Disturbing Discovery of the Day - Unexpected Steemit U/I Changes

“If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not recognize it when it arrives.”
– Heraclitus –

I have a love/hate relationship with Steemit.

You might ask, "What's not to love about Steemit and the Steem blockchain?"

Today I woke up thinking about attempting the next in my ongoing set of experiments in creating my Steemit Library. I was contemplating writing a software tool that any Steemian could use to create their own, more easily accessible Steemit Library / Table of Contents.

Imagine my shock and horror when I went to http://steemit.com/@creatr, scrolled down expecting to have a complete list of all my Steemit posts, and hit a brick wall at the first post of 2017?

WHAAAAT???

I've been on Steemit since August of 2016. I have many good posts that were published before January of 2017. Where are they? Are they all gone? How do I access them? Can I even remember what they were? Do I have to resort to the dark side (Google) to find them again?

I don't want this article to be misconstrued as a lack of appreciation for Steemit and STEEM, and so I'll start out by enumerating some of the many things I love.

I want to scream!
Image courtesy of Gabriel Matula and http://unsplash.com

What do I love about Steemit?

I love the ability to reap rewards by creating compelling content.
I love having an online wallet with the built-in latency of Steem Power.
I love the amazingly fast, scalable transaction times for transferring STEEM.
I love the decentralized, censorship resistant nature of Steemit as social media.
I love the permanence of the blockchain.

But there are things that I find annoying, troubling, and at times deeply frustrating.

I hate the Steemit U/I limitations.

I've written about other aspects of the http://steemit.com user interface limitations before, but I have to say that today I am very annoyed and frustrated at the latest unannounced change.

Long ago, and contrary to promises and expectations, I discovered that it is impossible to edit posts after the payout window. This is fundamentally wrong, as content creators should have the perpetual ability to edit, modify, correct, and revise their own work.

To those who worry about ex-post-facto revisionism, I'll point out that all Steemit editing done on the blockchain is inherently a versioning series, and (with the right software tools) the entire history of every revision can be recovered and inspected.

It is also impossible on http://steemit.com to re-steem a worthy article that is past the payout period. This is clearly a Steemit U/I limitation, because the U/I at http://busy.org allows it.

Then, not too long ago, I discovered that my painstakingly constructed Steemit Library was unexpectedly broken. A change in the user interface implemented by http://steemit.com suddenly began inserting a superfluous, duplicate 'https//' into every link, one that does not exist in my source code. What the heck?

And so today's discovery that I can't even list older articles simply adds insult to injury.

What recourse do I have?

My experience with complaining about these things over the course of the last year or so has not been very encouraging. Perhaps in a decentralized system, there is nothing resembling good user support?

I think my ultimate refuge is going to be something I've threatened for a long time now. I may just have to become a developer.

And so I'll make this appeal.

Are you a Steemit developer? Do you know how to do web programming? Is there any such thing as a Steemit Development IDE? How about a "Learn to Love and Access The Steem Blockchain," or a "Steemit Programming for Dummies" sort of tutorial?

I'm all ears.

If you can point me in the right direction, please, hit me with your best shot. I'll be extremely grateful.

_FIN

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Introducing: The SILVERengines proton - Image by @creatr

Thanks for your time and attention.
You are why I'm here on Steemit!
I have very eclectic interests and hope, over time, to write about them all.