial TLDW:
@ned and his team are considering all options right now. There is a focus on survival for steem inc right now. They spent a lot of time talking about proposals which would bring an end to steemit.com. This would allow steem inc to focus on building a strong base layer for the blockchain, remove themselves from the position of competition with other apps being built on steem. at 18:00 minutes Ned spends a lot of time responding directly to @smooth's post which you can find here: https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/third-livestream-test-tomorrow#@smooth/re-ned-third-livestream-test-tomorrow-20181129t061746800z Phasing out steemit.com would also include phasing out API's which right now a lot of dApps rely on. They spoke on how this is better for decentralization (right now many apps would go down if steemit.com goes down) and better for natural competition in the system (right now steemit.com is subsidizing dApps with their APIs). There was also a focus on how to fix the currency distribution, and bringing a focus back to SMTs
spends time focusing on a simplified SMT 1.0 version and what that could look like. At 50:00 mins They get into some technical points about the database, how to prune it to save steem inc resources. A hardfork is a possibility, or switching the DB to "rocks DB
In the past all i've seen from ned are some overly utopian posts, broad promises with no outline of how to get there and some bad photos and videos of him playing guitar. A few times now @ned has expressed he is a verbal communicator, and this video really proves that he can communicate verbally very well and has a good grasp on the issues in front of him and his team. A restructuring like this isn't easy, but the discussions coming out of it are giving me a lot of hope for the platform.