The texts clearly show that the community should restart a new thread, about the same topic. You can therefore continue the discussion on Marketing Bounty here.
Summary
It’s better to go to the original thread to see details of everything, before you reply. In addition, discourse has a “summary” button, which will give you an AI-generated summary for tldr.
thanks for doing the reasonable things which was to open a new thread. Making a summary of the previous one would be useful. Funnily if there was censorship, we would not allow you or anyone to re-open a thread, right?
If the question is whether this is censorship or not, I can give you a resounding yes – disrupting the flow of discussion and making information harder to find is a form of censorship.
In the Internet age, it’s actually really hard to completely censor information, because there are so many ways to publish information. You probably found out about this yourself – I only heard about the marketing bounty controversy after you have censored the original thread because there started to be outcries on Twitter. So this is actually the predominate form of censorship (that many state actors also choose to use) – if some unwanted information becomes a hot topic, make it difficult to discuss it, until the engagement dies down and no one cares about it any more.
This is the very thing that happened here. We have the original thread we could have used for further discussion of this topic. It is a hot topic, yet the original discussion flow was disrupted. Making discussions difficult is a form of censorship.
If in your Parity’s position post you were trying to back down from the original censorship, I’m sorry – this is a job really poorly done. You may claim there’s no more censorship from this point on, but it won’t hide the fact that there was censorship.
Regarding the question of providing a summary – this is a deliberate choice. I provided a link to the original thread and the goal is so that more people would check the details of original thread before commenting (rather than relying on any second-hand summary). Then they can judge by themselves, whether it’s a genuine discussion and moderators censored it wrongly, or, as you have claimed, that they
Everyone can also judge by themselves, based on the original thread, of the vulgar remarks you used against them.
For a bit of logistics of anti-censorship, I found out that if the discourse discussion is very long, Wayback Machine actually cannot save the full page. The initial rendering without Javascript only transmits a portion of the discussions. Then the Javascript part somehow doesn’t work (at least for this site).
You can add /print at the end of the url to force discourse to transmit the full page without Javascript. For example, given the Marketing Bounty Deep Dive url:
Finding solutions should come first. Just pointing fingers without offering ways to avoid these kinds of “dramatic” situations in the future doesn’t really help.
Less noise, more proactive problem-solving.
Or do you really think saving the thread on the Wayback Machine is the solution?
You are directing this to the wrong party – ask Parity/Pierre. They have the perfect solution – stop the censorship and unlock the threads. It’s honestly just one button click for them.
We’re doing proactive problem-solving for the problems Parity/Pierre created. And yes, saving the thread on the Wayback Machine is the solution to their censorship.
For anyone who’s still interested in reviewing the accounting sheet of the Marketing Bounty – the original spend tracker is already becoming unavailable (again, for why saving evidences and Wayback Machine is essential here). An “official” backup is available at the following link:
Having an appropriate external audit done for the marketing bounty (which is the thing that the community has already spent weeks doing) is the solution.
Hiding the problem is the worst choice.
We’ll also try our best to find out how moderators / Parity employee’s collusion with governance actors played a role in the recent censorship incident.
This ensures accountability and prevents situations like this from happening again.
Good news is that no one here is requesting treasury support. We start the work right away. The community has been doing this for weeks in the original locked thread.
The community has already decided.
You can, however, submit a Wish for Change proposal asking us to stop. Until then you have no say, and we’ll be really happy to continue our voluntary work for the community.
Just took a brief look at marketing bounty’s accounting sheet and I immediately noticed a problem – the accounting doesn’t match! If you sum over all the spending entries, the result is 2290598 DOT. Yet, the total spending is 2232327 DOT. There’s 58271 DOT unaccounted for. Where are they?
Any auditor would scream if they see this accounting sheet. Now without separate entries it becomes difficult to find which projects are they, and importantly whether the accounting actually match or not.
If they had spent so much money, they surely could find a professional accountant to do the work properly.
I hope I’m not misunderstood: it is entirely reasonable and indeed responsible to carry out checks, request clarifications, and ask relevant questions. However, as long as certain underlying structural issues remain unaddressed, recurring challenges are likely to persist regardless of good intentions.
This is not about defending any individual; no one needs special protection. Rather, it is about recognizing that without a clear and consistent organizational framework, treasury management will continue to face avoidable friction and uncertainty.
The Web3 Foundation may already be moving toward establishing such clarity. Yet one critical piece remains missing: a binding contractual framework that safeguards the interests of all parties involved. For instance, a professional accountant conducting an audit of bounties would reasonably expect a formal agreement before proceeding. Who would be responsible for providing that contract?
This gap is not isolated. All bounties and indeed all OpenGov proposals share the same fundamental shortcoming: the absence of enforceable agreements that adequately protect Polkadot and its tokenholders.
If like @labormedia said, Polkadot can be considered unincorporated associations, then there’s no need to wait for Web3 Foundation. Any legal person can act as a “gateway” to a binding contractual framework. This can be easily done that OpenGov pass a referendum signing a power of attorney / mandate to a proxy organization.
PCF is kind of supposed to do this, but to be honest, I expect it to be ineffective because it’s incorporated in the Cayman Islands. We should have multiple (more than tens of them) possible proxy organizations, located around the world, to whom we can sign mandates. For each binding contracts, the mandate should be signed with the proxy organization located closest to the other party (for example, if we sign a marketing service contract with a person in EU, then we should select a proxy organization from EU). This ensures that in case of breach it’ll be easy to sue.
But to be honest, and like I wrote earlier, requiring a structure like this for Polkadot governance to even function is an admission of failure. OpenGov was supposed to do something, and now it just fails back to a traditional organization (unincorporated association) because it doesn’t work.
I tried to look deeper into marketing bounty’s accounting sheet, and I think what happened is this:
There’s a budget of marketing bounty (200000 DOT per month), and their goal seems to be just spending them all.
In another word, the spending is not based on what is required (“we need to do this, so let’s spend this amount of dots”), but what they had (“we have 200k DOT budget per month, and let’s find ways to spend it”). This will explain a lot of the rather unethical behaviors.
In the end, the returned amount, from marketing bounty back to the treasury (197,617 DOT), just corresponds to roughly one month of the budget, which further proves this theory.
If you ask me, I would say that the issue is the entire OpenGov bounty system, which encourages this kind of misuse, because it’s based on budget, not on need.
Use monthly scheduled payouts to the bounties instead of lump sum payments up front.
Have payouts be tied to reporting commitments and/or any other relevant KPIs
Incentivise community members to track commitments and payouts and hold bounty curators accountable by delaying/canceling scheduled payouts if need be: https://www.treasury-guardian.app/
W3F is starting the scheduled payout enforcement already…
