Communication around the deployment of hardfork 16 was a failure!
Long story made short :
@dan announced hardfork in this post. He wrote:
I have tentatively set the hardfork date to Tuesday November 16th
People took it too literally and bypassed the warning at the end of the post:
This schedule is tentative and may be subject to change if testing discovers issues.
- On the November 16, as nothing was coming out. No hardfork, no info. Witness @klye made a post to inform people on why the hardfork 16 delay.
- @krnl was not happy with that and, due to misinformation, thought of the delay being the result of kind of plot from some witnesses to block the deployment of the new economic changes proposed by @dan
- This ended in a discussion on steemit.chat between witnesses about communication.
- @sneak popped in the conversation and this turned to a small "drama". You can also read @shadowspub excellent post about this
- Today, a short post was published by @steemitblog where apologizes about lack of communication were presented to the community.
I was part of the discussion on steemit.chat @shadowspub mention in his post and my comment triggered @sneak to pop in:
This led to a long discussion between the witnesses and @sneak on the need for better communication between the Steemit team and the users.
@sneak personal opinions were:
- “we're not worried about the hysteria of the uninformed right now. ”
- “the underlying operation of the network, hardforks included, is of interest to only a tiny, tiny fraction of users. we probably won't ever spend any significant time or effort on communication surrounding it.”
- “a mailing list will suffice, which i am actually setting up today”
- “we will post all of our official community communications on the steemitblog.”
Scary coming from a product leader. I did not agree with what he said and some others witnesses expressed the same way.
We felt a bit in front of a "blah blah blah ..." circular talk between parties. Hence @shadowspub‘s post.
My opinion
We currently have too many communication channels: @steemitblog account, github, steemit.chat, ...
Think of a new user ...
How does he(she) knows @steemitblog is the official voice of Steemit Team and he(she) has to voluntary follow this account to be kept informed?
Even if he(she) does, it is already often easy to miss a post from @steemitblog because it is flooded in the middle of other user's posts. How will it be when we will have 100x more users, as of @sneak's wishes?
@sneak's idea to create a mailing list is not better because once again it is something you have
- to be aware of
- to subscribe to.
And I am not talking about the so wanted external notifications feature.
All these communication channels require user to PULL for information, and sometimes moves them away of the platform.
Let's turn into action
I’m not here to complain about what is going on but to share my ideas and help the platform to provides better communication to its users.
What we need is a dedicated PUSH communication channel from Steemit Team toward its users, not something users have to subscribe to.
The new red badges have already proven to be extremely useful!
Let's go further and have something like this :
This kind of notification will be obvious and clear for everyone
The link would lead to a blog like list with all the official posts.
IMHO, this is very easy to implement and consistent with the current user experience.
Some proposed official posts should be read-only to prevent the community to (over)react.
This is a discussion we should have.
Comment and share your opinion.
Thanks for reading!
Support me and my work as a witness by voting for me here!
You like this post, do not forget to 
upvote or follow me or resteem