(Sorry that I post it here, the letters will be small, it would have been much better on read.cash, but it contains personal attacks on C. Edward Kelso and Shammah Chancellor, so I would have to ban me on read.cash for this post)
This is probably the most personal story I've ever published on the Internet on how your project will come back to haunt you and destroy your mind and your life.
CoinSpice should find enough "juicy" details here to humiliate me even further, I think they still could! I believe in their potential! Should I send you my nudes to post, CoinSpice, for you new article? (No, I'm not a girl, in case you're wondering)
Enjoy it if you like long reads. Warning: it contains quite a few jabs at some people.
So, you might have read this "piece" from afriendofsatoshi C. Edward Kelso Chief editor of CoinSpice https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/i067py/readcash_founder_threatens_ban_permanent_fund/fznpi0x/
I'm really disappointed in CoinSpice. Anecdote from the past about them: my interview with them was terribly handled. I started the interview with them with "English is not my native language, so feel free to fix any errors you see in my answer", what did they write in CoinSpice? "We were able to determine that he is not a native English speaker" Seriously, "were able to determine", Sherlock?... why did you even need to publish that? To add a bit of a sensation? But this new piece from CoinSpice just breaks through the floor... I'm speechless... If you are ever offered to being interviewed by CoinSpice - run away! Save yourself!
What happened
28 July, 2020
An uneventful day on read.cash, people posting pictures of flowers, telling stories how they met their spouses, doing contests about who will sponsor whom, posting articles about teamwork and interviews with prominent Bitcoin Cash figures. Seriously, read.cash guys interviewed tons of Bitcoin Cash supporters (After the interview with CoinSpice I never gave anoter interview to anyone fearing it will be exactly unprofessional as CoinSpice - trying to get every little dirt the could dig out there)
micropresident (the guy who does not yet know he's going to, very professionally, like a normal stable developer he is, later go on to tell me "fuck read.cash") publishes a contest where he calls for memes that contain the following phrases: "Amaury the Socialist Dictator", "Marc De Mesel is Calvin Ayre Lite") promising up to 2 BCH in return (I believe, I didn't read his rules) for these memes.
Since a lot of read.cash users are from Philippines, Nigeria and other poor countries, where $300 is a lot of money (maybe something you will make in a year), people proceed to create these memes.
This goes directly against the rules of the site that everyone must agree before they sign up, directly violating the rule: "No name-calling, trash-talking, personal attacks or insults."
I log in to read.cash and notice the homepage full of low quality posts attacking Amaury, Marc, ABC, upvoted to no end, tons of boosted posts and Shammah giving $$ left and right for this stuff.
I publish 2 responses where I tell people to remove the memes that contain personal attacks or face a ban. https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/the-state-of-things-33c3d68a and https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/post-a4935cbd
Most of the people agreed and removed the offending memes and had no problem with it, many said they were sorry.
u/micropresident in a very professional manner proceeds to tell us to "fuck [ourselves]" and tells he's building a clone (non-moderated I presume). He also quotes us very calmly and professionally adding: "Complete bullshit" referring to rules of read.cash
CoinSpice proceeds to publish the "celebrity upskirt" kind of article "Read.cash Founder Threatens Ban & Permanent Fund Blacklist of 100 Users by Midnight London Time Tonight". Emphasis mine, I just can't stand this kind of language... this is yellow press at best. It only lacks "Reason #2 will shock you!" in the title...
So, back to the story.
Why do we even have this rule?
Is it because I'm an egomaniac that hates people? Is it because I'm secretly funded by BSV? Is it because Marc de Mesel donated nearly $100,000 to the fund? Is it because I love censoring people?
No, no and no.
It's because I want Bitcoin Cash adoption. I frankly wanted Bitcoin adoption since 2013, alas, the tiny blocks and huge fees won't allow that. So I had to switch to Bitcoin Cash which kept Bitcoin idea going.
Do you have a friend that is not deep into cryptocurrency? Tell him/her to join the Crypto Twitter. They will look at it for five minutes and tell you: "Are you crazy? These people are constantly attacking and mocking each other. What if I do something wrong? Why are they doing it? Are they mentally ill? Is this really the money of the future?"
This will be his answer for nearly every site or platform that talks about cryptocurrency.
It's everywhere. But with Bitcoin Cash somehow it's very ingrained into the nature. I understand, Bitcoin Cash was attacked so often that it became a second nature of some people to attack everything they don't like.
Don't like Amaury? Let's attack him! Why? Don't care! I just don't like him!
Don't like Marc de Mesel? Let's attack him!
Don't like CSW and Calvin? - Let's attack them. - But why? They don't do anything bad to us now. - Wait, are you one of THEM? Let's attack or you'll be attacked! Fuck you, you and you and read.cash, fuck yeah! Attaccckkk!!!
This all seems totally crazy to a newcomer.
But what do we want to achieve with read.cash? Getting newcomers to use Bitcoin Cash. Without the drama or craziness. Just some flower pictures.
Up until 28 July, 2020 this was the case. People were posting innocent pictures, got payments from the fund, tipped each other, sponsored each other, yelled at me for not getting paid enough.
Occasionally, we had some dissenters, like *****, who proceeded to tell spammers that they are "fucking cunts", got a warning for that, left forever, deleting all articles, returned, started attacking people again, got banned for that, started telling people on memo.cash how stupid read.cash is because we didn't manually ban the spammers and wasted time programming software to detect them...
Ok, weird thing - she seems to recommend people to join read.cash now, which is confusing, so I removed her name.
Then there were people who wasted hours upon hours of my day by asking stupid questions, who got blocked (from me, not from read.cash)...
But mostly things were okay with read.cash (not with me though). We've got 12,000 users, very few incidents, the fund got a donation from Marc de Mesel for nearly $100,000 which will pay new users for a year or so. We gave away money to 5,700 people (for free)!
I want to stress one part here. Marc has donated (unconditionally) more than 97% of the fund. More than 30 times more than all of the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem combined donated.
Read that part again. Marc donated 30 times more than everyone else in the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem combined! Unconditionally. I haven't received any condition about the donation use.
Marc even told us that he's willing to donate much more! Which we hastily declined, because read.cash is not profitable and it doesn't make sense to spend more than we would have gotten from ads if we were monetized.
read.cash can't be living off donations forever. It's unsustanable. So we spend via the fund approximately what we would have gotten if read.cash was plastered with ads.
But again, 12,000 users of read.cash is 97% MarcDeMesel's achievement.
That's 12,000 users of Bitcoin Cash.
Isn't "adoption" what you wanted?
Yet, the guy who said "fuck read.cash!", all the while getting top payments from the read.cash fund, proceeds to create a contest about "Marc is Calvin Ayre Lite"...
Told that this is a personal attack, replies "Complete bullshit!" (exact quote)
Note: Marc is actually OK with memes about him and asked us directly to revert our policy to allow the [offensive] memes It wasn't Marc's initiative, it was mine.
And it wasn't only Marc who were being mocked.
I'll admit right here - I don't like Amaury's actions, I don't like IFP (and I listed my reasons), but I'll warn/ban anyone directly attacking him on read.csah (not his thoughts, but just him). Wanna discuss how Amaury's idea about DAA is bad? Feel free! Wanna call him an idiot? Welcome to ban'sville, population - you. Well, usually a warning, then a ban if you insist on doing that.
The same will go for CSW, Calvin or anyone anywhere.
Are you crazy? Did you just say you'll protect CSW and Calvin? We've got a BSV shill here! Attackkk!!!!
No, no and no. We have no funds from BSV (as far as I know, the fund is non-custodial and permissionless - anyone can donate and cancel at any time), I've never contacted Calvin or CSW and I've been attacked by BSV people on multiple occasions and was accused of being a BSV shill on multiple occasions (besides people telling me to "fuck [my project]").
One thing I figured early on is that if you allow people to do something, you need to apply that rule to everyone.
Otherwise, you are a hippocrite and you should hang your head in shame.
If you allow people to mock and denigrate Amaury, Marc, BSV, BTC supporters, that's the fine line that you'll have to keep later on, when BTC and BSV supporters come. How come you're allowing people to mock a BTC supporter, yet you protect a BCH supporter? That's dishonest.
So we will have to allow BTC and BSV supporters to mock us and denigrate us. Because that's the rule. You allowed it!
They will be right.
So if we allow people to attack other people (even if I don't like them), everybody would be entitled to attack everybody.
That's where you start your journey to becoming a Crypto Twitter, where you will be attacked for nothing, where a snowball will roll on you (it did on me, but thats another story), where people would start to stalk you and try to ruin your life, because you like the coin they don't like.
That's a place which normal people won't ever join.
Read it again: No adoption for you, no world money!
So, you either have "no censorship" (which is really moderation) or you have normal people. Choose one, choose wisely, you won't be able to change it later.
We chose "normal people".
The plan was working fine (almost) until the eventful post.
But I will not revert this policy. I hope I explained why.
Koush: But you allow worse crimes to happen on read.cash!
Ok, here's a yellow press sensation worthy of coinspice.io! Listen carefully! #1 will shock you!
I am... one guy.
Yes, read.cash is a one-man shitshow.
I'm the backend developer, I'm the frontend developer, I'm the system administrator, I'm the moderator, I'm the policy maker, I'm the one who replies to 100+ emails daily on hello@read.cash, I'm the one getting up to 200 notifications per day on read.cash, I'm the one who writes articles, I'm the one who wakes up at night when a server fails, I'm the one who logged 1000 hours developing read.cash according to my IDE's time tracking plugin, I'm the one responsible for the bug that took your money, I'm the one who returned you your money, I'm the one fighting spam, I'm the one writing code to catch spammers, I'm read.cash.
I'm the one responsible to keep 7,500 comments per day (that's one comment every 10 seconds, 24/7), 800 articles per day, 400 short posts per day clean. See the stats yourself, the damn thing is growing and growing...
It is an impossible task. But I do read every one of 100+ reports sent to me per day. And each one of them is a moral dilemma for me - what to do here. This guy has copied an article from the Internet, but edited it so that it looks like another article, what do I do here? Ok, this guy is posting non-sense - is that against rules? It's surely annoying, but doesn't violate the rules. What to do here? Now try this 100 times a day. This guy, Koush, I know, he's a good guy, but now he's attacking the only guy who really helped read.cash when no one else did? WTF do I do here?
That's why I'm always telling people to report anything that they see that violates rules. I can't be everywhere. I can't make the right decision every time too. I'm a regular fucking person. Two legs, two hands, one medium-sized brain.
Ok, to be honest, a few months ago I asked a developer friend to join me to help (paid with my own money, not using read.cash fund for that), so he helps some 10 hours per month. That helps, surely, not enough.
Though I'll still call read.cash we, as it is still a registered company.
BTW To be clear - I never got any money from the read.cash fund, but I spent more than $5,000 giving away. Here's a screenshot from an internal tool that I call "the random rewarder": https://i.imgur.com/ucQEvVM.png
As you can see, I'm entitled to about $1.31 - $1.39 for today, but I get $0.00. That was always the case, because I strongly believe that I must give it to people of read.cash to attract new users.
I also gave away 100% of the funds that came to me as tips on read.cash.
BTW Did you notice that on the screenshot the guy who said "Marc de Mesel is Calvin Ayre Lite" and "fuck read.cash" got the top payment from the fund, which is at the moment 97% funded by Marc de Mesel?
My friend, the developer, who joined me, told me a few days ago: "I read your history on read.cash, you sound progressively ..." "..depressive and passively aggressive," I ended his sentence, "I know."
Yes, I know. I'm pretty passive agressive already, because every day I met with demands from users. "Why am I not getting paid?" "I work for read.cash for 8 hours a day, why is my pay so low?" "I sent some money and now I have $0.01 less than I should?" "How do I get sponsors?" "I think this guy is cheating!" "Hey, our family of 20 people joined read.cash and it says that I have 19 colocated accounts on the same IP! That's not true!"
I loathe my morning, when I open my email and there's 50 new alerts from Sentry, there are 100+ emails from users demanding stuff from me, accusing me of being unfair, wrong, an idiot, telling me "fuck read.cash"!
etc.. etc.. etc.. daily grind.. I never experienced anything like that. I was always a lead developer or manager managing small teams of 5-10 people. Nothing close to this shit I experience now.
You get progressively less sensitive. You start to think that it's ok to just delete an email, since you can't reply to everyone. You can't research why someone of 12,000 people didn't get paid, since the algorithms are now so complex that you yourself will have to spend a week just researching one guy why he gets $0.10 instead of maybe $0.50... you have no idea who your users are. The project is out of your control. But you can't do anything, because it's not profitable enough to even cover the server costs, let alone hire additional programmer or a support guy.
Then one day you log and see the beautiful garden full of dog shit. Crappy memes. A guy telling you "fuck you, there's $25K for the clone of this!" Thank God Shammah didn't offer that $25K for my head...
You find this about the only guy who really helped read.cash with money and demanded nothing in return (not a single condition was made) being compared to a midget version of a guy who was in a FBI Top Wanted list!
Again, Marc says he's ok with this, I'm not! Whoever did this meme is an asshole, I don't have any other words for this human. (Yes, I would have been banned on read.cash for this alone. You can ban me here, I no longer care...)
You find yourself increasingly grumpy, angry towards those around you, your family, because everybody is angry at you in the Internet, people are demanding and people is attacking the only people you can trust (Roger, Marc)...
You think about your previous nice cozy job. You think about 5 recruiters sending you daily mails to just name the price to join their company. You realize that these 9 months you could have made maybe $100,000, maybe $200,000 sitting on your ass, managing 5-10 people like you always did.. Instead you spent 9 months, $5,000 in Bitcoin Cash, got grumpy and depressed.
You start to ponder why you do this and whether you should even continue.
That's your future, Mr. Shammah Chancellor!
That's the reality of running a social media platform with cryptocurrency.
I will be happy to see your platform, Mr. "fuck read.cash", grow and flourish, but I warn you - it's not going to cost you $25K, but much much more. It's going to eat you alive if you are mildly successful with it and you have a little bit of conscience.
You will be attacked, you will be spammed. People will tell you "fuck you!"
I honestly have no idea why you think you will fare better than yours.org or honest.cash...
What's your advantage? being censorship free, so that people can shit and pee on each other?
Then one day 9 months later, 12,000 users, $50,000 in tips later, a guy will come in and tell you "Fuck you, Shammah and your project! Fuck you! I'm building a clone for $5K of this shit of a platform!" You will look at the clock where it's 8pm, you will look at your inbox, where there's still 50 more people yelling at you.. you'll ponder why do you even do this...
That day you'll understand me, Mr. Chancellor. Or maybe not, I have no idea what kind of a human being you are. Maybe you're reading this and laughing madly: "poor pussy can't take a beating! boo-hoo! Get off the internet, you wuss!" Maybe that's your thoughts, I don't know. You certainly don't seem to care about other people's feelings dismissing them as "complete bullshit".
Well kept gardens die by pacifism is a wonderful read about this.
Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)
Peace, and out.
P.S. I remind people that there's an ongoing fundraiser going for mainnet.cash, so anyone agreeing with "fuck read.cash" policy of Mr. Chancellor should cancel their donations while there's still time. It's very easy to cancel. Don't give your money to idealistic fools like me.
P.P.S. I blocked u/afriendofsatoshi, so somebody please forward it to him so he can humiliate me further, only on coinspice.io! Subscribe now!
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