Conversation about structural change for ZCG forum?

Governance
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Hi, I’m taking off my hat as team lead for Birdcalls and now i’m just writing to the community as plain-ol-Sunny. I know that other people than me have expressed the opinion that the ZCG process is toxic and discouraging. But I don’t think it has to be that way forever. It could be structured differently. It could be better. So in case there’s a meta-discussion to be had here, I’m creating a space for it here.

I’ll be recusing myself from this discussion since in my capacity as team lead of Birdcalls, I’m currently an aggrieved party :sweat_smile:. I’ll probably also take a break from Zcash again for a while because I already feel burnt out, but I do want to reiterate that I believe in Zcash and I want y’all to be strong.

Here’s a few relevant quotes from the past week:

I think that an interesting way to think about a community forum is as a social common space where the shared resource is our ‘focused attention.’ It’s easy for forum discussions to devolve into a tragedy of the commons where our limited resource, our focused attention, is wasted.

One of my favorite thinkers on how to successfully govern social common spaces was Elinor Ostrim. She won the Nobel Prize having spent most of her life studying real world situations where communities successfully shared scarce water resources for hundreds to thousands of years, without having to resort to privatization.

Communities avoid the tragedy of the commons by taking the time and care to put in place structures to properly incentivize responsible stewardship of common resources.

Here’s the Ostrom Workshop: Ostrom Workshop: Indiana University
Who knows, maybe Zcash could hire a consultant affiliated with the Ostrom Workshop to make professional suggestions for how to better structure the ZCG program. If you want them to do that though, please please don’t make them submit it as a grant proposal to the current public forum.

I’m just tossing out a few ideas to get people thinking.

One last thing to throw out there for the discussion -

Screenshot 2025-02-06 at 11.48.04 PM
Screenshot 2025-02-06 at 11.48.04 PM2248×1424 212 KB

I noticed this new user account because its very first ‘like’ was my comment saying I was too tired to keep responding in the grants forum. Then I realized that the account had already read 394 posts in 1 hour of read time. I thought it was a little odd. Then I remembered that we live in a world now where it would be trivial for an LLM to be trained on the Zcash forum and then unleashed into the forums to spew mostly coherent nonsense that wastes everyone’s time and attention, forever.

In my opinion, HHIROSHIMA is a little sus.

Perhaps it’s time to add two more reputation features to community profiles: a trust graph of whether someone originally invited you into the community, if so who that was; and a badge if anyone in the community has ever met you in person.

Last thing. Now I’m putting on my hat as a privacy professional: don’t forget that the state department doesn’t have to get you delisted from the exchanges if they can just insert enough monkey wrenches into your system that you fail to function.

Okay, I’m done here for now. I’m recusing myself now. Furthermore, I’m going to turn off notifications for Zash for a while. So if anyone specifically wants a response from me then please ask Jason or Zooko to send me a ping via text.

All best,
Plain Ol’ Sunny

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It’s really hard to take you seriously anymore, i get the impression that you feel caught out and to be honest, that is my opinion.

You didn’t want to help at all, but saw the opportunity to make money quickly. That didn’t work out and now everyone else is to blame, although - and I’m sure of this - the majority of members here paid attention to the cost-benefit factor and now you feel totally attacked. Finally stop this manipulative behavior.

This drama what you are doing here meanwhile is deeply ridiculous and no, I don’t have to open a second account to tell you my opinion. :man_facepalming:

Agree with this point, because I have already thought about it too and urge everyone to keep
a watchful eye on it.

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Hello! I’d love to chat with you in private, just to hear you out. Ping me.

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Yes, these types of accounts are bots that create an account and “like” as many posts as possible to gain forum trust levels. They then remain dormant until someone posts something wallet related like “help my ZEC is stuck” then they send out a DM with fake “customer support” links. I delete or restrict trust levels for several of these types of accounts per week.

I also remove one or two accounts per week that are trying to post clearly AI generated content.

But that said, there are more active readers like Hiroshima who are real people that have a lot of time on their hands to be active on the forum. That doesn’t automatically make them a LLM AI bot.

We do have forum titles that I manually assign to users like @Autotunafish and @pacu who are trusted known members of the community

…

Regarding users questioning the cost of grant proposals ie: “price dumping” as Pacu put it. The entire purpose of having the discussion on an open public forum ( not just a private conversation with the applicant and @ZcashGrants ) is to question and get feedback from the broader community about the application.

The discussions here are ultimately something ZCG can take under advisement when considering the grant, or can choose to ignore all together.

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Hiroshima is definitely not a bot. There’s no doubt about it. Bots don’t have feelings.

There’s a lot of frustration about the market in all of us, it’s noticeable. But we need to be able to find a way to communicate without accusations and resentment.

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Are you asserting that you know @HHIROSHIMA isn’t an AI? That’s certainly what @artkor is saying.

I have strong reason to believe that neither @Shawn nor @artkor is an AI. But apriori, I have no strong evidence either way with respect to @HHIROSHIMA .

I think @machinesunmachine makes a good point that tools that help make that determination are needed… maybe even an entire communication platform that’s robust to inauthentic messaging…

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I’m really starting to wonder what kind of stuff you guys are smoking. This is not normal anymore and such people are developers for zcash. Until just now I thought highly of you but now you have disqulified yourself to such an extent that I won’t even read your posts anymore and that as an AI :upside_down_face:

But before I forget, thanks for the compliment anyway.

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i agree, u can’t be AI, too authentic

unless ur one of the top new AGI models :rofl:

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Yes, based on interactions with them and usage patterns on the forum I can say Hiroshima is not an AI.

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Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil? Involuntary dilation of the iris?

The fact is that the only-slightly-uncanny valley is not coming, it’s already here.

I’ve read way (way way) too much of this forum and I don’t think HH is a bot, but these days, especially if you’re being observant and very honest, it’s sometimes difficult to tell.

Anything we can do to promote awareness of where info is coming from is good. Protecting humans, particularly naive humans, from spam and propaganda is not easy and is important for a well functioning social group. The under-appreciated job of the mod is hard and getting harder all the time.

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Every forum member will have to perform the Baseline Test in person:

:sweat_smile:

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I tried to upload a cool image but I couldn’t get the forum to accept mine… :frowning:

so thanks for getting a correct reference into the right place :slight_smile:

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Spoken like a well-trained guardian replicant. Welcome to the forums Nexus 6-1740617817!

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“You’re not even close to baseline.” – The Overseer From Blade Runner

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Well… also I’m hopeful that we’ll be welcoming to Intelligences of all origins.

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Hey Zcash, Sunny here!

I finally read this discussion last night. This whole experience with Zcash back in February was so fascinating. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. What’s most cool is that the thing I’ve been thinking about all year is the same thing that you ended up discussing the most. The human-or-bot problem.

To this day, even internally on my team we still argue about whether or not we were seeing bots in the Zcash forum. Personally, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the HuggingFace git repositories and playing around with fine-tuned LLM chatbots, so I know how easy it is for the newest generation LLMs to be trained on some corner of the internet’s culture and then given distinct personalities and goals. They’re capable of real time, authentic interactions. I always vote that there were LLM chatbots. Others on my team still think there weren’t; there were just non-native-English-speaker human trolls with a lot of time on their hands. And someone at Zcash told me that they think all the Zcash accounts are real humans, but that some of those humans have been using AI to craft low-quality responses.

At some point in all these discussions, I realized that the answer doesn’t matter. The thing that matters is that the argument itself is an indicator that humanity has reached the point where the answer is no longer knowable. The Turing Test is dead. Long live the Turing Era: Who’s a human? Who’s a bot? Who’s a human wielding AI? Who is a human pretending to be a different human? What is real on the internet?

We don’t know any more. We simply can’t be sure. There isn’t certainty.

My team was so fascinated by this experience. It was one of the largest inspirations for us deciding to shut down our old company and start a new one where we can think about this stuff full time. We’re not Birdcalls anymore. Now we’re Who Technologies.

We’ve been working in stealth mode for a while now and we have some cool tools to start sharing. The gist of it all is this: There are a lot of teams out there building solutions for identity authentication; distinguishing human from AI; and dealing with deepfakes. But we think they’re all going about it the wrong way. They’re focused on biometric authentication of real-world identities and how to detect AI using algorithms and/or watermarking. But we think all that is the wasteland. Those tactics are either unwinnable arms races or socially fraught. It all fails. Something fundamental has broken. What’s left is this: trust. Trust between people who know each other in person. Who you know; who you trust, who you’re willing to vouch for. The answer is cryptographic signing and the trust graph.

So, Zcash, thanks for the eu-stress! It was healthy and productive for us. :smiling_face: I sure would love to finally build something for Zcash, though. Is there a fit here with what we’re doing now?

Questions: What’s the state of the forum these days? @shawn, do you still feel like you have a good handle on who’s a human versus who’s a bot? Has the number of clearly AI-created posts increased or decreased? Is there a line where you’re not sure any more? Are the suspected bots always trolls or are they sometimes helpful?

@pacu how do you rate the level of psychological safety in the forum these days?

Who thinks that some of the posts in the forum are low-quality and add a lot of unnecessary reading time? What about sock-puppet accounts? Are those problematic or do they add value to the community?

@zancas what are your thoughts along these lines these days? What did you mean when you said ‘inauthentic messaging’?

@zerodartz, @artkor What are you thinking these days? Do you still think @hhiroshima was too authentic and full of personality to be an LLM chatbot? Are there other identity or bot related things in the forum that have been annoying you or making you curious?

I’ve also heard that the Zcash Telegram channel has a lot of trouble with impersonation scams. If anyone wants to share complaints about that, I’d love to hear those, too.

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I am not aware of any current accounts that are bots, any bots are deleted upon discovery. I do have to prune 4-7 new accounts per week that are obvious bots but any others that are suspicious I limit thier trust level until proven otherwise.

Per your previous experience with some users like HIROSHIMA, they wore out thier welcome by constantly antagonizing users and have been suspended. There is a fine line between respectful and productive discourse and simple being a reply-guy with too much time on your hands.

If you see or suspect any bots please flag them, I have a number of admin tools at my disposal to see if a user is “real” or not.

Since returning to moderation I have posted my thoughts with regards to moderation here and Moderation feedback - #118 by Shawn.

Feel free to reply and provide feedback in those threads or DM me if issues arise.

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I’m no expert on positive psychology so I can’t say. Also it’s a very subjective thing. It not only depends on the place but a huge part of that determination depends on the applicants’ own subjectivity.

As for objective metrics, the amount of Grant Applications has increased.

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Update for transparency! I realized that my last grant proposal thread had been recently updated with some comments from a developer having trouble installing the btcpay zcash module. It does look like those problems have been fixed. But I’m taking some time to investigate whether there might still be a use for my team there. I’d rather work on the problem set relating to the focus of my new company, but the ultimate goal here is to be useful to Zcash. I know that many online merchants already use btcpay, so it’s an easy win for Zcash if that btcpay module is in great shape. If btcpay could still use help, I’ll prioritize that first.

Temporarily pausing these discussions. That being said, I have a couple replies I don’t want to forget to make -

@Shawn Thanks so much for taking the time to provide this information. At some point I would love to know more about the admin tools you use to determine if a user is real - but I certainly won’t ask you to disclose that on a public forum. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks so much for directing me to these threads; I’ve read through them and I’m glad to have the context. I know moderation can be a thankless job sometimes so I just want to take a moment to say that it’s so clear that you’ve put a ton of attention and care into curating the Zcash community discourse.

@pacu , you answered a better question than I asked, thank you. I’m glad and relieved to hear that the number of Grant Applicants has increased. All year I have worried that withdrawing that grant application wasn’t a helpful thing to do.

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Results of taking some time to make sure all is well with BTCPayServer!

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