Should the company hand over control of https://www.reddit.com/r/Zcash to The Foundation? Or should we leave it closed, with a sign on the door saying to come to this forum? Or what? ZCash Subreddit - #6 by zooko
This seems like a good thing the foundation could do, especially in terms of defining some good policies for moderation and helping stick to them, especially to be compatible with the foundation’s Values. What approaches to moderation would you want to see?
I’ve spent a lot of time observing the subreddits, and personally I would want one that does not endorse banning posts/comments based on political opinion, and where the moderator log is public and sacred.
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agree! imo, political activists will probably find zcash useful, and probably will be the first group to embrace ZEC! would be a bad idea to b& inevitable political posts from any side.
be wonderful if the mods were politically neutral. as a kekistani i’m often a victim of censorship… find it disturbing!
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That sounds perfect, @amiller! I strongly agree that moderators shouldn’t try to suppress specific opinions, while at the same time I think they should try to suppress toxic communication, spam, threats, etc. etc. etc. Not easy! But doable, and worth doing.
I can definitely recommend the mods of this forum and of the community chat as being hard-working, honest, thoughtful people. They have done a great job! A big part of their job involves privately contacting posters who are going off-track and explaining to them how to stay within our community norms in order to retain their posting privileges. That’s a lot more work than just clicking the ban button, but it really pays off.
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You know what else? The company could consider handing over ownership and control of this forum to the Foundation. The company has done a great job of managing this forum (in my humble opinion), largely due to the efforts of Maureen (who has since left the company), Paige, Daira, and the volunteer, unpaid labor of @Shawn and @anon47418038.
However, in the long run it seems fitting that the common meeting-ground for the community would be independent of the company. For example, someday there might be competing companies trying to make a living writing Zcash software, or something, and it wouldn’t feel good for them if the main forum was owned by our company.
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I know that this forum being owned by ZcashCo has kept away some people working on forks of zcash…in some of those cases they were/are doing work on things that revolve around libsnark and other bits of stuff that would benefit the wider zcash/zero knowledge cryptocurrency community.
Like having full nodes get a share of what mining rewards for validating transactions, as @nathan-at-least I think it was said something about on chat. A fork of zclassic is working on that right now, but they don’t post here, as an example.
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Thanks for the compliment @zooko!
If it is needed at some point in the future I can install a discourse forum at the zcash community site. If the Zcash Foundation is going to be taking the lead on the Reddit and the Forums please feel free to contact me @amiller and let me know how I can help out.
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Let’s learn from the mistakes of the Bitcoin community.
I favor ZcashCo keeping control of the /r/Zcash subreddit for the time being. (I am not affiliated with ZcashCo, nor have I ever met anyone that is part of ZcashCo.)
Leadership matters, and leaders matter. I believe Bitcoin would be in a much better place right now had Satoshi stuck around longer. Had he stuck around longer, he could have influenced the whole block-size-limit war.
We are off to a great start building a strong, vibrant, antifragile, and inclusive community, in large part due to the leadership of @zooko and the ZcashCo. If Zcash succeeds, I think we will look back on the following events as pivotal:
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Zooko breaking bread with a member of the ZClassic team. (See ZEC/ZCash will die, ZClassic is here now - #28 by Shawn and ZEC/ZCash will die, ZClassic is here now - #40 by zooko)
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@nathan-at-least and Zooko’s October 7, 2016 blog post entitled, “Consensual Currency”. (See Consensual Currency - Electric Coin Company) In that blog post, they wrote: “If [Zcash] thrives and grows big enough, it will eventually split into multiple sub-communities that share and use multiple technologies. This will probably include forks of the original Zcash blockchain. Don’t be scared — that’s a good thing.”
These actions create an inclusive, antifragile path forward. The Zcash code is open source; forks have already occurred and are likely to occur in the future. Why waste time trying to impose one’s viewpoints on others in the community by trying to prevent or discourage forks?
Contrast the above with many leaders of the Bitcoin community, who preach freedom but practice the opposite (censorship, threats of litigation, backroom deals).
The reason I buy Zcash is in part due to my belief in the wisdom of Zooko and the other current leaders of ZcashCo. Zooko, I understand that ZcashCo is building a technology that is bigger than you and bigger than ZcashCo itself, but I think it is advantageous to the community as a whole for ZcashCo to maintain control over the /r/Zcash subreddit, lest it eventually fall into the hands of people that don’t share your same commitment to the principles laid out in the “Consensual Currency” blog post.
As for handing over ownership and control of the subreddit to the Foundation, there is no telling who is going to have control of the Foundation in the future. Just look at what became of the Bitcoin Foundation. I’d rather the subreddit be controlled by ZCashCo, who I believe has demonstrated great leadership so far.
As for what to do with the subreddit in the near term. I favor keeping it closed for the time being. Redditors are free to discuss Zcash on other subreddits. By keeping it closed, it will make clear that no one subreddit is the “official” Zcash subreddit.
Long Live Zcash!
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Thank you so much for the words of encouragement! That kind of encouragement really helps keep me going. 
I agree that we should keep forging ahead with the company as the leader for now, if only because the company is already operational and productive where the Foundation is just bootstrapping itself.
As for “who will control the Foundation eventually” and the negative example of the Bitcoin Foundation, I have to admit that this has been preying on my mind recently since I’ve signed over basically half of all my forseeable worldly wealth to be donated to the Foundation, and I have more or less no control over the Foundation.
The four founding board members are people that I trust, but in the long-term I think we need both transparency, inclusivity, and a voice for all stakeholders, in addition to strong, active, decisive, principled leaders (not just design-by-committee, or democracy, or “consensus”). This means I think that the community of users, and the Foundation (and the company) need to step up and be willing to hold the other accountable and to demand the best of the other.
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Core developers need to be in control of some aspect of the larger discussion. The subreddit should be handed over, but I think handing over the forum is a bad idea. Managing the forum on Namecoin was hard enough even with a strong leadership team.
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