It was a disaster for the dApps this way... I find it very confusing that on one hand Steemit inc wants the dApps to succeed but they make their lifes very challenging by bad documentation and no beta test environment pre-release. 

>It can not a beta any more when you encourage people to build their businesses on it.

I'm no developer but totally agree with this.

This is my first HF and it's really not that motivating. I just imagine how much of earnings people will lose in the next few days... 

Still, I'm in no panic mode. STEEM will be better and hopefully, top 20 witnesses will take time to hear others. Maybe this is what we needed to start making some changes, asap.

STEEM ON!

Even when a big company deploy any major changes they first try out in dummy environment to look for the pros and cons before giving a final go. Surprised to see here the deployment even when people statred to talk about steemit

Posted using [Partiko Android](https://steemit.com/@partiko-android)

They need to get rid of the "beta" mentality as soon as possible. Because anything that happens can just be waved off "remember, it's in beta!"

I've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out the tangled mess that is the witness system. It becomes painfully evident that @freedom / @pumpkin effectively chooses 13 of the top 20 witnesses, because they wouldn't be in top 20 without that vote.

That being said there are plenty of top 20 witnesses I respect and think are hard workers, but accepting this fork was totally irresponsible when they knew there was a negative RC's glitch happening but went ahead anyway.

The testnet that was used for this fork was not adequate because it was mirroring transactions from the mainnet, not a parallel, independent chain... i.e. "total fork rehearsal." I can't believe this is the first time that there's even *been* a *(public)* testnet!

So far I have not seen any T20 witness with serious answers.
Everything went fine, steem on!
That seems the Motto of the day. 
Not one opposed the HF20. 
That is a full consensus. 
All their testing and review went fine. 

What can we low and even lower witnesses do in the future to avoid such major issues?

I haven't experienced any fork so far but HF20 changes isn't cool enough. Although, it has its own advantages but I think the disadvantages are more visible and evident on the lives of the minors (not really minnows now) and their accounts.
Literally, I would be restricted to number of healthy comments I can drop on a post (currently I have dropped two for the day, remaining one left, lol). Even posting is limited and subjected to my Mana and RC.
But I know the better days are ahead of us...

>It can not be a beta any more when you encourage people to build their businesses on it.

This is a very good point I don't think enough about. I don't encourage any normal users to live off steem but for the devs building dapps and various businesses starting, they essentially must. 

After hf19 I thought they would bundle less major changes together so it was easier to understand what effects they had on the platform and community (as well as testing) but this one seems to change many fundamentals. It is going to be near impossible to know what has done what now which makes future planning less precise. @reggaemuffin mentioned small forks more often which should be the standard. 

Luckily there aren't millions of users on hundreds of apps yet so there is still time to adjust best practices.

the issues i have with all these are quite many! :P

First of all the definition of success! If that's what they call successful they need to open a dictionary. It's like they laugh at us straight in our faces like we are stupid or something. 

Also, since i came here i followed 3 principles: 1) to write quality posts 2) to write about things that i actually care 3) to interact and help people along the way.

The interaction which is the key for success is nearly impossible especially for the new users that is totally impossible :P *what are they gonna do if they can't even make a comment?* *how the new ones that want to join the platform actually join?* (*basically you need to pay now*) 

Another thing i wanna mention is that i believe we have a couple of other things that we need to focus like the extremely old interface that is very difficult to user if you wanna curate manually or check for posts. The majority of users just use busy or steempeak. It's like steemit inc say *"ok don't bother the community will do all the work". the same applies for the older posts reward system. Except the fact that nobody can actually check your older posts manually because he needs to scroll and scroll, it's also from the perspective of the author like these posts don't worth anything after the 7 day period.

>"if it doesn't get accepted, this will delay SMT"

What can i say about this? This shows the whole democratic aspect of steemit and the "for the community" type of things... What i am gonna do is take a 2-3 days off and come back when my voting power is over 80% I wanna upvote comments and posts like i used to but i can't.....

Oh but remember, this is a decentralized platform, so no one single person or entity controls the direction of the product.

Yeah right!  STInc maintains all of the power here, the Witnesses are just for show since STInc shoves what they want down the witnesses throats and they have to say "Thank you Sir, May I have another"

Still the best game in town though I suppose.  Until that changes, Inc will keep getting their way.

I'm not sure if it's Stockholm Syndrome<sup>[1](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stockholm_syndrome) </sup> or not but I'm seeing "success" everywhere so I started to think it as a success as well. And focusing to the positive parts. Yes this HF is a big strong punch to spam, but in the meantime I just leased 600SP and doubled my power of 9 months old account and I just left with 9 comments to put (so you better upvote this precious one ahah). And this HF suppose to increase sign-ups and it does in theory. However a newly created account has only two options, they either power up or power up. Steem became freemium. I'm not sure how this will end.

Sad part is I'm hearing rumors that T20 is scared to lose STINC support, I'm not an investor but it would sound bad to an investor too. If that's the case and I can already observe many money-centric, lack of knowledge accounts rising in witness ladder. So I don't know what would be the solution but maybe increasing the top witness count might help with easily centralised decisions. IDK even if that is possible.

It kinda came across like, say, Facebook  trying to go straight from this:

![](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmY8ePqBsy2UGw6TfE4gUa7L7PSTU2BwWBnBeLkGmmFkbs/image.png)

...to this:

![](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmdKoCatf7PwBxo55jnB2ey7xfEttTh81a8pq1dFRceQBE/image.png)

Without anything in between... =)

Postpone is not always the solution, you need to adapt rapidly to have an edge to position yourself in the market. We needed to have those new features to embrace more users in the platform.

While I think you're right, I also think the time to argue about process is when we have a functioning system again.

Are you ready to roll back? If not do you have a drop-dead point when you will support rolling back?

Hey @pharesim, @d-pend, @tarazkp, @reggaemuffin. Thinking from Steemit Inc / Freedom / Pumpkin perspective, why do you think they have pushed this through with so much conviction?

Certainly we have the same common goal..?

Do you think Steemit Inc. is withholding information that would change your stance on the need of this HF?

Would it be practically possible and resource effective to fully test the HF?

I'm not being coy these are actual questions. Feel free to speculate a bit.

Hope this gets posted and you still have RC's for replies lol

You are spot on this and its among the reasons i voted you among my witnesses and i will be editing my list soon!

This thing of being called beta forever ain't good and some people are investing here a lot of money and people have lost almost a week's time of business!

>And he's absolutely right with everything in there, it's common sense to not let practically untested changes go into a live network people and businesses rely on.

I am assuming if we had like 2m active people here and we have all these mess,it would send negative messages about Steem to the crypto world and yet we want to attract the crypto world here...These temporary stops on th blockchain  should stop for the betterment of Steem.

Waiting for the good news after HF-20.

One of the hard things here is that if you don't have a technical background, you really have a hard time playing catch-up when things like this happen. Awhile ago, I had not voted in several days. Voted once. Voting power dropped in half. Don't even know where to find my statistics for these RCs, or how many times I can comment before exhausting them. I have people off Steemit asking me questions that I feel incapable of answering. I get that the spammers need to be stopped, but at the cost of creating a avalanche of people abandoning Steemit? Don't get me wrong, I am not going anywhere. I just think that SOMEBODY needs to write a Hardfork20 For Dummies post quick!!! There is a lot of confusion about how, and what the actual effects on this are to the average posting member on a daily basis!

These new changes have harmed many users, more than all those who rent steempower, this change to the fact that these users lose a lot of money invested.