Zcash Community Grants Meeting Minutes 7/8/2024

Community Grants Community Grants Updates
22

Sorry — my fat thumb hit reply when I had written only a single sentence, that I wasn’t even sure was going anywhere. Trying again

When I said I have no expertise, I was speaking only about myself personally. I do have a YouTube channel with 18K subscribers. I have no idea if that’s “good”. I haven’t tried to market it. I’ve never made a short, although I recently made a couple shorter clips from a longer piece. I have those subscribers based on the quality of my “content”, as far as I can tell. I just put up talks I’ve done and the talks from the conference I organized and people subscribed.

I looked for your channels, but didn’t find them. Are they still up? I’d be interested to see what you’ve worked on, just as an aside.

Look, I know you hate this grant. You’ve made that clear numerous times. I’m kind of done arguing about it. I was only replying to @gordonesTV to let him know that we were aware of the style of content.

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23

Thank you for replying @ambimorph. I hope that my tone on these messages is taken as constructive criticism, rather than attack on anyone’s skills or person.

It’s not that I “hate this grant,” I feel like this is a betrayal of the Zcash community, an exploitation of the grant program, and destined to fail, given the current strategy that I have seen. That’s what I’m trying to be clear about.

Since you asked: My main channel is youtube.com/adjyleak and the first channel that i started, simultaneously, ten years ago, was SF Bitcoin Meetup, before also creating and streaming to the Berlin Blockchain Meetup channel. Between all of the channels that I’ve published on, the total number of videos, either streamed or uploaded, is around 1k. A lot of the metrics and history of my work was recently posted in the Zero-knowledge Audiovisual Club forum topic. Starting around here: Zero-knowledge Audiovisual Club - #125 by ryan.taylor

icymi youtube metrics have never been my goal, nor one for which I have much respect, although I have done the research repeatedly over the years, as a matter of practice.

My target audience is not youtube users. I use the platform for it’s free infrastructure that has been reliable since I started using it in 2014. My target audience is nerds who specialize in, or are curious about, open-source and decentralized tech. Super niche and primarily made for archival purposes.

Over the years, I have met some of my audience at events and have been told that they download my videos using command-line tools, like yt-dlp, or otherwise hide themselves from YouTube.

edit: I could also add World Crypto Network to channels to which I’ve contributed, although Thomas Hunt (Mad Bitcoins) did almost all of the channel work, wrt publishing and marketing.

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24

Very cool! Thank you. I will check it out.

And thank you for clarifying.

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25

In their defense, that was disclosed in their grant proposal. I remember the community was overwhelmingly supportive nevertheless.

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26

TBH, if ZM had spent a few hours over the past couple of years engaging with the community, engaging with ZecHub, engaging with Free2Z, hiring talent from the community, getting ZEC circulating with the creators in the community, then I wouldn’t be openly critical of the content. The content isn’t my thing, but someone else with a different perspective may love it. “Looks pretty good, at least they are trying.”

The saddest thing about the ZM grant is the hand wave towards community engagement that I just haven’t seen at all. Creating a patreon, instagram, facebook, etcetc without even trying to engage with f2z seems like a bit of a spit in the face. It could be that I’m just overly sensitive. Maybe I’ve already offended ZM with some sarcastic comment and they hate me personally, IDK. I view ZM’s choice of platforms to concentrate on to be ironic and hypocritical. Again, maybe it’s just me.

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27

Considerig the format of the videos, the super-slow rollout and the total lack of interest in gaining YouTube traction, when matched with current ZM behavior, it seems to me like a strategy to prepare for a sale to Netflix or another streaming network.

I believe this is their actual target audience (network execs) and my guess is that the grant would allow for this.

28

Let’s stop this now. We’ve heard enough evaluations about ZM. The ZCG will now make judgments and take action. I don’t want to experience any more fatigue on this topic.

Let’s have more constructive discussions for Zcash. If you want to share more opinions or make decisions on this matter, please apply to become a ZCG member and express your views internally.

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29

Reminder :slight_smile:

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30

My comments on this thread are fulfilment of requested feedback, stated in the original post.

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31

I am not saying that you should not criticize.

We’ve done enough criticizing, and by now, anyone who isn’t a fool understands the issues with ZM.

I’m just saying that we should wait and see what decisions our elected ZCG committee makes.

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32

Sorry for misreading your comment. It’s a sensitive topic because that is a message that I’ve been receiving around here, in various ways, quite a bit lately.

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33

I would like to apologize as well. My previous message was written in the heat of the moment and came across as harsh.

I recognize and appreciate your contributions to Zcash.

Thank you for being the first to extend an apology.

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