Full disclosure: I am a member of Permanence DAO, however these are my personal views below and don’t reflect opinions of any other DAO members.
I’ve been observing the (still) locked threads mentioned in this thred, I think the discussion now has been watered down and participants are being vague and evasive. Instead I would like to ask direct questions and propose practical actions that can be taken immediately to help put this debacle behind us and restore trust in the community that the Polkadot forums are not a place where people can be “jerks” but are also moderated without bias to certain individuals, groups, or organizations.
- @erin Could you please point to the specific forum rules that were violated in the threads you have locked down? My assumption would be that if there were certain users or posts that violated forum rules, the specific posts should be deleted or the users would be banned. However. this doesn’t seem to be the case but the threads were locked down instead. Does this mean that the original posts of the threads were against community rules? A comment I also would like to make is about your post in the PSA thread:
Happy to settle any concerns around this discussion off the forum in a productive way. My DMs are open.
I find this approach completely antithetical to blockchain ethos. any discussion started publicly, on an open forum no less, has to continue publicly. If you have any further arguments you’d like to make, please make them here where we all can respond to it and participate in the discussion.
- @Remy_Parity given your statement on the PSA thread, specifically
We as moderators do not have the bandwidth to verify veracity of posts nor do we have any sort of robust “community note” mechanism implement yet and therefore will be removing all posts which fall into this category wholesale.
Is it your opinion that the moderators have a responsibility to verify the veracity of claims made on the forum? I would argue that this is a decision each member of the community would make on their own and when a proposal is put forward on OpenGov (like the one just had to close the Marketing Bounty) they would vote to make their opinion heard. I don’t think the moderation team has a responsibility to investigate any claim made on the forum, it’s up to the parties involved to make their case, present any evidence, ask their questions and answer truthfully. Any individual should form their own opinions on the validity of the claims and how they’re answered.
If the current moderation team doesn’t have the bandwidth to moderate the forums effectively, I would propose they pass the torch to neutral individuals, who I’m sure will step forward.
- @pierreaubert Moving on to this thread now, you’ve said that:
Public spats and unnecessary drama can be damaging to the reputation of the ecosystem. When disagreements escalate publicly, it creates confusion, discourages participation, and can give outsiders the wrong impression of how our community operates. Maintaining respectful, high-quality discourse is essential not just for the forum, but for the credibility and growth of the entire ecosystem.
which I completely agree with. One also has to consider what kind of a message is being sent when threads questioning or criticising agents funded by the treasury are locked down by other agents belonging to the same group. Doesn’t this signal to anyone participating and reading these threads that there are “untouchables” in the ecosystem?
Moderation, ironically enough, works best when done in moderation, if there are insults or unbased claims, or anything that goes against the forum community rules really, these specific posts would obviously be deleted and/or the users banned. Asking forum participants to restart the thread is whimsical, the obvious action to here is to delete posts that are against the forum rules and reopen the threads. Anything less is a failure of fair moderation and, if I’m being honest, implies ego-based judgement making. This whole debacle has been one of the more disappointing chapters of my time in the community, I would have expected better from a blockchain technology that has made it a motto to Don’t trust, verify. Some topics can be difficult to deal with, people are often “jerks” but how we deal with these difficulties are what determines the values we’re upholding as a community. Please delete the posts that are breaking the rules, ban the “jerks”. and unlock the threads and hopefully the community can move past this hiccup.
