Request for comment: Your Concerns About Community

please feel free to list any concerns you have/have had regarding the community on here.

it’s becoming more evident that there are grievances that need to be aired instead of continuing to fester.

it could be limited to the community on the forum or in other forms/mediums/networks etc

please frame from the point of view of what’s wrong with/can be improved of a process and not a person.

no wrong answers! :raised_hands:

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I’m relatively new here so I can only offer feedback from my limited experience.

I actually got encouraged to post on this forum because of @anon20038177 art contest initiative. I think it’s great that community members offer their funds and time for the benefit of the Cardano project. That shows a lot.

The forum is full of smart, educated people from around the world. Obviously with different backgrounds and various opinions. Disagreements are bound to happen - I don’t think it’s a bad thing. We have a common goal - help Cardano become globally adopted - but we differ regarding the technicalities of the path that should be taken to achieve that goal. Debates should be welcome, they are a way to alpha test the initial idea. Critique should be an incentive to find better solutions. Projects where everyone agrees on everything are the ones to fail, because of the inability to indicate flaws.

My only issue is that this forum looks very authoritarian, comments are often deleted without stating a reason, threads are closed, people get banned. This is not a way to go, this is a way to fall.

Consider the fact that if Charles Hoskinson had an anonymous account on this forum he would probably get banned within a month as he often calls other people idiots.

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Great word of wisdom.

Employees (mostly teenagers) are thinking they are “gods” on this forum. As soon as there is a single critic, we get banned . This is totalitarianism, dictatorship. Similar as neo-nazi, We see these similarities in North Korea, China, Russia.

We do need to have a democratic way to elect, Ambassadors, moderators, etc. Being a moderator and working for IOHK is similar to a dictatorship.

Kind regards.

CH encouraging me to challenge the power!!!

It seems that moderators do not know the way their CEO think!.

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In the Parsons era I have found the Community (and this Forum) to be a much better place. How ironic this is!? And during the Parsons mission we were brought together nicely, but not anymore.

Here is my speculation, version of the story of what´s happening with our Community.

  1. The Community Management Team is struggling a lot, they are not able to fulfill their role to provide guidance, balance, healthy environment for the Community in an unbiased, fair & efficient way. You can´t really recognize their own voice and identity no matter they cost 4 FTE for the Foundation.
  2. This is one of the issues allowing for the toxicity & mud we sometimes end up in.
  3. The Community Management Team has no transparent plan & agenda to involve and unleash the intellectual power, vast capacity & diverse skillset of our Community, to utilize all the highly motivated talent we have out there and promote a decentralized Community, this should be done already in the design process and not only when something is rolled out in runtime
  4. Such kind of collaboration doesn´t exists. What rather exists is various levels (regular member, lounge VIP member, Slack Member, Inner Circle) of Community status and exposure to information and opportunity to influence.
  5. Their weakness might come from the fact that Parsons never really cared about Cardano or had the competence to do so, so he has recruited people for the job and just to provide the illusion, but didn´t hire the best talent by far (and I am being polite here). I find it even troubling that when clearly asked in social media by one of the members of the Community Management Team, whether he stands by Parsons side or the Community side, he didn´t even respond to that.
  6. In the Parsons-Era this CM Team got close with a few members of our Community (will refer to it as the Elite) as the Elite had the early-entry advantage to the Cardano Community and they were always eventually quite active. These relationships were quite clearly protected in the Parsons Mission, not to expose or damage anyone from the Community Management Team, who had personal relations to Parsons.
  7. What happened after Parsons resigned suddenly there was a vacuum of power, opportunity and available resources to invest
  8. The Elite tried to secure (and honestly succeeded) their position close to the Community Management Team and have everyone else (CF Board, maybe even Charles) see the happenings via their eyes
  9. CF Board & Charles just don´t have the time & effort to go into this depth we are in (it´s not their job at all), they mainly get their feedback, reports via the Elite & CM Team (there are a few exceptions luckily)
  10. The Community Management Team needed the Elite to balance off their aching weakness of experience & competence and by then the trust relationship was built. With every challenge to the Community Management Team, you can usually see the Elite coming out defending them and their bond just grows stronger and stronger.
  11. Having Parsons out of the picture, to start the engine of the Cardano Foundation, new programs were finally announced like the Cardano Ambassador Program, the Cardano Hubs Program, which will define the future of our Community
  12. Having explicitly asked for having all of us from the Community shape these programs together in an Open Community Consultation, instead the Elite is applying tactics of protectionism and have exclusive influence how these Programs should look like
  13. Any efforts (like the Cardano Social Council https://forum.cardano.org/t/cardano-social-council-introduction), which were tackling the centralization of Community Power and Influence are broken down by strategically pushing them into a personal, emotional, discrediting & destructive context (aka mud), where they eventually die off (or get moderated, topics closed, made private or even deleted without prior agreement & transparency). It will likely happen to this comment as well.
  14. You may have also experienced the misuse of anonymous users, who most of them have very little other contribution, but as part of tactics exclusively focusing on politics shaping public opinion or voting in Forum polls (such an anonymous profile was busted recently)
  15. In the meantime the Elite is expanding its network and influence, by making some other Community members and even people from other Cardano Ecosystem Entities “loyal” to them (sometimes with morally & ethically not acceptable tactics, sometimes with sharing special titles, etc.)
  16. What you experience is the clash of people in the Community who are not loyal to this Elite and challenge the very basic fundamentals (like whether having Cardano Ambassador´s on LinkedIn without ever empowering them with representation) & trends happening in the Community
  17. IMO we do not need a hidden and non-official hierarchical organization formed by the Community having totalitarian control (but maybe I am wrong and this is all a natural & healthy process?)
  18. IMO the members of the Elite are passionate about Cardano, some of them are sufficiently competent, they want to help the venture and also do their best, but they just want to keep this control so it can be done their way without Community wide openness and some sort of consensus (but maybe I am wrong and this is more efficient?)
  19. This is a very complex topic and unfortunately hard to grasp & recognize, which results in some members who have very good intention & character, but haven´t put the puzzle together will mainly see pointless arguments and pick sides without being aware of the entire deep context

For the record I am not conspiracy theorist, just good in observing things & putting the pieces together (which I mainly did for the Parsons Network Graph you might have seen).

Here is an earlier, overly simplified definition I had for decentralization:

“Decentralization is about emergence; an extended, diverse & large “non-hierarchical” network of (identical or function based) nodes, where all the independent nodes collaborate following a consensus protocol and each of them is contributing to the utility (consented agreements) the network itself provides.”

The larger the network, the stronger it is. The better the consensus protocol, the more efficient it is.

This is completely opposite to how our Community is organized at the moment (but maybe I am wrong and this is an idealism?).

Just replace nodes with members of the Community and ask yourself if this is how we function or not.

You will know when we are decentralized, when you will be able to join a collaboration platform that will allow you to bring your competence, insight & know how shaping projects together, which define our joint future.

Just one sign of this speculation is that there has been zero response by the Community Management Team for almost 2 months on Community Feedback for the Ambassador Program or any recent Change Requests proposed to it by members of our Community. Eventually there has been other feedback on this program from 6 months ago in the Lounge area of the Forum, which was never responded to.

https://forum.cardano.org/t/announcing-the-cardano-ambassador-program/

I expect a lot of attack on this comment (maybe even from the Elite), but I won´t have time to respond to them. I simply can´t invest so much time having a job & family I just can´t let down. I have also nothing more to say about this topic, but would like to focus on other initiatives of the Watchdogs.

I kindly ask the other Watchdogs if they like to help & follow up on this one.

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I’ve seen loads of critics that have never been moderated in any way… Unless you got proof you were banned because of your opinion, I tend to believe it was due to your behavior.

I think this is one of the things that is wrong with this community. People having different standards of what is acceptable and what is not.

As for now the forum rules require you to behave yourself and don’t do personal attacks etc. I believe the majority feels this way, and therefore those are the rules that apply to everyone.

Feel free to start a vote wether the forum rules should be altered or not. If the majority agrees we should be able to call each other assholes on this forum, then the rules should be changed. If then the so called elite keeps banning people for using foul language and personal attacks, then I agree there is something wrong… (Allthough I’ll probably be gone then, because that’s not the environment I want to be in.)

For now I still believe mods are just following rules set by majority consensus and don’t ban based on opinion.

To be fair: If they were banning people based on opinions, @bercinho would have been long gone, since he never seems to agree with their opinion. :grin:

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It’s great to see community interest in :ada: :gift: art contests! Few members are picking up the initiative, and will present an exciting contest for you soon. Will be looking forward to your participation!

@anon20038177 is the inspiration, happy to have such proactive members in our forum!

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So they should ban Hoskinson when he is publicly insulting (Youtube) ADA community members and Parson.

That CEO is responsible for the price too.

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As long as he’s using his personal twitter it’s all up to him. Unless he breaks Twitter rules, then I’m sure Twitter will ban him.

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So it does shock you to have a CEO insulting the community ?
Keep on keeping on my friend, you are on the right path.

What ever the media, a CEO insulting the community hugely hurts the price of ADA and many members left because of those public insults.

Which community are you referring to?

“To the idiots and FUDsters, I have not left IOHK or Cardano. Being an advisor for a project does not mean that I am abandoning or slowing down upon existing commitments. It is unbelievable the garbage being said on telegram and reddit. Cardano is my primary passion and work”

The above is not directed at :cardano: community.
It specifically says to the “idiots and FUDsters.”
To take offense at this tweet you would have to count yourself amongst that community.

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You beat me to it, I was going to quote that! :smile: TG is loving it! :grin:

Ruslan’s set up a bot so anytime Endor is mentioned that tweet appears… :rofl::rofl::rofl:

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As you wish




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Bert, I am just taking this thread as a random pick. Quite a number of posts in this forum are attacks against people, and not against ideas. The tone is rather uncivilized, not a tone that I would allow in any meetings I participate at. I will not go into details here, may post one or two more comments (again, rather randomly - no ambition to “respond to all”) and we will now strictly enforce the Terms and Conditions of this forum, please also see the FAQ. Everyone still has a voice on the internet. Please everyone who wants to express their view, their grievances, their requests, if the terms of this forum does not fit, feel free to use the various other online forums (just like you and many other have in the past). Please also note that I will be respond posts here on a minute-to-minute basis, simply because it’s not practical, but also because it’s not constructive. Best wishes, — Nathan

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Dear misteraxyz, I appreciate your request for comment. I would like to - tongue in check - state the obvious: as we can see throughout the past let’s say six months or so with the online discussions on the forum, on Twitter, and other platforms, rather clearly there are no grievances that were left un-aired :slight_smile:

Best wishes, — Nathan

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What did I say yesterday about this guy? Oh yeah:

He misunderstands the very premise of his own argument and then attacks the party simply trying to point out his error.

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it’s easy, some people start using it as a weapon against a specific group of people, and other people who are affiliated with them.

Also, some innocent and unrelated people just became collateral damage.

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Great to hear that. I might be quite busy in the upcoming days, but it’s great to see such initiatives anyway :slight_smile:

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I will not reply to certain individual(s) directly as it seems that this individual(s) do/does not want this at this point. However, would like to reply on the following statement:

‘‘And during the Parsons mission we were brought together nicely, but not anymore.’’

I have to disagree with this last part. I have the impression the community (apart from several members on the forum) is actually quite active, aware, coherent and consistent in their actions. Meetups are starting to get organized world-wide more frequently, people are showing genuine interest in learning more and people are creating VERY valuable contents across the community. The CF itself is also slowly, but steadily, waking up and trying to restructure itself (which Charles also mentions in some of his AMA’s, may take quite some time to accomplish ;)).
Furthermore, talents are being spotted/headhunted as we speak, because some contributions (Adatainment, as well as blockchain explorer devs etc.) are just amazing and deserve all the attention they can get. @richard.wild :wink:
This should disprove the above and instead, attest to a very vibrant and active community.

Emurgo and IOHK (who are also part of this community) are ramping up their work and efforts, and are clearly showing the results across all the social media platforms.

However, anyone calling people who have contributed, mostly voluntarily, to this project since day 1 as ‘The Elite’, is misinformed and definitely wearing the wrong pair of glasses.
It makes one wonder and reevaluate what a ‘‘from the grounds up grassroots’’ community actually means.(please do not read this in a denigrating tone/way, as it is not my intent)

After the ‘‘Parsons Era’’, certain people literally ‘took’ a different path, as stated in recently released statement which I signed as well. Taking a different path is fine, to some extent, and heavily depends as to how this path was taken, I might add.
It also requires them to take appropriate responsibility for their actions. It seems to me ‘‘the community’’ in general, is quite woke on what happened ‘‘PPE - Post Parsons Era’’, regarding this.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to state that I will not further comment on, or want to be involved with said factions’ leader and/or supporter(s)/members anywhere on any social media platform. Please do not reply, tag, or otherwise involve me in any (upcoming) discussions from said factions/members, whatsoever. (Better understood as the ‘‘Rick McCracken’’-method.)

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

I do, however, wish them all the best in positively contributing to the Cardano ecosystem, wherever and whatever that may be. :slight_smile:

On to better times.

Cheers!

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Yes, I guess we shouldn’t have any concern since everything is just fine and the community is so great.

Any criticism is purely FUD, any concern is simply worrying too much, and this thread should be taken down since it’s “inappropriate”.

TBH, the above description of “the impression of the community” also works just fine in the Parson’s era.

The truth is, “a problem is never a problem until it’s a problem”.

Parson wasn’t a problem until people realized he was the problem.

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Most of you know me on twitter as Denicio Bernier.

Viewing the post here, one thought came to mind - that is: what is exactly the goal of the community? Should we not be unified and in being so, strive the best possible outcome for Cardano and ADA?

My hope is that we all will put aside whatever hard feelings of power there may exist and start to contribute and build as ‘one team’. We do not want this to continue once Goguen has been put into place.

I hope as well that in the coming months it will become more and more clear who the honest community members are. The ones constructively contributing to the growth and marketing of Cardano.

Do not focus too much on positions. That only brings confusion. Just do what you can to contribute.

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