The Grifter Hunters Have Become the Grifters themselves, understandable so, this happens when you employ the UN-employables.
jeeper’s concerns about WagMedia expose something we need to say plainly: the people who positioned themselves as guardians against ecosystem exploitation have become the primary beneficiaries of a misaligned system.
Look at the numbers:
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Management: $146,000 (paid in full)
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Content creation (the actual mandate): $44,000
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Unused funds sitting in treasury: $180,000
This is a 3:1 ratio of management to actual work, on a bounty whose entire purpose is content creation. The management got paid in full while the work got done at a fraction of the proposed level. That’s not oversight or inefficiency, that’s capture.
The political propaganda post jeeper flagged isn’t a content problem, it’s a symptom. When a bounty prioritizes paying itself over delivering its mandate, editorial standards collapse because there’s no real accountability to mission or output quality.
jeeper asks the right questions: Why was management paid in full when content delivery was minimal? Where are the unused funds going now that 52 weeks are complete? These deserve immediate, public answers.
But this isn’t just about WagMedia. My analysis shows only 55% of active bounties meet basic compliance standards. 65% lack monthly reports. 60% have no live tracking. We’ve built a system where getting paid is easier than delivering results, and where those who should be enforcing standards are the ones benefiting from their absence.
The curators who approved this allocation and allowed full management payments while content delivery lagged need to be named publicly. Their judgment calls need to be visible and their professional reputations should reflect these decisions. Not all curators are aligned within bounties, and not all curators are the same… some have tried to enforce standards while others have looked the other way. But the current system makes it impossible to distinguish between them or hold anyone specifically accountable.
We need to pay special attention to the Marketing bounty, which has been totally opaque about everything they do. Here’s what should have happened: WagMedia should have been structured as a child bounty under the Marketing bounty. That way there’s clear mission alignment between what gets funded and the expected outcomes of those efforts. Instead, we have fragmented oversight with no one clearly responsible for ensuring marketing initiatives actually advance the ecosystem’s communication goals.
The deeper problem is the arms length approach has been abandoned. We’re watching people cannibalize the system they’re supposed to be stewarding. When curators fund themselves, when management extracts more than the work delivers, when oversight becomes a formality rather than a function, the whole mechanism breaks down.
We need to restart this with a new system in place. One where curators can’t fund their own operations, where bounty structure enforces mission alignment through child bounties, where decisions are onchain and attributable, and where reputation has actual consequences. The current system has shown us what doesn’t work. Time to build what does.
WagMedia should return the unused funds immediately. Management should justify why they received full compensation while delivering a fraction of the content mandate. And the Marketing bounty curators need to explain why they’ve been operating with complete opacity while initiatives like this fail to deliver on their mandates.
I’m working on a reform proposal that makes this kind of situation impossible through structural accountability. We need systems that prevent capture and self-dealing, not just better intentions from the same people.
The unused funds need to be returned. Now.
