In # Developer Experience must be our #1 Priority, @alice_und_bob makes the case that the root cause of issues in the ecosystem is:
The way developers experience the ecosystem.
I would contend that this is just one of many symptoms of far deeper issues:
- a desperation to ‘bring in new developers’, rather than making the talent here work better together.
- a lack of deep (and fiery) philosophical debate that was the hallmark of early BTC and ETH development.
- a lack of ‘edge’… everything feels too nice, too safe and too comfortable.
- quit with all the moderation… it’s antithetical to the entire experimental spirit of ‘opengov’…
- continually referencing ‘blockspace’ and other lexicon that only reinforces the cache of the incumbents, we need our own language, culture and narratives.
- a razor focus on continually asking the question ‘what is ONLY possible here?’.
- a fear of letting projects die - as long as we retain key talent.
- let those who want to leave, leave, stop begging to keep people who were never really that committed.
- quit the helpless “parity, founders etc need to do something” mentality, this is about finding a unique new voice, not expecting them to work miracles everywhere.
- too many conferences, too many events, too much circular debate in a bubble.
- a fundamental (mis)understanding of the technologies strengths, especially when related to the coordination game of opengov… lean into the tools, don’t mediate their potency.
- build on the core strengths, as opposed to complaining “it’s not like Ethereum / Cosmos etc does it”, there’s far too much focus on 'what everyone else is doing" - stop.
- a Substrate login to this forum speaks to the simple stuff not getting prioritised, in favour of more complex ‘important things’… this is the home of Polkadot - the ‘governance experiment’… this is where people are, lets make it the heart of the experiment, technically, culturally, economically…
- too much money… it makes people wasteful and lazy, whereas the fewer tools you have, the more resourceful you will be… less is more.
- competition between ‘for profit’ teams and ‘common good / system chains’ drags the whole thing down and pits commercial models against ‘the state’.
- funding models that pit everyone against everyone else in zero sum games.
- little to no discussion about core network value accrual other than ‘let’s wait for the bull market’
- subjective, rather than objective measures of success that result in short term populist agendas
- lack of any unifying direction/s that can kickstart more collectivist mindsets.
- technical solutions from parachain teams that are far too complex, rather than making the basic stuff work really well… clue, you don’t need more stuff in your runtimes, you need less.
- a primary focus on Polkadot, rather than on Kusama…
- and finally…
What do you think?
What are the ‘root’ causes of the issues?
People are aware of the symptoms, but dig deep, what isn’t working right?
Where is there tension?
What do you ‘feel’ isn’t right?