The middle of the Andy Livingstone Park, in Vancouver. Photo by me.
Turns out it's been quite a while since my last "witness update" -- almost 3 months. Oof. But if you're aware of what I do, you know I've certainly been around and active through @steemcleaners and @cheetah, and on the chats. I just haven't had the time to do a top-level post in a while!
Life was pretty hectic for me over the summer. I had a lot to do, not just with my internship, but also with school, general life, and of course the latest crypto gold-rush. With summer over, I've moved once again back to Vancouver for school and am now settled in my new suite. Hopefully that means a bit of a return to normal for my life, and a bit less stress (well -- as much as you can avoid while being a Ph.D student).
So anyways, here's a brief update on some things that I've been up to.
Cheetah
With the recent rise in activity after HF 19, daily posting rate and new users saw a massive increase compared to the historical numbers. You can check out some of the statistics here. It's pretty incredible watching Steemit take off in popularity, with a ton of onboarded new users and posts, and the amounts increasing daily.
Unfortunately for my "job", that also means a ton more load on @cheetah. I've noted privately first and now publicly that the direct costs for running her had exceeded $100 per day, simply due to checking tens of thousands of posts per day. Cheetah as a solution to identifying copy-and-paste isn't the most scalable solution, as the cost is directly proportional with activity. So, unless the price of steem also directly correlates with activity, it could be problematic. (Granted, it might be loosely coupled, but not necessarily.) I have taken to automated logging on @cheetah, and just a cursory glance at the logs shows immediately the problem: hundreds of posts per day are copy and paste, and most are plagiarism. In fact, just the number of plagiarized posts per day, exceeds the total posts per day just a year ago when @cheetah was first introduced -- not something I quite planned for!
With the logs, I'm fortunately still comfortable financing @cheetah and whatever overage that she costs with my witness pay. (This is, of course, assuming I stay a top witness. I don't think I would be okay with paying out of my own pocket if I were not.)
Some fun facts:
- I host my own private RPC full node strictly for cheetah, since she absolutely hammers it with information lookup requests.
- Cheetah frequently runs into the 20 second comment limit during periods of high activity (mid-afternoon US, for example), and I have seen her run as far as 20 minutes behind the blockchain trying to catch up with the load!
- Plagiarism, as a percentage of total posts, hasn't really changed over the past few months. The increase in activity seemed to bring a constant ratio of both real users and abusers.
Steemcleaners
I won't talk too much about @steemcleaners, but instead will point you to a recent post:
Keeping Steemit Clean: One Year Later
It's hard to believe we've been at it for over a year now, but the group has been working hard to keep Steemit something we can all enjoy -- free of plagiarism, identity theft, and other abuse. I know that sometimes, as someone recently said, "dolphins can get caught in the net". We do seriously try our best to avoid mishaps. If you really dig into it, it doesn't happen often (one mistake in a ocean of thousands of cases), but the mistakes will always be what is noticed. You can always chat with us if there's a problem, or message members such as myself or @patrice directly. We try our best to be active, but remember it's all volunteer work. Fortunately, as far as I am aware, anything recent has been resolved!
It's sometimes hard to imagine the impact of not having a group like @steemcleaners would have on the site. I often equate it to utility repairmen. We don't really consider the day-and-night effort these people put in to ensure the lights are on, the water flowing, and the gas coming through. But we certainly notice the moment they stop working. So, as usual, I implore people to help out with fighting abuse on Steemit. You can chat with us in Steemit.chat if you would like to help us directly. We're always strapped for manpower and resources!
Witness node updates, and a reminder on security
Time to change topics a bit, and discuss more witness technical stuff. Several people have publicly declared they would un-vote witnesses running 19.1, and I have responded to a few of them with my reasoning for not updating. [1][2][3]
The important bits of my explanation:
Consensus hasn't changed, the latest upgrade is just for P2P stability. This [update] is specifically best for seed nodes, which create the P2P "spine" of the network, connecting the whole ecosystem together. Witness nodes are more of the "brain".
In my case, my witness isn't directly accessible via incoming P2P or even SSH connections. It's locked out. So while I could upgrade, it has zero effect and I see no need to reboot.
This update is a good time to remind all of the other witnesses that the changes from 19.1 to 19.2 should NOT affect your witness node, because it should NOT deal with the public p2p network. Security isn't something that should be taken lightly when you're a top witness. I highly recommend @gtg's guide for a properly secure witness infrastructure, which you can read about here.
Since people who have un-voted me as a witness based on version only perhaps don't understand the above, I have decided to upgrade and am now on 19.2. I guess if it has no effect, why not.
Sometimes, I suppose, perception is more important than nuances. ¯\(ツ)/¯