Community Slander Has Gone Too Far: Enough is Enough

[SChamat]

This is a very sad situation to witness. From the @LegalGuild perspective all we can say is thanks @Ozymandius and @Grace for all your support and hard work, as well to the other guilds that not only help us with achieving our goals, but that are also putting hard work and dedication on the table. This I can assure as first hand experience.

My team member’s background is mostly legal: we traditionally come from a world where results tend to be the most important individual and very competitive metrics. It is wonderful to be able to break that chain, while getting the community’s support to keep growing and keep helping the whole ecosystem as a group.

We are thrilled as a community to interact with you all and to always receive the support from the people in charge of helping the guilds: specially Michael and Grace, among many others who kindly accepted to engage with us. Even when the resources are very limited.

There is an inmense ammount of talent in the ecosystem, and concretely in the guilds program. We really hope that it continues being supported and developed as it deserves.

[yulian]

+1 to @erik.near’s post. I wanted to expand on this a bit.

@Ozymandius is been a great support to the ecosystem and became an invaluable member of it. He embraced the culture of experimentation within NEAR ecosystem. I also wanted to give props to @evgenykuzyakov and @zavodil since their contributions are also quite significant. @zavodil came to NEAR ecosystem and built Russian community from scratch. In addition, the level of engagement that was created with minimal resources is simply outstanding. @evgenykuzyakov playing a major role in developing the ecosystem and there’s no single app that I know of that launched without his help.

I’ve been lucky to work alongside @evgenykuzyakov @zavodil and @Ozymandius for a while now and want the thank them all for everything they’ve done.

I think this thread became very divisive in its nature. We all work too hard at times and high temperatures are just a result of it, we all need to learn how to be productive in this high pressure environment.

@Ozymandius I can understand how this felt as an attack on you, but I think this was not the intent. @Dacha and other members of Ru Community are interested in the same things we are - making NEAR ecosystem a success. Let’s not take it as an attack. If we think about it, it is great what @Dacha did. He took an initiative in his hands and did a pretty significant investigative work. If results are showing some inefficiencies, I think the best response we can have is to work on improving it together. Let’s cool off and find a way out of it and work together towards the common goal. Conflicts are a natural part of the development and it is about how we overcome them as a team that matters.

I propose we have a call together to smooth out the edges and if everyone is interested, I’d be happy to moderate it.

[zavodil]

@Dacha and other members of Ru Community are interested in the same things we are

Great point @yulian. I don’t know @Dacha personally but as I understood he is a NEAR token holder with a massive bag. So he is not trolling, he is protecting his own money. We all want ensure we spend money wisely and moving towards building a sustainable community-driven ecosystem. Let’s work on doing it together and improve the whole grant system with locked tokens. @Dacha showed a great example how we can learn about our experiments and improve them. Lets establish the guild of internal investigations. Let’s not forget we are operating a blockchain and what @Dacha saw, is visible for anyone from outside.

[rimberjack]

I’m sorry but why are we pretending like @dacha’s “investigative work” was good? I do applaud them for spending all that time looking up each wallet and speculating on a narrative to suit their fantasies. No one’s saying not to look up NEAR explorer lmao. But when you want to make an accusation, you also have back it up with logic.

He accused people of embezzlement, suggested that because maybe a dozen people were selling (this itself an unfounded claim) that NEAR price dropped (without considering the overall dip in the market that day he showed the chart for), and assuming that people moving their NEAR to Binance did it to sell (even though two have come out and said they were staking their NEAR in Binance). You can absolutely question where funding is going and its optimization. But this was not the conversation you took.

And @zavodil, your reply mentions that you spoke with a few near degens and they said people were freeriding. I saw the original message and they said,

"Сначала там вообще не было никакой отчетности, и реально была куча людей, которые вроде начали что-то делать, но быстро забили

Сейчас чистят от таких, собирают метрики и тд"

If this brought you to believe people were getting freebies, you are sorely mistaken. First of all, this person was not responsible for any monitoring of activity. They were but one person who does not know what everyone is doing and frankly wasn’t even the most active person in the group. We made sure to cut everyone who didn’t deserve 300 near by output, availability, and commitment. Funny that you are willing to take one person’s word for it, but not another’s. This is the depth of your investigation?

Sure, let’s “work together” as you both say. But you also have to be willing to admit to fault even on your side. And @dacha needs to be speaking for themself and not through the mouths of others.

[SanketN81]

I recently Joined Near degens & from what I have experienced till now is, all degens in the group are working hard for the Community. Whether be it Social promotions, Spreading awareness about NEAR, Promoting new Projects Launching on Near Or Even helping Community in Chats.
If you check the social activities of NEAR, the Degens are always frontrunners there.

What these people are accusing the degens and @Ozymandius about is totally illogical. They aren’t even listening to Explanations & even Refusing to have a Talk about it. They are just posting what they seem fit to their narrative rather than checking the full story. This doesn’t seem right.

I hope this situation will resolve soon & I Completely Stand with Ozy & all Degens.

[Rejinderi]

Even so accusation and jumping into conclusions is not the right way to start a discussion.

First off the tokens could be moved through binance for other purpose.

Plus even assuming that 300 * 30 tokens were sold.

How can 9000 tokens sold across different timings cause a dip in the market where traded volume is. in ranges of 50-60 million USD a day?

[Aria]

So, big NEAR holders’ opinions are more valuable than other opinions? And how is creating memes and accusing valuable members of NEAR on the forum helping him to protect his money? If this is an acceptable behaviour then how would a community-driven ecosystem look like?

[SanketN81]

Completly agreed with @rimberjack
Check the Chart, BTC was Down almost 7% that day…and as Being ALT its obvious Tokens will be down like 10% n so…Further BTC & whole Market did go down…So Obviously Near also had some Downside move…it doesnt mean that degens dumped… and token qty that guy mentioned isnt even sufficient to make tokens dump. just look at orderbooks on cex every few minutes that much qty gets traded…

[Grace]

It is less than ideal that we arrived at this point only because non-constructive arguments circulated in various forum posts attempt to disrupt the development of the NEAR Ecosystem.

We, the NEAR Foundation and, more importantly, the Community, are here to build the best Ecosystem in the space and one that no other protocol offers. However, this is an excellent opportunity to start addressing the facts:

• Let’s start with the fact that we indeed have weak marketing @ NEAR at the current moment. However, NEAR never focused on creating empty shilling and pump something that doesn’t exist.

• NEAR currently has actual applications that bring real value to the world.

• Unlike others, we have a multidimensional strategy for marketing that includes heavy involvement of our Community members to propagate the message.

• We are rewarding the community efforts in $NEAR for their continuous dedication, and we expect them to exchange it if they need to, as, for many, this is their salary. We also want them to collect NEAR and see the upside, but we can’t expect people worldwide to be all investors.

• I see the opportunity to improve our reward scheme by adding a stable coin.

Our NEAR Ecosystem is unique because we put the Ecosystem first when we make decisions. That has been our working model and will continue to be the one that drives our initiatives and funding support.

We do this with dedicated and strategic work along with carefully selected initiatives that we stand behind and fully support. The end goal is simple, bring value to projects building on NEAR and empower self-sustained communities.

Our Marketing, Community, Grants, and other teams will continue to allocate NEAR to grow this Community. As NEAR, we believe in long-term value, and this is where we are focused and hope everyone in the Community can be focused on that as well vs. any short-term price movements.

We have seen an increase in our metrics since launching the ‘Degens’ and Incubated Guilds programs, all under the guidance and dedicated advisory of @ozymandius. We will continue fostering these initiatives.

I have seen very few people in my working life that have the resilience and persistence to endure a long journey of challenges and uncertainty as @ozymandius has during his experience with NEAR. I praise his work and ecosystem growth strategies because it comes from an honest and well-intention heart. His work has always been about building for the long term.

We will keep supporting our strategies, army, guilds, active contributors, and projects. Nothing will deter our focus.

We are indeed in a transition from more communication in private groups to public forums and public accountability. Thanks for keeping us accountable, and we are going to keep getting better at this. See Treasury DAO initiative for more drive to more responsibility to Community.

As for @Ozymandius, you belong here. I hope you know that you have nothing to fear; giving up your active involvement in this Community would only be a loss and a failure on our part to carry out our vision.

Making NEAR the place where the most Active Contributors feel they belong

Let’s keep working on awesome things that fill our day with positive energy and enthusiasm to secure the sustainability and wellbeing of our NEAR Ecosystem.

[poddsy]

How easy it is to criticize the actions of others when no one sees and knows who you really are, right @Dacha? I am surprised by the fact that some random person has brought so much negativity to the team. Perhaps he is right, and the system requires improvements, but this does not mean that it absolutely does not work and does not bring benefits. Instead of presenting a naked criticism, you should suggest a strategy to improve this system, if you are so concerned about the fate of the Near project, which I strongly doubt. If you don’t like what’s going on inside, then why deal with this project.
The boy just decided to have fun and make memes.
As for the @Ozymandius project, on my own, I would like to say that it is doing a great job and establishing contacts that will bear fruit in the future. @Dacha believes that everything that the degens do is a waste of time and all their actions do not give anything, but he hardly looks to the future, in the future all these small puzzles that are collected by the degens will form a big picture and a marketing ecosystem. I don’t think that the founders of the Near project are counting on a couple of years of the existence of this system. High goals are achieved not in a couple of months, but in the process of long and hard work, so in the future, what creates the @Ozymandius will help the entire ecosystem to rise to a higher level.
Personally, I am engaged in creating content for YouTube and promoting the Degen Syndicate channel. This boy wrote in his chat that our content is not made of high quality enough and no one needs it, but will he be able to gather his team and do something more interesting? Can I give you all the copies of our projects for editing and creating animations, the whole process of preparing for filming, which we spend a lot of time on? This boy just wants to hype on his trash talk and hate in the direction of our team. If you are such an expert in this field, I suggest that you create your own channel and make your own content so that we can learn the highest skill from you.
@Dacha wrote in his chat that it would be more expedient to pay an influencer to tell about Near on his channel with 100k subscribers. Then what is the value of this advertising, if his channel advertises every second project and his entire channel looks like a collection of scam projects? We create content and try to make it better every time so that in the future we will be watched not because we are paid, but because no one else does better than us.
@zavodil He may keep a huge part of his money in Near, but what is the point of believing it if there is not a single proof of it? Let him throw off graphs and reports, if he likes to do it so much, so that everyone will make sure that what is happening inside the ecosystem is really important to him.
There is no need to take such critics radically, they always exist and will be, treat such as @Dacha calmly, if people who manage large projects listen to every upstart from the chat and take everything they write seriously, then soon nothing will remain of your project.

[yulian]

I think the way work was presented was not very diplomatic, but the work that was done is good. It gives us all stuff to think about and build upon.

[jack]

Unfortunately misunderstanding.

I am a former member of sanbox and applied for the 21NEAR award link.

I did not waste the community marketing funds.

sandbox Dm:

After getting marketing funds,I created a DAO on spunik V2 SputnikDAO 2 (700+ NEAR wallets added proposal)

I believe @Ozymandius is working hard and hope that more people will contribute to the NEAR community.

[baxoff]

I am new to Degen. I was just beginning my path of Near, perhaps my opinion will not seem authoritative, but I will still express my thoughts. The community of degens made me an indescribable feeling of solidarity, friendship and loyalty to own cause. Each person knows his role in building and popularizing the ecosystem to the masses. Every screw in this system worked as it should, but the situation with this investigation knocked everyone out. I see how unpleasant it is for people to read about themselves that they are freeloaders and simply receive their awards.Completely unfounded, childish arguments of adult men, which seems silly when you realize all the activities of the guild from the inside. People can resolve any problems among themselves peacefully and come to someone a common solution. But the people behind this fud rely on the protection of exclusively the Near ecosystem, pursuing only personal gain. Do such people have to draw conclusions about the work of others, completely without monitoring yourself actions?

[Dacha]

@Ozymandius

Now, @Dacha has been trolling the forum pretending to be ‘investigating’ the use of funds in the ecosystem

Oh man, don’t get me wrong, but you’re really crazy . I’m on a 100% independent person. Feel free to check out my wallet.

I see you like the meme It was created by one of our Near community member.

In the next part of my little research, I’m gonna show you some interesting facts about guilds. Stay tuned

[Lolson_tg]

So, I have been observing this situation for about a week now. @Dacha , you had the right to demand an explanation of where the funds are going, but what you started doing next is the delirium of a madman. I’m sorry, but from the outside it looks like this.

It is very easy to criticize, but do nothing yourself. I’ve been watching your chat and apart from the fact that you’re just criticizing is not happening. As they say in Russia, right, guys? Критикуешь - предлагай. So we are all waiting for constructive suggestions from you guys.

I saw a message that you can replace all the degens with bots. Let’s replace. I am very interested! I think you will prove to everyone that our activities are useless. But you can’t, because your task is just to say words, blah blah blah and nothing more.

I have three directions in degens, more than 20 people. We are engaged in BTT, Reddit and YouTube. Every day we create unique content, every day we write articles about the Near Protocol ecosystem. I create large reports on a weekly basis and regulate the activities of each member so that we do not have those who just sit.

Replace my work with a bot. Make it so that it creates unique content, bypasses moderation on Reddit, BTT. Make sure that he follows each participant. We’re all waiting.

It takes me 5-6 hours of active work in Degens a day. @Dacha Dacha, and how much time does it take you? What have you done useful for Near? By the way, I spend more than 40 hours a week and I have an income of 300 Near. Do you think I’m not worthy of this payment?

And I assure you that each of the Degens does even more.

You are hooked on Shitposting. Guys, how long have you been working in the field of cryptocurrency? Doesn’t everyone in cryptocurrency understand what Shitposting is? If you don’t know this, I ask you to learn new words, this is very important.

Everything that @Ozymandius does is very important, it’s a pity that @zavodil and @evgenykuzyakov just don’t understand it. Do you want to hire a good marketer? Go ahead, hire him and pay his salary to him and his subordinates, I am sure that soon the @Dacha will criticize this idea.

You have created an ecosystem of guilds, and now you are destroying it. Good luck. You have a very strange management, probably one of the strangest in my four-year experience in cryptocurrency.

[ross]

Action Items

1. Encourage the community to keep @Ozymandius he’s invaluable asset
2. @Erik @Grace @jlwaugh @starpause @chloe come up with a plan to ban @Dacha I’ll 100% support it. Whether a real NEAR holder or a Troll, Dacha has done nothing but breed discontent among NEARs team members without offering constructive advice or direction. If they remain anonymous they can continue this path (which I would not allow) If they confide to a NEAR founder who they are and outline their plan and reasonings… maybe they’re given a second chance. Otherwise, I don’t seen a reason to have them in the community. Communities are for individuals working together to get better, Dacha’s goal appears to be simply tearing the community apart. There will be more individuals like Dacha, we should have a plan for them in the future as well.
   (I don’t want to start any conspiracies, but corporate spies/plants follow the same strategies Dacha is following)

To @Ozymandius

@Ozymandius I look forward to working with you in whatever capacity you’re continuing with NEAR
I greatly hope you continue with the Degens as I share your vision for what they will become.

I understand your frustration dealing with @Dacha anonymous community members who nickel and dime every initiative (potentially hoping to safeguard their NEAR investment through inaction rather than constant marketing experimentation … this argument from above doesn’t make sense to me. Personally I vote to ban @Dacha from the forum, whether they’re real or not, they’re not constructive or offering solutions, their one goal is to breed discontent in our organization.)

@Ozymandius You’ll have a supporter in me, as I know your master plan, and I’ve seen what your amazing contribution has brought to the community over 18 months of straight grinding.

Was this clean break inspired by anything more than the Troll … is the Troll just the tipping point, and given that we overcome the Troll and side with your budgets and plans, are there still more reasons to make a break? I’d be sorry to see a plant in our community (especially if planted by a competitor) break you from our ranks.

If the problem is bigger, I would love to see

1. the livestream you mention with @Dacha (if they don’t show … ban them)
2. Any other changes you suggest that need to be made that you’re fighting to achieve your initiatives … even if they point out NEAR’s flaws, we can’t improve without knowing them)
3. And I’d love to see your vision of the future, where NEAR is a top 10 blockchain. I’ve seen you share it with new members in a way that inspires AWE, if everyone understood your vision, They would understand the components you’re building to achieve the end results required for NEAR’s success.

Other Thoughts

I fully support and vouch for any and all of @Ozymandius 's plans as I’ve seen him at work keeping up 100+ relationships a week with current NEAR community members and new members he’s constantly on-boarding. Our problem is not lack of funds, it’s inspiring talent to build in the NEAR ecosystem and Ozy is an amazing asset helping to grow Nears numbers and voice.

To the quality of work from Guilds
Guilds are built on an apprentice ship model, not all work is quality at first, but if you vet and see potential in someone (especially someone who undervalues themselves because they are new) The best thing you can do is get them in your organization and give them the opportunity to grow and reach their full potential. I’ve seen Ozy do this with so many people who start slow, learn the ropes and become expert performers, leaders, etc… inside the communities he’s built, though his guidance and their own initiatives. Unless we’re going to start every initiative by recruiting top talent with top $, we have to empower those who are interested and leave room for experts to join when they’re ready.

To decentralized decision making:
This is not the first time I’ve watched Ozy defend the work of the community members he’s brought in from outsiders (who weren’t part of the original conversations, who may not have reviewed any documents, but whose words in Telegram, Discord and the Forum required him to re-win approval 3-4 times for the same project, even as it was in motion). He won’t say it, but this has weighed on him. I don’t know the solution, but if it’s giving set times (at the end of a project to judge whether it should continue … based on qualitative and quantitative reporting)
The average marketing campaign at a startup is around $25,000 … and a lot of them fail, but you have to take shots to see what will win (to find the campaign that will 1000x your return. Building communities take much longer than running campaigns. I’m not a community expert, but I think Ozy has laid out a vision of each community he’s started and what will will be capable of contributing to the NEAR ecosystem when its members have settled into their responsibilities, I’d ask Ozy how far along each community is toward that goal before judging whether they should have been started.

[evgenykuzyakov]

@Ozymandius hey, sorry if you think I have anything against you. I’ve never supported the attack on you personally or the way you run guilds.

As for my interactions with @Dacha, I was encouraging investigative work to figure out the token distribution and where they go. Whether they stay in ecosystem or being sold. I don’t support personal attacks and would prefer if it was only focusing on the data instead of speculations.

I don’t have time to run the community and I don’t know how to run the community, so I can’t take over the role and will likely fail if I do so.

But I can suggest technological solutions to some problems. My proposal is to introduce locked NEAR tokens. They shift the incentive from being a short-term game of getting as much liquid NEAR as possible now, into a long-term game where the incentives align. Example: you give 300 locked until Q4 NEAR instead of liquid NEAR. These 300 tokens can’t be liquidated on the centralized exchanges immediately. But there can be a secondary market on REF finance, which swaps locked tokens into unlocked tokens with some discount. So a person might choose to unlock some of them earlier or hold them till the unlocking period.

While they are waiting for 21Q4, they may receive the payout in the 22Q1 tokens, which makes them vesting in NEAR until the end of Q1. Overall it would remove some concerns about immediate token liquidation and create an alternative reward mechanisms.

[Dacha]

@Ozymandius

Question: Does this constitute trolling?

Yes, and you told me that the meme was fun for you.

[David_NEAR]

+1,000 on this, Ross.

I’ve been with NEAR for a little over two weeks and, speaking objectively, the passion, effort, and positive attitude toward the NEAR Community emanating from @ozymandius is tangible. In fact, it’s infectious.

It’s essential that funds are allocated in a responsible manner and that those who receive them are held accountable to their (promised) workload.

However, the approach taken by a certain community member(s) on this forum is not the way to go about it.

Much like a blockchain, the NEAR Community is decentralised, open, and accessible - abusing these features amounts to little more than trolling IMO.

This does not mean that concerns are disregarded. Quite the opposite, in fact. The open nature of this forum makes it an ideal venue for voicing such concerns, however it must be done so in appropriate mannner.

@Ozymandius You’ll have a supporter in me, as I know your master plan, and I’ve seen what your amazing contribution has brought to the community over 18 months of straight grinding.

Ok, I’m not privy to the master plan yet, but that grind is real

[JMaenen]

Reading through all the forum posts initially made me really sad.

I was wondering how it was possible for someone to have such a flawed idea about our most valuable community member. Which you are @Ozymandius. I don’t know anyone with as much energy, belief, intrinsic motivation, and dedication to making NEAR a success as you. I would say, if you haven’t met Ozy yet, you don’t really know NEAR.

But this initial sad feeling has started to turn into some sort of anger. It seems like @Dacha is a troll who created some charts to back his “evidence” that there’s a mismanagement of funds. As if the selling of tokens that have been distributed to valuable community members, is something anyone at NEAR should have anything to say about. Locking up a certain amount of tokens for a period of time is definitely something to consider, but this can be put forward with constructive feedback.

We should have disregarded his posts a long time ago, his intention is very clear. If @Dacha would’ve been a large token holder, he wouldn’t have communicated like this. And even if he is, I don’t think anyone would mind him leaving this project and moving on to something else. The value that Ozy brings to this ecosystem will always be larger than the value of Dacha’s tokens.

I just really don’t hope that he gets his way and takes @Ozymandius with him. @Ozymandius please don’t give this one troll what he wants, you’re a huge part of NEAR and it’s way too early to say goodbye like this. 99.99% of NEAR wants you to keep doing what you’ve been doing, remember that