keep up the good fight 
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Ironically, @Shawn literally wrote the moderation policy, and, as the founder of these forums, his opinion regarding how they should be moderated carries more weight than anyone else’s.
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This echoes feedback we’ve had from multiple community members in recent months (including from ECC team members, ZCG committee members, and grant recipients), to the effect that trying to participate in productive discussions on these forums is difficult, due to “constant aggressiveness” from a small number of users “flooding every single topic” and “derailing the conversation” (quotes from actual feedback).
There are plenty of memes that allude to a person forcefully making a point about something to someone who’s not interested…
e.g.
…but we’re far beyond that, to the point where it’s akin to that scene in A Clockwork Orange…
Fundamentally, the purpose of these forums is to provide a place where people can constructively discuss Zcash.
If people are unable to have productive discussions about improving Zcash because a small number of users keep derailing the discussions, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed.
This approach makes a lot of sense to me. I think we should trial moving any price discussion to a single topic (e.g. Price Speculation). We can see how that works for a few months.
We’ll formalize this with a change to the moderation policy in the coming days.
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The reason price discussion is relevant and constructive here is because there is a development fund. It’s relevant since your organization gets paid from it.
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It doesn’t make sense because its a form of censorship.
Stripping away the context of discussions around ZEC (wherever they may pop up), and things like adoption or treasury finances, look like a strong armed attempt to white wash the history/ sheep dog the thought exercise of the forum/ the opinions of the growing Zcash ecosystem.
If any mention of the value/ price of ZEC gets boxed under “Price Speculation” then the forum becomes void of nuance related to how the value/ price of ZEC can interact with many aspects of the project beyond simply taking guesses about Where will ZEC be next year
Nimmy also makes an important point. The Zcash Foundation and the Electric Coin Company are in some part, in control of ZEC because they have taken in so many coins over the life of the project, they want to continue taking in more ZEC, over the next halving cycle, and they are the largest non-PoW sellers of the coins.
Is moderation policy really this quick to change?
A couple handfuls of people are annoyed by ongoing comments about ZEC, so now we snap our fingers and change the policy?
Do we all agree that this is a priority? (Over-engineering moderation rules to specifically box-in speech about ZEC/ box-out ZEC from all other threads)
Many of us saw that there is a history of using authority to attempt to control/ change the speech of others!
Did it make sense professionally to interrupt @zooko on stage, mid presentation, to tell him your opinion about what he should/ shouldn’t be saying about Zcash governance?
It wasn’t like he insulted your mother up there
This is a helpful piece of history. This is the first time that I’ve seen it suggested that the forum is Shawn’s Zcash forum. The presentation here is that the forum is for everyone/ all opinions and ideas.
Are you suggesting that Shawn makes the final call about the rules/ moderation?
Now that Shawn announced his new job with the ECC, I’ve got to wonder out loud, maybe we ought to try and decentralize some of this ecosystem management work(?)
To make my opinion clear, I think these forums are moderated well as-is/ with the existing policies. I’ve accidentally derailed a thread or two, and have been a broken record at times; and I haven’t been angry about cases where you moved comments, removed them, etc etc. I generally feel the same about what I’ve observed, the moderation here is what any reasonable person should expect.
The concern is that we would over extend moderation to close down discussions about the value of ZEC… making a huge blanket out of “Price Speculation” that doesn’t make sense, it is painting with too broad of a brush/ it takes away the importance of nuanced discussion.
It is nice to see a lot more people in the forum who I’d describe as (decentralized) Activist Investors. People in Zcash who have invested money, time, energy, reputation, and who rightfully feel like they were sold swampland in Florida.
There should be no surprise that as the project grows, more of these types of people would get active in the forum - making suggestions that are business/ investor/ economics minded.
It doesn’t make sense to pigeon hole all of their remarks under the “Price Speculation” banner because it isn’t all merely speculation; part of free speech is about respecting nuance of speech
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There is a lot of healthy Price Speculation happening over here. I hope you two have rethought (and abandoned) the idea of it needing to be flagged/ merged/ cornered into the only Price Speculation thread in the forum.
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There’s a difference between planning for future budgets by charting potential price movement in a thread and “Zcash dumps” or “Wen Zcash pump?” or “How come Zcash price went up/down today” type conversation.
One is constructive, one is not.
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I like that you’re acknowledging some nuance now. (Maybe you meant to suggest nuance all along, but from the quotes below, you and Jack seem to have be framing out a black-and-white moderation policy change).
I haven’t seen any When Moon style price speculating in the forum for a long time, especially not as derailments of non-price threads. We’ve all collectively suffered under this Zcash bear market long enough to have had our imaginations dampened out of that kind of dreaming!
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I haven’t posted much in quite a while. Frustrating with development direction (my username should provide a clue) was a large part of it, but so has been my perception of heavy handed moderation. Upon my return I see moderation is still overly aggressive (particularly marking posts as off topic)
If the goal of moderators is to slowly drive away community members that want to encourage developers to listen to the people that actually care the most about on chain privacy and the public perception of Zcash, you are succeeding.
You may eventually achieve the echo chamber you desire but it will come at the expense of adoption of the shielded functionality that is the true purpose of zcash.
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Do not interact with @rep they are a scammer.
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Looks like it’s time to add “Live Chat” to the auto-flagged words list. Maybe “Live Support” and “Live Agent” too.
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Your post has been hidden because it was flagged by multiple community members.
It is deeply inappropriate and a clear breach of the Code of Conduct to suggest that another community member has cognitive issues.
You may edit your post to remove that part and leave the rest intact. If you re-post the offending section again, you will be suspended.
From the Code of Conduct:
Forum members should strive to be kind, respectful, and interesting. Ideally, your presence in the community should improve the experience for everyone.
You were previously warned (in January) because your forum activity fell short of the standards set forth in the Code of Conduct.
You are welcome to voice opinions about Zcash governance, and to criticise leaders like myself if you believe that we are not doing the best thing for Zcash.
However, you must not engage in personal attacks on other community members.
If you continue to do so, you will be suspended.
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So because you can’t be civil and respectful to others, you want someone else to start a new forum where you can do that?
And this is one of the reasons why people walk away from Zcash. There’s a lot more to freedom than just doing whatever you want.
There are more than enough cases in Zcash history where people weren’t allowed to share their views in a public forum that related directly to technical direction. That’s completely different than what you did.
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You’re clearly missing the point. If you think that having posts where you personally attack someone else censored is biased and you can’t just have a civil discourse, then maybe this isn’t the forum for you.
I do not agree with many of the things Dodger, Zooko or Josh or any of the other Game of Zcash Thrones participants, but I don’t go and personally attack any of them. Attack their ideas? Yes. Attack their positions on the tech or direction? Yes. But that’s where the line should be drawn.
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It doesn’t matter if someone is “famous” or not, the rules are the rules, they apply to devs from ZF/ECC, independent contractors, miners, Zec holders, etc… everyone agreed to the rules when they chose to create an account here.
https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/faq
Users can choose to abide by them or not but if they choose not to they shouldn’t be surprised when a moderator calls them out for it.
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Did you get permanently banned for not following the CoC? You are still here posting from what I can see.
So the issue is not will the rules themselves it’s that you don’t like being reminded that you are breaking them with a warning and asked to change your post as Dodger did above?
Rules without some sort of action to enforce them aren’t rules at all. Overall I would say the policy’s here are pretty lenient compared to what happens over on places like Telegram or Reddit. They are much less “please stop doing that” and more straight to the ban hammer.
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You mean the same language that you later said:
It seems to me that you posted something that could be viewed as a personal attack, which is against the CoC that states:
Examples of unacceptable behavior include:
Personal attacks.
Trolling and insulting or derogatory comments.
Then after being called out for the error you apologized to Skyl so all was good.
Seemed like everyone had moved on.
Yet you are now posting that you have incurred some sort of injustice by Dodger for not unflagging your post, which you’ve not changed, after you already admitted it was wrong and apologized for it?
Hypothetical situations stemming from hypothetical people making hypothetical statements cannot be proven or disproven until the actual event occurs.
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Yes, he absolutely would if he said things here similar to the tweet of his that you quote.
On the subject of what happens to platforms that allow abusive speech, including ableism, see Free to speak. ECC Update - #13 by daira . For many of us that is an absolute red line: we will not participate in fora that allow abusive speech.
Yes we would, because I for one would kick up a huge fuss if we treated “celebrities” any differently wrt moderation policy.
Indeed you can’t. Deal with it. There are plenty of other ways to say that you disagree with what someone has said, or even that they persistently make flawed arguments.
Personally I find that it actually helps a lot to address the argument rather than the person. And tbh, it makes the very occasional cases where someone actually is just a raging asshole and you justifiably say so despite the risk of getting banned, all the more satisfying.
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