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So there was a SOS forum yesterday with @pennsif interviewing @ned, with a few other people chiming in from time to time. Ned answered some of the hard questions that have been fueling the FUD around here and  talked a bit about the vision for Steemit from this point on.

So first I'll just give a brief summary on the parts I heard, then I'll give some thoughts about what was discussed.

- The list of priorities for Steemit it largely unchanged with the focus currently being on reducing costs and making everything more sustainable. Hivemind was a large step forward in that plan and RocksDB is next on the list.

- One area where there's been a bit of a flip flop is when it comes to Steemit.com. When Ned first announced the 70% layoffs there was a lot of talk of Steemit being in "maintainence mode", and there was even talk of sunsetting Steemit. The message communicated was that Steemit Inc. was trying to do too much and they were just going to focus on blockchain development. Well that's changed to basically no, we want Steemit to be cool too. So after the highest priority goals have been accomplished, making Steemit better is going to get thrown in there as well at some unconfirmed time.

- One of the major features that will lead to Steemit being more awesome is Communities, which for those that don't know, will behave similar to subreddits on Reddit. Communities would make it easier for people to connect with other people of similar interests and as the name suggest, build communities.

- The powering down of the Steemit account was due to a perceived threat of forking out all of Steemit's stake. While some believed this would be unlikely, Ned communicated that he had reason to believe this was a credible enough threat to where action needed to be taken. Of the different options available, they chose to power down and store their STEEM across exchanges. Ned also communicated that he understood that storing their STEEM on exchanges also posed a security risk, but that he felt that was the lesser risk.

- Steemit currently has 12 employees not including contractors.

- Steemit owns 74 million STEEM.

- SMT's, Communities, and other improvements to the blockchain or Steemit.com, don't have a timeline currently. Specifically Ned wouldn't even commit to this year for Communities.

So those are the major bullet points I gathered and here's my thoughts on them. I agree that priority one has to be getting costs under control, we can't have nice things if we can't keep the lights on.

I'm also a fan of the idea of not treating Steemit like a redheaded step child. Steemit already has the most traffic and is the number one site that outsiders associate with STEEM(whether we like it or not), so it would be great if Steemit was awesome. I do have mixed feelings on the fact that there is so much back and forth in terms of the direction though. When it changes this much, it just fills you with insecurity, because next month it could be something completely different.

I've mentioned before that I feel like the Communities feature could not only be the saving grace of Steemit, but of Steem. The number one problem(IMO) with all the social applications is the user experience and that largely has to do with content discovery. It takes a ton of perseverance to connect with people that are interested in the stuff you're interested in and especially  to build a following to have those people engage with you. Communities would make this MUCH better and it would also focus curation as well as content consumption. Right now all Steem dapps function as one global village, which just doesn't work. Users need a way to organize around interests, and have an easy to navigate UI which facilitates that.

As for the powering down...well this is interesting. So some details I didn't get into above that Ned mentioned were that when he first heard this idea of Steemit's stake being forked he also didn't think it was much of a threat, but he then learned that some witnesses, apparently top  20 ones, had been discussing this for weeks. What is also interesting is that for him to perceive this as a credible threat, there had to be quite a few witnesses in on this...plot. So what I'm curious about is,

WHO ARE THESE WITNESSES???

Apparently some of our top 20 witnesses were pondering whether or not it would be a good idea to effectively stage a coup which would absolutely undermine the security of this blockchain? As in who would want to invest large sums of money if some people might just get together and fork you out of the chain? Ned didn't give up the names, but I for one would love to know who these witnesses are, because I'd like to make sure the don't currently have my vote. I understand that people are frustrated with Steemit, with Ned, etc. But a move like that would be catastrophic. In the chat some of the witnesses started to step forward and say, I was not one of the ones discussing this. I would like more witnesses to do the same, because we need to know who we're voting for. Maybe some of you are in favor of that idea, but I'm definitely not and I'd love to have some community effort put behind figuring out where people stand.

Moving on, so Steemit only having 12 employees, just made me think okay, so we shouldn't hold our breath on these new features, especially if the bear market doesn't let up.

74 million...that's a lot of STEEM.

On the lack of timelines, well, I guess I get this, they don't want to make promises they can't keep, but of course, we all love dates to look forward to.

Well that about wraps it up. Overall I think it was a positive chat. I feel a bit better to be honest. Ned mentioned they were going to also try to open up more lines of communication as well as reaching out for community development, most likely with Steemit, so all in all mostly good, or neutral news, not a lot of doom and gloom.

Hope you found this useful/informative, what are your thoughts?