Hi!
Can forum mods please self disclose their membership in Chaos DAO as well as their role and purpose in the DAO. For those who are active in Chaos DAO, can you also disclose if you are receiving monthly or part time payments by Parity.
Thank you.
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I’m not a Chaos DAO member, and I never have been. In fact, I’ve criticized them publicly more than once in the past (e.g. here and here).
To be fully transparent: lately I’ve also felt frustrated that they haven’t been more vocal about certain things going on in the ecosystem. I’ll leave it at that.
That said, this anti-Chaos DAO witch-hunt is absolutely bananas. It’s especially ironic that the person demanding “disclosure” is doing so from an alt account. I mean… @salty_carbonara? Come on.
And for what it’s worth: I’m pretty sure most Chaos DAO members were raised by responsible adults who taught them not to share personal details with strangers on the internet.
So hey @salty_carbonara: is this post a reaction to how Chaos DAO voted on a recent OpenGov proposal? 
That’s it, isn’t it? I knew it!
Anyway, as always: “fuck Chaos DAO!”
But for a change, today I want to say this clearly:
I stand by Chaos DAO.
Have they made mistakes in the past? Sure. So have I. So have we all. The only people who never make mistakes are the ones who never do anything.
Overall, I think Chaos DAO has been among the most impactful community groups Polkadot has had.
Most of the members I’ve interacted with are genuinely passionate and well-intentioned. Have there been bad apples? Of course. Any org, especially one with visibility and influence, will attract opportunists. If anything, the fact that you got access to their private chats is evidence of infiltration and breach of trust, not evidence that “the whole group is bad.”
I understand that the org’s opacity can look “cultish” from the outside, and some people will always assume the worst. But that says more about their assumptions than about reality. From what I’ve seen, Chaos DAO has often been more transparent and self-critical than plenty of better-funded, more politically-connected groups in this ecosystem. And when they identify a bad actor, they remove them. They also can take criticism and act upon it.
Do I have the full picture? No. But I’ve known enough members to say this: their ethos is solid, and the intent is overwhelmingly aligned with pushing Polkadot forward.
We should be grateful to have a community of white-hat hackers and cypherpunks trying to build and, defend things that matter.
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why ChaosDAO do this?
FCD
Hi!
Can forum posters please self-disclose their legal name and place of residence? For those who are actively posting, can you also disclose all sources of income. Thank you.
(this is sarcasm, for those of you who looking to screenshot this and say “Bill is forcing people to give up anonymity on the Polkadot Forum!”)
For the record, I am not a mod of Polkadot Forum, not a member of ChaosDAO, and I am not paid by Parity.
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Chaos DAO delivered some valuable work, but it also caused significant harm. Close coordination among past curators blocked many promising contributions from entering the ecosystem. I’m not claiming any group is uniquely blameless… grifters have appeared everywhere, and Permanence removed bad actors as soon as evidence surfaced… but what I saw with Chaos was a troubling cycle: a group that began fighting grifters ended up repeating the same mistakes, often from inexperience, and some sought to entrench paid roles, some still working @parity. The result was millions spent, targets missed, and a lot of wasted time.
Bounties must be managed at arm’s length even between curators (this why they are paid positions, not as a paid cartel), with transparent processes and accountability. I’ve posted on this before and am working on a practical solution that I hope to share soon - one that creates wins for both the network and contributors.
Chaos DAO had an important opportunity and missed it. If you see problematic behavior in your DAO, speak up early. If members fail to act, the whole group’s credibility suffers, and that is a waste because there were good members in the DAO, and they also got hit hard.
I have never been paid 1c from Parity nor the W3F, but have put many years bringing investment and developers to the network, and by personal experience <4 people from that DAO try to push me out of the ecosystem, sadly for them, they don’t have any leverage over me, they need to grow up.
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Hi the Bill!
According to Oscar Wilde Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence. Some even say sarcasm is a hostile form of humor. What I think is that sarcasm is lazy.
In continuation to your clearly emotional response, I think it is worth mentioning you are mixing apples and oranges here.
- Being anon does not make questions or comments irrelevant, its simply put in place to protect individuals from public discreditation (protection you, w3f, parity ever failed to deliver).
- Insinuating that an ordinary forum member should be upheld to the same moral standards as forum mods, is shallow and patronizing.
For rest of the commenters in the thread, most of you missed the point of the message. The point is not to discuss what CD is and what is not. The point is to discuss whether there is a conflict of interest, where mods on a centralised forums also participate in a DAO which is closed to public, therefore preventing Polkadot DAO (a broader audience) to trust there is no foul play when it comes to flagging certain posts in a coordinated fashion, and then removal of that specific post by mods (also members of CD). Just to clarify, I aint saying this is or isn’t true, I am saying, mod membership in CD could allow such behaviour and due to the rules and homogenity of CD also possible. Therefore mods should self-censorship their participation in any hidden/private memberships to clearly show they are dedicated to moderate forums objectively.
To further re-inforce the problematic nature of mod membership in CD, lemme summarized how CD is perceived by Josep - in this thread:
- Josep is lately frustrated because CD has not been more vocal on certain things with the ecosystem (I agree with this, there was no CD participation in a problematic marketing bounty, with the exception or sarcasm and vulgarism by their individual members on social networks)
- Josep does express he is standing with CD despite:
- CD made mistakes in the past (Josep if you can please enlighten us, what are those mistakes and how the responsibility was taken)
- CD has bad apples (Josep, which ones are bad apples?)
- CD as organisation is “cultish” from the outside
It is not hard to align with Josep on these bulletpoints, hence the initial question of mod membership in the mentioned DAO.
But since y’all wanted to talk about CD so much, lets review what an outsider can perceive about CD:
- We worry about public image of Polkadot, these worries even resulted in removal of posts on the forums (which did not break any of the rules) in order to protect image of Polkadot. Yet, noone ever pointed the finger at vulgar, primitive communication by CD on social media. Proudly utilising catch phrases as “fuck ChaosDAO” “bunch of pussies” and similar. Does this not affect our public image?
- CD is running on a centralised Discord controlled by individuals, it has nothing to do with decentralisation, nor it ever attempted to move the operation to better aligned tooling with higher democratic access.
- Even CD within CD has layers of visibility. Being a member grants you access to daily vulgarism/sarcasm, but not actual access to voting or even voting discussion - so a basic membership with no actual voting access.
- With that said, only a minority of CD members actually have access to voting, and the voting discussions are hidden from other CD members. This setup signals heavy centralisation of delegation to a few people.
Maybe not a lot of people knew about these facts, but thats how it is. High delegation to CD can either mean one of two things:
- The ecosystem is aware, but simply doesnt care - in this case we have to accept outcomes that the ecosystem has boiled down to “being in CD is being cool” conforming to vulgarism, sarcasm, secrecy and centralisation in the hands of few.
- The ecosystem is unaware, Parity and w3f are oblivious, ignorance is bliss.
There is a third possibility. The ecosystem is aware of this and turns away until the problems have been solved. However, the only person who can do this is Gavin, as everything comes together with him. But Gavin is apparently terrible at delegating and even worse at hiring competent managers, unless of course they do exactly what they are supposed to do and it has been decided to scrap the project.
You might wanna spend your weekend doing something else. There’s nothing to be said here, really. People have issues with CD; apparently you do as well. From what I know it’s a generally well-functioning DAO and for some unknown reason has gathered the most delegated votes of any DAO in the ecosystem. Sounds like they’re doing something right.
All the other stuff you’re insinuating is, frankly, ridiculous, unless you’d like to directly accuse me (or my fellow mods) of something specific, in which case I am all ears!
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How I spend my weekends is my problem. It is not surprising tho that the mod who is also part of CD would open with cinism/sarcasm. The Bill gave green light to such language, so apparently now mods can go to personal level.
It funny you say CD is a well functioning DAO. My claim is the following:
- CD is not decentralised
- CD is not autonomous (due to the fact that CD includes a lot of Parity employees)
In reality, CD is not Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, instead it should be called “Chaos Organisation” since its neither decentralised nor autonomous.
The fact you are calling it a DAO is, frankly, ridiculous, unless you’d like to showcase any proof that shows otherwise, in which case I am all ears!
Lastly, I would gladly provide you with direct quotes from CD, direct messages by one of the mods, but unfortunately it is against CD rules and I might get banned.
Well, I got invited, climbed all the way to the top level, did some initiatives, got some other people to do some stuff, got demoted for trolling people in the NSFW forum too much, then stopped voting and participating in governance (around the time I started REEE because I didn’t think it was good to vote in 2 places that could potentially have DV), and eventually left.
Further, how does any of this have anything, at all, to do with polkadot other than they voted against you or whatever thing happend that made you such a salty carbonara?
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feel free to go search my twitter account for swear words. anyway, this thread isn’t pertinent to anything, closing. thank you for your misplaced concern
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