[Plea] Marieke Must Go

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For a while now I’ve been looking at the rapidly deteriorating state of affairs on NEAR.

Some people are not willing to say it out loud because of gender ideology. Others may be waiting for her first year to be up so she can get who knows how many vested NEAR tokens. But Hairen is here to say it loud and clear - Marieke Must Go.

The NEAR community is full of people with resentment at the current state of affairs, and leadership is nowhere to be seen. Up until recently, most people were simple silently quitting - fading into the background and moving to other ecosystems.

Recently all these tensions have bubbled to the surface - months of frustration have pushed people to go public. Cheering their move to other ecosystems (ouch), openly inviting other NEAR community members to join them, offering help to onboard them (truly painful), and lashing out at the ‘ecosystem’ - even on they way out some are still uncomfortable criticising the Queen and NF.

To be clear, this goes way beyond NFTs. The state of NFTs is a symptom of a community that began to die a long time ago. This is Erik’s legacy (Guild program ended last year). Marieke failed to acknowledge this and course correct. Beyond disbanding the (failed) Community Team and eventually firing everyone, after 10 months and a lot of public humiliation, it is clear that Marieke has failed the community and must move on.

The NEAR Foundation is a distant monolith, taken over by bankers, and hostile to the community.

I agree with the usual tropes I expect to hear back from NF - it’s a decentralised movement: step up and do the work! Gurl, we’ve tried. It’s easier to bang your head against a wall and get through to the next room than to engage the NF and get initiatives off the ground.

Credit where credit is due - the NF seems to be making inroads with corporates, even if its just personal connections and shady deals. However, this type of institutional outreach should never come at the expense of the community.

It is extremely sad to see core contributors leave while the NF is oblivious to the problem. There is no better tech stack to build on, so for people to leave we must have truly reached a dark period.

Thanks for your efforts Marieke, I’ll be the first one to acknowledge all your achievements. Right now we need REAL LEADERSHIP. Someone who is passionate about the NEAR tech stack and is going to relentlessly present it to the world. Someone people can be proud of and rally behind. Enough of the woke bs.

My plea to the community members who are dissatisfied - don’t go. Make yourself heard. As we enter desperate times (still need a couple more months to secure bonus), the NF is more likely to listen to us. Some may say it is too late, but most other tech stacks are truly terrible. The technology is the hardest thing to build. We can come together as a community, heal, and come back stronger.

@marieke.flament @erik.near @illia @shreyas @David_NEAR @Dacha

#mariekeMustGo

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What projects do you blame Marieke for? You gave a link to the criticism of the stake delegation, but this is more about supporting ecosystem projects, and here it is necessary to analyze individual cases, and not blame all those involved. The difference between paying out tokens and issuing delegation to project nodes, is that staking tokens can be easily withdrawn.

You also mention “REAL LEADERSHIP” and the tech stack, but I’ve never heard that NF focus on that. The goal of the NF, as I see it, is to fairly distribute tokens among important ecosystem projects, and support the development of the protocol with money. And then, when the fund ends, be dissolved. I understand that at a time when funding is reduced, a many claims appear and problems become visible. And this is a good opportunity to tackle problems. But these kinds of attacks, as you did in this post, do not help make the ecosystem better.

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You are correct, this is a separate issue from token delegation, hence why I have created a separate thread.

The core issue here is the Community, or the complete disregard for it.

There has been no replacement to the Guilds program since it ended 10 months ago. The Marketing and Creatives DAO were allowed to run wild for months with little to no contact or input from the Foundation, now all funding put on ‘hold’. LATAM regional hub cancelled. Education programs such as fellowships cancelled. Education funding ‘paused’. The grants program has been extremely slow and difficult to access - up until recently there was little technical know-how within the Foundation and total detachment from the trends and needs of the ecosystem.

The above list is not exhaustive. I am simply reverse engineering the problem as it now clear on Twitter - NEAR community is dead, giving us a final Halloween zombie show before the final OGs also jump ship to Aptos or whatevet comes next.

I am aware NF is looking for a Head of Community, job post has been up for two months.

I am asking for someone to take responsibility for the abysmal current state of affairs or start drafting a new job posting for a new CEO.

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I understand that you are very upset by the cuts in funding. Surely, anyone in your place would feel bad, especially when you see that funding for one entity has stopped, while others continue. But I see no reason for a vendetta with Marieke. Without taking into account individual projects and guilds, this is more like cutting inefficient spending, which is quite natural on a downtrend. It would be great if transparent work on improving the effectiveness of grants continued. The community, the real community, and not the members of the DAOs with the word “community” in the name, will only benefit from this. I didn’t see the community complaining about the cuts in grants, mostly people are interested in new high quality dapps/projects.

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I agree recent changes impacted the community in a negative way in some instances, and in others, change was needed; however, let’s not blame a single individual. As an Ecosystem, we are a collective. We venture, learn, gain, and fail, which has been done collectively. It’s been a little over two years since MainNet, and we are all still learning, growing, and working to create the best possible outcome.

I’m not saying the way things were done is correct, but we need to move forward together to build programs for the Community that aligns with our mission of 1Biillon users. I can tell you that is what Marieke and Illia are working on, along with the rest of the Ecosystem Leaders.

Overall I’m afraid I have to disagree with your statement. Changing leaders only shuffles the deck and creates a different set of problems we can not objectively manage at this point. I do believe Marike has the best interests of the Community and Ecosystem in mind and cares.

For those considering leaving the ecosystem, please raise your concerns and feedback. Let’s work together to address them collectively and create a better Ecosystem.

A shameless plug, the NDC is a community initiative to decentralize governance of the Ecosystem over time in a pragmatic way. Collectively we are working to create evolving governance models that increase transparency, create collective-decision making, and ease the Ecosystem into being fully decentralized. This makes it clear that the concerns have been heard and we are moving forward.

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She cares about pocket. Only Iliia our love leader.

With Marike, who destroyed the community and cut off payments, the NDC community will have a budget in cheddar tokens.

#mariekeMustGo

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I’d generally agree that something feels a bit off here with NF, but it’s hard to do variance in outcome attribution solely to Marieke. As a collective outcome though, something does feel off with NF hiring many expensive C-levels who look good on paper to crypto community, but to be honest from an institutional perspective some of the hires have been pretty weak.

Take for example the CMO at NF, anyone who has followed Euro neobank landscape from 2016 will know that the key PMF for those apps to take hold in Europe was initially the ultra dovish policy rates in Europe after the GFC, which drastically reduced the switching costs for folks from old-school banks like Barclays (after if you’re not getting interest on your deposits why not use a bank with a better UX)? This is an example of the difficulty in outcome variance attribution as it’s hard to say if the CMO had anything to do with it at his prior job or if becomes of accomodative rates there were plenty of funds looking to invest in a shot on a ‘new bank’, but from what I’ve gathered on the marketing so far, things are pretty weak. Another example would be a “Mr Google” who runs one of the ecosystem funds; loves to say he worked at Google, but conveniently skips that he worked in marketing - hard to say if he had any contribution when the products themselves are thoughtfully engineered. I could go on and on here.

It’s OK if NF is more corporate, but we should benchmark them at Polygon level deals, for example with Meta and Nubank. Otherwise the community is at risk of a bunch of corporate grifters who confidence trick their way into roles in crypto. If NEAR fails they still walk away and have something to say on their resume, and folks in traditional world are none the wiser of their grifting.

We NEED NF C-levels with skin in the game.

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Ser, you are representing yourself. The Shitzu community does not have an opinion on the matter. The individuals may, but, the community itself has never voiced such an opinion. Please do not sully or involve Shitzu’s name.

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This is not a member of the Shitzu community. They are misrepresenting our community. The Shitzu community does not condone this post or any other with inflammatory leanings. The post has been flagged.

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Near Shitzu community against

#mariekeMustGo
#ShitzuStrong

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Contact me for your 2$ for this comment

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Once again, the cuts in funding are just one aspect, and for the most part they were needed. Another important aspect is the inability to resume funding in an efficient way.

The core metric here is - the highly valuable community members and active contributors are leaving or have already left. How is the community smaller today than one year ago even though, technically, the ecosystem has actually objectively grown?

I personally don’t care whether she stays or goes. But it is clear the community is on life support and given her performance so far, either something changes or we do have so start considering alternatives (including looking for new ecosystems? It hurts me to say it but I am not going to be the last one holding the bag)

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Sir, please stop it with the collectivist marxist bs. No one is buying it. We are not all collectively getting the CEO salary or invited to the discussions and make key decisions. There needs to be a minimum of PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY along with professional performance. Otherwise just give her a crown and send us all some NFTs and we can be done thinking about how to improve the ecosystem, who specifically does what, and how to measure whether we are making progress in that direction.

Spoken like someone who is already at the top of the food chain. Easy to talk about We when being at the top and advocating for poorly performing leaders to not be removed - we all take the losses but you (the ruling class) keep all the benefits?

NDC has been taken over by former NF employees and the troubled Creatives DAO. There is a lot of frustration there too around the way it was rushed ahead of NEARCON. Overall, I welcome the initiative but please do stay vigilant and be extra proactive to ensure there is wide community consultation, specially of people who are busy building and may not be available for the day-to-day discussions but are the largest stakehodlers.

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You bring up another excellent point - clear the NF is made up of a lot of individuals. BUT a lot of these hires have been directly decided or guided by Marieke - including our current CMO who was her former buddy at Circle. Got any complaints about Marketing - let’s go to the source of the problem and ask questions. (To be fair, Marketing has been getting a lot better since NEARCON).

C-executive levels with skin in the game is one way to put it. But there has to be something else - their bonuses would be 10x if price of NEAR 10x, which is possible if they didn’t massacred the community. What I believe is lacking is true understanding and passion about the technology.

Foundation is a bottleneck of employees holding back founders. This is what truly upsets people and makes them leave - we are being judged by standards that are so out of touch that only an accountant who is only looking at the books could justify.

Marieke may not be the only one who is responsible for execution, but she must be the one held accountable for hiring and setting expectations for the rest of the team.

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This has nothing to do with NEAR Protocol, Aurora, or Octopus Network and therefore has no place here.

Anyone here attempting to speak on behalf of the SHITZU Community in opposition to Marieke or the NEAR Foundation is doing so as an individual that does not represent the collective views or opinions of the SHITZU Community. Furthermore, these negative posts are clearly a weak attempt at a false flag attack against NF and Marieke, attempting to create hostile sentiments towards SHITZU; likely in an effort to combat the positive efforts the SHITZU Community consistently makes in support of the NEAR Ecosystem.

The repeated attempts to defame members of the SHITZU Community only makes us stronger and draws attention to the positivity and support which we are working to spread across NEAR, Aurora & Octopus. So, I guess that I should be saying thank you for the free publicity :grin:

Anyone who would like to join our regular, active discussions and contribute to the ecosystem will be welcomed with open arms by the SHITZU Community. Youre encouraged to join the Telegram channel at Telegram: Contact @ShitzuApes and follow the SHITZU Community on Twitter @ShitzuCommunity

Additionally, the SHITZU Community will continue to host regular free-form Twitter spaces every Saturday, where anyone is welcome to come up and speak about anything they’d like to discuss. Those who have something to say are highly encouraged to attend. Especially the individuals hiding behind anonymous accounts, making inflammatory statements. Here’s the link to the upcoming space on October 29th: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1mrxmkOqAeLGy

To everyone else here, keep building! The SHITZU Community is here to provide support, encouragement and constructive criticism alike. We stand up for what we believe in and take accountability. Dont be fooled by the spineless attempts to shine a negative light on our community. Much love :heart:

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I say “collective” because it is one-to-another which is the NEAR Community. We are individuals, but we come together to do things like discuss hard topics like this. That is a “collective”, that is a Community.

We all tend to lean on people we know and trust. Is that a bad thing? If I’m starting or joining something new, I reach out to my closest friend and colleagues to join me. Do you blame me?

Then please change the hashtag to #NEARbuidlBetter

The NDC can not be taken over by anyone because every Community member has a voice there and can join and contribute.

We now have an overview page (on the wiki, onchain!):
https://thewiki.near.page/ndc-overview
It outlines our mission as a community-driven initiative, a “collective,” a “node” in the NEARVerse, and the deliverables, which of one is Guilds v2.

Can you help us define how community members are promoted via merit and reputation to “top of the food chain” as you say? What is the framework, the governance model, how do we define it, and what are the levels of reputation to promote individual community members? What is the 1YR budget? This is now up to the Community to draft, elaborate, finalize, present, and then implement and govern.

Can you help us define it and bring other community members along to help? There will be specific, part-time, and full-time bounties. That’s what we’re “collectively” doing in the NDC: Defining evolving governance models that adapt and change over time to transition the Ecosystem into being 100% decentralized. Transparency, On-chain decision-making, Self-Governance.

This initiative was envisioned by Illia and championed by Marieke and the rest of the NEAR Ecosystem leaders, and that says a lot. I also welcome everyone to read this letter if they have not on “What Decentralization means to NEAR.”
Ecosystem Update on Decentralizing Governance

Been out here grinding for 2 years in the ecosystem, and I’ve done nothing :thinking: (anything) but keep all the benefits. Why did I step up to help Champion the NDC, to specifically address what you’re eluding to, and that is how do we empower the Community with “grass-roots” bottom-up growth and learn from our previous experiments to BUIDL it better? Can you help with this what are your thoughts?

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The result we see is a set of problems.

  1. There is no transparency in the guilds.
  2. There is no control.
  3. There are no clear KPI’s and plans to achieve them.
    @illia addressed the forum participants about this a year ago. The result - no one listened to him.
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This is more of the bureaucracy that grinded the NF to a halt combined with the intellectual endeavours of Creatives trying to shape the NDC. Mostly words that are detached from reality.

The truth is the ecosystem is too small to be worrying too much about those things. What happened to common sense? We all know each other and we can see each others output. We can then deconstruct principles such as 'is contributing in a) building b) educating, etc.

I value and respect all you do. And it is with utmost respect that I say, you are aiming to do too much and accomplishing little.

Where is Illia this days? I was onboard of his original vision. THAT guy has brains. I am now disillusioned as former NF employees (why did they lose their job in the first place) and a bunch of ‘Creatives’ are running the show.

Most community leaders and members want one thing - to be able to build and operate in peace in an ecosystem that they are proud to belong. NEAR is destined to fail if it requires so much political shit fighting to get the most basic stuff done.

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heyhey!

Just 2cents: from what I saw, only a tiny % of the Creatives Dao community is actually engaged with NDC. There are a few, ofc, but most of those with actual responsibility in the Creatives DAO scene are not calling the shots at the NDC work teams.

It might be a case of a few vocal ones (and good for them I guess) making you think there is a community effort in that direction.

In reality, if you check current discussions regarding the Creatives DAO Vertical, many (myself included) have defended complete independence from the model NDC is proposing, at least until there is clarity there. @Paul as stated exactly that on his proposal for the new Creatives DAO model.

Having said that, I think NDC has its own flaws (and strengths?), which seem to me 100% unrelated do the Creatives DAO, unless you want to make a bigger claim about how ALL funding verticals suffered from NFs silence.

If you want to go there, I might join you, including stating the obvious : not only creative dao members are collaboratingin the NDC, there are topics created by MKT Dao council proposing themselves to be leading characters at the NDC, the same for forum moderators. It seems to me there is a lot of confusion at the moment and people are trying to navigate themselves in the dark.

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Thank you for your objective feedback. I will aim to “accomplish more.”

These people showed up and started working because they love NEAR; that should be a testament, not a negative thing. As a community-driven initiative, why would we tell anyone they could not help? We’ve been working to gain clarity to engage the community in a broader way, and we’re very close to that point.

Working on strategic initiatives to onboard 1 Billion users. Casting vision for a fully decentralized Ecosystem. I would say he’s def around. The reality is he can’t be everywhere and do everything. He’s scaling out and up through decentralization.

I see this differently. We experimented on many things that were pretty loosely defined, and now it’s apparent that we need a bit more rigor and more community-governed initiatives.

Hey, I welcome a chat if you’re up for it. Would truly like to understand your concerns and see if we can work together. Take care. I’ll work on accomplishing more.