You are probably already well aware of the degree of skepticism the community has about this acquisition or partnership or whatever you would like to call it. We are an intelligent and diverse community, and we can be a bit difficult, but we are a capable bunch, despite many of us being a bit rash and over emotional at times.
While some are calling this a takeover and have written you off immediately, most of us just want assurance that you are going to be better for us as a community than Ned was, which really shouldn’t be hard on your part.
If you don’t win us over, you’ve added a new tool to your arsenal. You have a recognizable name on your list, a few headlines to raise prices, and a platform for your current tron family. Not a bad deal I guess. If you do win us over though, you have a new wave of cavalry who believe in your vision and have thousands of hours in experience running communities and creating valuable content. We’ve been experimenting here for a while so we know what works and what doesn’t work and many of us are very good at what we do, whether that’s tech, community building, making art or writing great content. If you win us over, you can fast track many of your future plans because we will help you build this place into something that can compete with the likes of Facebook and at the same time you’ll be able to fix any problems Tron has had with its image.
I don’t know what the Tron community is like, but the steem community cares about things beyond money. We like money, we want money, there are no illusions about that, but we care about the bonds we’ve formed here and take personal responsibility for its success and failures. Part of the reason Ned was not very popular was that he did not seem to recognize how much of the blockchain a success was due to the community members. He didn’t address many of our biggest concerns, and many might say the best choice he made was to put someone else in charge of interacting with the community because he was awful at it.
We will not be swayed by fluff. That’s why we didn’t like him much. He treated us like we were stupid, or he avoided us because he couldn’t handle the pressure of having to listen to the people who care more than he did. During the livestream, we wanted to hear from you and get real information about what this all means, not “你属什么？” although, once we know we can trust you, those kinds of topics will be fun to learn about too. Right now we are worried about the future of the place we love and could not care less about that.
You strike me as an intelligent and capable guy who can read people and situations very well. You are obviously very ambitious and tactful. These could very well be what makes steem and tron a huge success, but it could also destroy everything we’ve built. If we don’t trust you, you basically bought a name and a blockchain which could easily be replicated, perhaps by some traditional social media company or a competing blockchain. If you gain our trust, you will have a huge army of people working for you who are not even necessarily on your payroll. We can be your Unsullied Warriors who send you straight to your iron throne, but we need to know you won’t burn down our city. You need to prove yourself to us.
Here is how you win us over
Give the community a balance of power
The most essential thing for you to do to gain our trust is to prove that you are sincere in your promises of true decentralization. This means a decentralization of power. We want the community at large to have more say than you do when it comes to the steem ecosystem. You be the captain, but a captain that trusts his crew.
The fact that steemitinc has always had such a massive stake (and the way it was attained) has always been a problem and it’s a reason many good developers, witnesses, and community contributors left. (You probably know that we once had far more active users than we do now.)
Telling us that you won’t vote out any witnesses you don’t like and vote in your own people is not enough. We want some kind of proof, whatever you can give us. Making it difficult for you and a few of your tron supporters to even do so is what we want. This is how you gain instant support from the majority of the community.
I’m not exactly sure the best way you could do this, so I’d love to hear from witnesses and other tech savvy members or people who have put a whole lot of time and energy into debating the technicals and economics.
From my limited understanding, one thing you could do is distribute the ninja mined stake to the community. If you don’t know what it is, just search for it, it’s been one of the community’s biggest complaints from the beginning until now. Whether or not this will create a sufficient balance of power, I hope others will chime in on.
You could also commit to burning a certain percentage of your stake at regular intervals.
In any case, a guarantee that you not only won’t but CAN’T run this place like a dictator is really the fastest and easiest way you can keep us all here and excited, bring old steemians back in the hundreds of thousands, and quickly attract lots of new users.
Get to know us a little
I recognize that you are probably extremely busy. That’s ok. You don’t need to read every post on trending. What we do ask is that you do keep in contact with our witnesses and community leaders, listen to their input and respect their opinions. My sense so far is that you will be good at this. I got a sense that your EQ is higher than what we are used to around here.
Leave as much in place as possible
We have had a lot of problems over the years. We have solved most of them, and and we have mostly done it as a community, independent of steeminc. One of the best things you can do for the community is to get out of its way and let it run itself whenever it can, and it usually can.
We have seen many hard forks and how everything plays out under a variety of different rule sets. The community understand this ecosystem better than you will for a few years. Leave as much as you can to us, but please support us when we come to a consensus about what we need.
We want someone who carries out the will of the community and if you do that we will give you more support than you can imagine. There is so much untapped potential in this community and the more you respect our ideas, the more you can tap into it.
Do what you do best at
Get us some positive press. That seems to be the one and only thing we have been lacking from the beginning until now and it's one of the areas where you really shine.
We won’t be bribed....easily
Money won’t be enough to win our hearts but I think most of us would be pretty sour if Tron users were the only ones getting airdrops, or if the airdrops were tiny. We feel a bit sold out right now the way Ned didn’t engage with us well, and then disappeared when the price was down. Now he’s sold us off and we just have to deal with it. You can imagine how that feels. Large airdrops won’t win us over as devout followers which is what you really want but it will probably get us complaining less and way more open to hearing your vision, so it’s definitely something to consider carefully how to approach.
After you give us some reassurances that go beyond words, and show us that 你不会跟独裁一样控制所有的，then you can tell us about your damn zodiac. 😝
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I can’t speak for everyone but I want to like you. I’m very skeptical of people with huge ambitions, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt until I see a reason not to.
And to fellow steemians, please share any additions about what you hope to see from Justin and any improvements or additions you might make to my suggestions. 😄
