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Cross post: Forum Migration Update
GeorgeHallam
Member, Administrator, Moderator Posts: 229 admin
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4em6wq/forum_migration_update/
TLDR summary
Forum migration update
Yesterday, a followup post was made on Reddit about the fate of the "official" forums as a response to our inital feedback collected in January.TLDR summary
- Regretably, we were not aware of the popularity of the forums with miners. We have seen very little engagement from self-identifying miners in many other channels (Stack Exchange, Gitter, Reddit, Meetup, Blog, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook)
- Migrating the forums away from Ethereum Foundation control is part of the larger vision for DAOification, written about many times on the blog
- Many resources were initially developed centrally to facilitate bootstraping the ecosystem, but several of those resources are being spun out into private or independant entities (ConsenSys, EthCore, EthStats, EthDocs, etc.)
- The Ethereum Foundation has been consolidating servers and services since Winter 2015. Closing down the forums is part of effort to save costs and reduce administrative overhead, which is aligned with the goals of smart contracts and DAOs. This leaves us with more time to focus on R&D for light client, scalability improvements, and beyond
- In general, communities should self-moderate and self-fund to remain as independant as possible of Ethereum Foundation or any other community. It's healthy for the ecosystem that several communities to exist on different corners of the internet
- The current hosted forum costs $300/mo. The Ethereum blockchain protocol releases a 5 ETH block subsidy every 15 seconds, equating to approximately $45,000/day. Compared with the cost of running the forum at less than $10 per day, miner self-hosting equivalent forum would cost 0.02% of the daily protocol subsidy (that's 2/100 of 1%)
- We are happy to hand the keys over to the existing forums if the forum community can identify:
- who pays?
- who moderates?
- what URL it can live under (there are legal implications when using an "official" domain)?
- who pays?
Current migration proposal:
- Host an archive read-only copy of existing forum content that can be used to seed new self-moderated/self-funded forums
- Post migration notice + new resource links on forum.ethereum.org
Miner migration proposal:
- Let us know!
Comments
i would be willing to do so.
alternatively, hand the keys over to http://etherforum.org/
You miners have served your purpose, you have hosted their project throughout its prototyping days, you have done all the hardware R&D, now they don't need you.
You MINERS have all been shafted.
Well I got work to do..... Content for a new forum. Fresh start. Why waste time here?
Also working an a block withholding card, will soon be ready for small batch hand built production runs. Gerber files compleated.
See you in Hell Ethereum!
We're not shafting anyone. We're trying to find the best course of action moving forward. I wholly appreciate that the mining community really values this space, and we're absolutely taking that into account along with other useful feedback that has been presented to us.
The amount of vitriol and general nastiness around this is totally not required and just plain unhelpful to everyone.
You are the external relations. Please ask your friends from the dev team to think twice before they type in public.
You guys had success yes. Congrats. Yet taking into consideration Taylor's and Bob's comments on Reddit I am surprised no one dropped the F word.
Dismissing the biggest miner community was a bad move. But hey that's history already.
What's going on with @dr_pra offer? Seems like he's got support in here.
His 'source poll' from which he believes theses actions are legitimately based was ill-concieved and invalidated as it provided no status quo option and no notice of it was made the stakeholds it effected. Now that it has, the 'Reddit' idea has unambiguously been outvoted.
His argument 'But it's under-maintained', is by all evidence of the continuity of perfect operation of the forum, weak. His argument as to a lack of moderators, is also incredibly weak given that it is an imaginably simple task to award such a title to respected members. Further, I would say that there is little need for moderation as we have developed a generally civil culture here unlike many of your alternative suggestions (Reddit). His and your arguments against costs, has been simply and repeatedly rebutted with Google adds or other sponsorship methods.
The simplicity with which all these arguments presented to shutdown the forum can be dispatched indicates that none of those arguments are the true reason for that action, that there is another agenda by which this has been pushed forward as written in your next point but which was entirely unknown to the growing community here. I find it mildly offensive and see as another point of demonstrated arrogance that Ethereum high-devs, who develop a geographically agnostic platform, speak in 'seasonal' language such as 'Winter 2015'. Such shows a complete disregard to literally over half the globe, including the tropics and the half upon which I and many others live. I live in the Southern hemisphere tropics which does not in fact experience any great extremes of the traditional seasons. Your use of such colloquialisms illustrates an ignorance of how centralised the dev teams mentalities actually are. Is their some reason terms like, Q1, 2, 3 and 4 aren't used instead?
Regardless of why or what kind of community still exists here, the entire idea of not having an official web facing Ethereum forum supported by the foundation is absurd and to try and force that community toward centralised Web 2.0 platforms, the very platforms Ethereum is seeking to render obsolete, even more so. Given the infancy of Etherum, it is as yet incapable of hosting the promised decentralised forums and so it makes no sense what so ever not to support the community in a place away from Web 2.0 monetarisation harassment. The boot-strapping analogy only works if the bootstraps don't break first and render the whole boot useless.
I'd like you to further consider the future utility of the forum as a 'foyer' and entryway for disseminating and educating new users during the long phase of mainstreaming. Ethereum will need such a place on the traditional web which holds a body of experienced users and knowledge, simply because that's what traditional web users will be looking for when they seek to take up Ethereum activities. By this argument I see that the Foundation should be actively fostering and promoting the forum to a more general community of users.
The fact that the predominant community that has emerged and remains on the forum is that of the miners and the fact that this went entirely unnoticed by the devs has to be assessed. It's my belief that this has happened due largely in part to the differing levels of integration within the differing communities.
The culture of developer teams is one of high integration. Everyone has some awareness of what everyone else is doing at any moment. There is a constant stream of disposable detailed and technical information being passed and generally a lot of face to face interaction. For such teams it makes a lot of sense to move to disposable communication and collaboration platforms such as Slack, Gitter, Reddit and such because the end product is not hosted there. Whereas the end product of a forum is the growing body of knowledge that it holds. The inappropriateness of these other platforms is directly evidenced by witnessing the constant stream of the same questions on a platform such as Slock.it's Slack. You really can't go a few hours before the same question is asked again and the same answer needs to be tediously repeated.
But now consider that the highly team-centric approach, being the daily experience of the dev, does not actually constitute a community, but team. Such teams are in themselves 'centralised' by their high integration.
Contrast that to a low integration community such as the miners. They are far more in the field of operations rather than creation and they need access to current and historical knowledge and experiences in order to maintain their operations. There is no great need for high integration but a more general need to access that knowledge in the form of dialog and easly accessible archives.
Considering all this, I think there is a fundamental philosophical mistake made by the devs in their attempt to 'decentralise'. Instead of 'decentralisation' of the community what you end up seeking is 'disintegration' of that community. And while that still works for highly integrated and well defined dev teams, where the teams themselves simply move appart, it completely blows apart the weakly integrated and more nebulous communities. And that is bad. I don't disagree that the miners could be capable of funding their own community. My earlier arguments are more for fostering ethereum communities in general and the alternatives offered completely fail to support the nature of dialog that a simple forum offers.
Who pays? While @dr_pra who is a most respected community member and pool operator has offered to take this on, surely the most logical answer though would be a 'Miner DAO' to manage such funds. And if the foundation persists in trying to dispatch the specific mining community, I would put that suggestion forward as an official proposal.
A DAO would take some time to organise and launch, and I ask that the foundation graces us with that time in order to organise such a DAO. It would not likely happen before Slock.it proves the DAO.
But the broader argument is not about the specific mining community. It does not answer to all the other arguments I've raised against shutting down the forum.
Shutting the forum can only be seen as a most ignorant act that can be seen as a denial of natural responsibility by the foundation. It will cause huge damage to Ethereum as a brand and play directly into the minds of trolls and suspicious though generally ignorant media.
The fallout will likely be in the way of massive loss of confidence in the value of Eth and put the foundation in far greater financial peril at a time when that value is needed most in order to build up the basic utility of Ethereum itself.
I can't imagine anyone here or on any other sincere forum actually wanting that to happen.
So make some sense. Keep the forum. Promote the forum for more general community use, and save youself having to find solutions to all the problems that you're about to create for yourselves and everyone else.
And put the Foundation itself on a DAO so we miners can contribute maintenance for our little patch.
I will contact you to know more about the process.
Guys, wake up and think like real men, not like a bunch of hippies!
How can you even speak about ethereum becoming the internet of everything if you can't find a solution to run a simple discussion board? Make a dapp to charge a wei or two for every read, key-based ID's, structure the content based on readers feedback and rating. Get yourselves together, play around with it and find a solution to this practical problem, instead dreaming about big things and lamenting around that you can't manage a forum... Otherwise you will become the laughing stock of the internet.
If you listen to some bs lawyer telling you that a forum is a liability for your brand/firm/enterprise or whatever you call it, then you are really stupid, and there is no hope my friends.
For my part this forum is where I started getting to know e t h e r e u m and I would be very sad to see the forum mothballed. I don't tend to do Stack Exchange, Reddit, Facebook or the rest of the 2.0 stuff. What I want is a place I grock. There is too much cruft on the web for anyone to dig through without a personal spam filter. The rule of thumb for me (when shopping or visiting someone AFK) is:- try / knock on the front door and see if anyone's in? If they don’t answer, move on. I don't go round to the back and try again I just go somewhere else (and it's the same heuristic I use on the web).
Please suck up the short term pain and "expense" and keep forum.ethereum.org alive for those of us who like it here where we know what we like and like what we know.
P.S. @greenuser - If it were a ponzi or a pump and dump then the front door would always be open, with a red carpet and tea and biscuits for every new customer / mark, but with sticky tape and bogies (British English for booger) holding it together behind the scenes.
Making a bad decision is not the same as having bad intentions, e t h e r e u m is still run by people and people are sometimes mistaken (like you, - or perhaps me?).
(and I said I wouldn't write a long post