Ethereum Sub Hard Forks

Ethereum Sub Hard Forks

The most active ethereum public space has had a split as a number of moderators suddenly announced they were quitting to form their own sub.

Aftab “DCinvestor” Hossain, the new top mod of the new subreddit, stated publicly on r/ethtrader:

“I was alarmed when I heard of u/AdamSC1’s removal as moderator via unilateral action by the “first mod” of this sub-Reddit. The extremity of this response to a simple disagreement during the middle of a moderator discussion concerned me, with many mods expressing disapproval to me privately.

That alarm turned into dismay and downright anger when I learned of u/jtnichol’s removal as mod the next day, made more insidious by the fact that his name remained on the sidebar, but with all moderator permissions stripped away…

That’s why I’m moving on to r/ethfinance with this team of mods, along with many other prominent community members. I hope to work with them to create a strong, high quality, and of course, fun community to serve Ethereum and each of you.”

What exactly happened isn’t too clear, but the six mods that moved to the new sub say the r/ethtrader top mod, Carl Larson, acted unilaterally in removing AdamSC1.

It’s not very clear who Adam is, but he seems to be busy building games and coding stuff, publicly stating earlier this year: “2 years ago, I cashed out a lot of my savings account and my crypto.”

There apparently was some sort of “small administrative dispute” between Larson and Adam. The latter was removed as mod, with Larson stating:

“I removed Adam as a mod because he had been inactive in mod duties for at least 3 months and sporadically before that (even jt and yukon complained about him remaining on the team).

We have a policy that two months inactivity can result in removal. I also felt when he did mod he exercised poor judgement (one example was removing a critical comment on one of his own posts).

I did demod him unilaterally, which was unusual as we had previously had threads to discuss inactivity first. But ultimately removal of a mod was always an action I was responsible for.

A number of mods disagreed with how I handled this and we were at an impasse. After 4 days discussion and jt (who ran the [mods] discord chat) declining to remove Adam from that chat I left that chat and removed permissions from jt. Permissions are easy to restore so I saw that quite differently to demodding (position of mod in mod list would stay same once restored).

There were also building resentments in the team. For instance Yukon often took quite a strong stance on moderation that we came to heads about. While I think the split is regrettable it’s possible more choice may also ultimately be a good thing.”

Jeremiah Nichol, aka jtnichol, describes himself as a pro DJ and a music teacher. He is a long time ethtrader mod, and is now second in line for top mod in the new sub. Giving the “official” statement, he said:

“As a moderator team, we have tried working good faith with Carl (“lead mod” for this sub) for the past year and beyond to benefit r/EthTrader as a community, however, this has grown increasingly challenging due to consistently unilateral, and ostensibly self-serving decisions which he has made that degrade the quality of the sub.”

This insinuation of “self-serving” refers to donuts, a reddit experiment that gives points (donuts) based on the amount of activity in the sub by a participant.

All mods get an allocation of 13,000 donuts a week, with some saying Larson gets more as top mod. Larson himself publicly said today:

“I have something like 3m spendable donuts. If donuts became worth what they were before at peak (I actually think that’s a stretch) then that might be worth 150eth. So that’s really peanuts compared to the time I have and still need to put in to the project to see it to completion.”

150 eth is $30,000, with this donuts aspect seemingly being coded/developed by Larson with it potentially to become some sort of ethereum based DAO that may be extended to other subs by Reddit if it is successful.

The idea is to combat fake accounts or marketing/shill accounts by ranking votes based on karma rather than one account, one vote.

How this experiment will work in practice and how it will develop, remains to be seen, but Larson apparently plans to continue with it as well as to continue being top mod, with this difference of opinion thus so leading to more choice according to both sides.

Larson created ethtrader and has guided it through some of the best times and some of the most difficult times.

We have no behind the scene view on what went on, but on the surface there’s a difference of opinion mainly in regards to moderation.

The new sub seemingly plans to be stricter, where “you are free to say what ever you want, if it… doesn’t degrade the quality of the sub too much,” according to Adam.

What that means exactly isn’t too clear, but the new sub might be more hands on and less reluctant to remove “negative” comments or articles.

It of course might not, but if there wasn’t something a bit more than just a silly dispute, you would have expected some sort of public discussion and some natural progression to the new sub.

Instead of a surprise, with some people in some backroom choosing some new top mod and so telling everyone to go to some new sub.

Which is entirely their right and it might work out for the better, but this coordinated action does echo bitcoin 2015, as ethereum has been doing really to the dot much of this year.

That makes it very interesting from a greater analysis perspective, but for now, we leave you with the keeper of the house:

“9 hours later and there are still 218,000+ hodlers, a virtual speed bump of migration. I’m going to venture that most of these people, if still active, don’t give a rat’s ass about the mods, their overblown personas, or the messy internal politics of this sub. They just come for the news, gossip, info, market sentiment, TA, memes, hopium, therapy, and to vent and/or reinforce their confirmation bias. Yes, this is the essence of ethtrader, and I’m sure it will continue on. Have a good day.”

Copyrights Trustnodes.com

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