Topic: Meta-thread on the moderation of HashFast threads (Read 2186 times)

When you try and do that in a honest way especially with BFL there is nothing near discussion. Even when people are polite and asking genuine questions in this forum they have been rudely rebuffed on countless occasions at some point moderators either need to step up or move out of the way and at least be honest about that. At this point it is clear they have no intentions of sanctioning those who are attacking others. It is clear pattern that is obvious to most but some how it is not as clear cut to the mods. I find that curious.

As far as I can tell, and if you would like me to spend about 2 or 3 days cataloging every instance where this is the case I could, but there is no point to doing that as it doesn't matter if there is clear evidence or pattern it is not being moderated as already stated in this thread there is nothing they are willing to do even though they posted those simple guidelines. The rules are not being followed. The moderators are not doing what they had promised and it is now clear that the only recourse for anyone who has a fair complaint with BFL is to do that anonymously here in this forum. That is a shameful state that this forum is in and that it has come to that because of a handful of people completely bereft of any moral and social obligations to this community and their customers which is indeed the most insidious part of this whole situation given they losses and time lost dealing with BFL. You want open and free dialogue great but you still have to have people who are going to play by some semblance of social and moral order.

BFL and their henchmen do not and they are clearly only here to derail pretty much any thread about BFL that shine light on what is going on to everyone and they do it mainly with personal attacks the people posting. This happens generally to ANY that stick their necks out and complain or posts negatively towards BFL. You know that is what has been going on here, as much as I do, as everyone in this forum who actually reads these forums widely can see.

What is the reason behind all the discord? In my view and I dare say the majority view of those following this it is a direct result, of again, just a few people not interested in engaging in a proper dialogue where the goal is to find a RESOLUTION. If you have two honest brokers looking to resolve a dispute no problem and things will then ultimately get resolved. BFL doesn't want to have that talk, they do not listen, they do not want to accept the consequences for their failures or minimally to find solutions for their customers and that is why there is so much discord. So we are then left with only one solution. Ignoring BFL and making certain to continuously and unfalteringly report all the crap they are doing as loudly and widely as possible so no one buys their products. That is fair. That is a fair result given the millions of dollars in losses they have caused 1000s of people and the fact they DO NOT WANT TO GENUINELY RESOLVE PROBLEMS.

 Honest question Josh. Do you recognize that you yourself are trolling ? Do you acknowledge that I was responding poorly to your trolling of these forums, and myself as a former customer of yours, back during your 65nm production debacle ?

 I would honestly like to know how I have spread misinformation, or outright lies about you or Butterfly Labs.

 Please. Let me know with details so I can offer apologies. Spreading lies is not my thing.

 You attempting to besmirch my good name speaks more to you than it does me. I don't think you see this either

 Again, I'm not the bad guy here. Stop trying to paint me out to be one because I responded poorly to you over your consistent inability to offer accurate production information for over six months, all the while taunting and trolling us.

 I've aspired to take a higher road since then, Josh. Maybe that's something you can work towards as well in 2014.

 

Worthless population should also include those who are associated with (work for) "companies" that continually and historically have always been untruthful and severely late with timelines and shipment...

Thanks for the tip Adolf. (Just listen to yourself man!)

This is the place to discuss it (among others) - the problem arises when you have irrational and totally inappropriate people like Christian "Xian" Antkow, Darin Bicknell, Entropy-UC, et al "participating" with misinformation, outright lies and general trolling.  They contribute nothing constructive in any possible interpretation of the word and serve to just bring the forum down to near uselessness with their repeated posts of the same thing, shouting down anyone who might disagree with them and the outright lies they continue to perpetuate even in the face of indisputable contrary evidence.  

If you eliminate the worthless population like that, suddenly the forum becomes a much more useful place.  But in the interests of "Freedom of speech," the operators of the forum are loathe to eliminate useless individuals like that, sadly... so we end up with a useless forum.

I don't think this is an integrity issue on gmaxwell's part. I think he created his moderation rules at a time where scam accusations were limited to individuals that were scamming people out of Bitcoin, not corporate entities that are engaging in questionable/misleading practices. BFL, and now HashFast, have presented issues which do not fit into the framework initially established and now gmaxwell is feeling pressured to honor the existing (obsolete) rules that he established with a situation that does not cleanly fit into the rules.

Rules need to adapt with changing times. They cannot be inflexible and expected to be honored. Every rules system has a framework for amendment.

There are going to be more entities which produce custom hardware and the business practices associated with said entity need to be presented as a package, not splintered across the forum for some outdated forum organization. The fact is that if you intend propose, design, produce, modify, distribute and support hardware which has only one function - to mine bitcoin hardware - there needs to be a place to discuss it. If the proposal, design, production, modification or support of the hardware is questionable, no one bats an eye - but if the distribution has problems, then all of the sudden we need to move the discussion to scam accusation? That seems ridiculous.

I think the integrity conflict gmaxwell feels is stuck between trying to honor very specific, but incomplete, rules he created a year ago and the fact that we can discuss every nuance of HashFast's hardware in this forum, except their failure to deliver that hardware.

Shipping the first product doesn't mean a damn thing if you cannot effectively distribute and support that product once it is in the world. Most of a business is the distribution and support. That's the most critical part, there should be a place for customers to discuss it, and for companies that have a clue, for them to come and discuss it too.

Ask yourself why you feel your integrity is under attack.

There is more-than-likely a legitimate reason you should feel an unhealthy sting of hypocrisy.

With respect, all I'm hearing from you, gmaxwell, is excuses for shirking your responsibilities to be good and trustworthy stewards of this community.

As it stands right now, a certain advertiser calling this place a "sewer" is not far off base, and there seems to be little desire for our absentee-landlord to spray some Fabreeze around here or clean the place up.

The fact that Theymos is ok with advertisers being openly antagonistic to this platform, while exploiting it at our expense, speaks to a cancerous and morally-bereft pathology.

This is the problem. Most people buying miners are first time buyers that do not do their homework. As such companies like BFL and HF can stay in business because they feed off the ignorance of newbies.

I don't know what the AdWords policy is exactly, but I'd be curious to see what their stance is towards pre-order products.

https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1331529?hl=en&ref_topic=1310871

Hopefully people will learn, and the terms of sale will change.

I doubt there will be any positive impact though.  It's too easy to attract fresh suckers with Google ads.

The expectation should be terms of sale that align your interests with the supplier.  When the supplier already has all your money, he really doesn't have much incentive to deliver.  It actually costs him money (shipping at least).

Paying fully in advance for gear that is not ready to ship immediately is essentially saying to the supplier, "I don't care, do whatever you want, there's no urgency about this".

As a person if you saw someone getting robbed in the street i bet that you would help that person right away either by calling the cops or any help or by smacking the thief or by any other means. I never saw that here from you even if you are not obligated. There is no warning here for the new people. I thought there was a warning with "Caveat emptor" on the Securities sub-forum, but i see that is gone now. If someone that just discovered bitcoin gets here, he has no idea that he got into a scammers den unless he starts reading everything here and starts screening paid shills from regular users with valid points and concerns. While i like the fact that everyone should be very careful with his own investments and own money, i think a simple warning or some guidelines about the scams that are around here could help people be more cautious before investing into something.

A clear distinction in Tom's case is that there weren't absolutely unambiguous statements made to customers that any refunds would be the full amount of Bitcoin paid.  In the case of HastFast case people (thought they) learned from bASIC and asked for, and received, clarification on this point. HF had learned too, and made all the right promises— full refunds of the amounts paid, investor funded, MPP to cover reasonable increases in difficulty, a named professional design time, etc.

Perhaps the mistake that people keep making isn't that they're failing to as a particular question or sniff out a particular red-flag. Perhaps the problem is just trusting at all for something this substantial when failure leaves the defaulting party holding all the cards (and all the coin).

Next time someone shows up asking for pre-orders with promises development paid by investors not pre-orders and full Bitcoin refunds we should demand using a trustless multisig escrow in the blockchain to eliminate the risk of a failure to make good on the promises.

Remember Tom from bASIC

He did the same thing,just before he closed shop...............he paid most everyone back,but............ 

wtf? whats to answer?  I've randomly commented on a lot of things, and in this case I'm personally impacted, so you can be darn sure I'm going to comment.

I'm not some mod-puppet. I'm a person too, and a regular user of the forums as well.

If I were acting as a mod against HF you'd see some sticked thread or even my gratis advertising slot used, but I don't think that would be appropriate.

What is your stance on HF today?

+1 You think he would get the message. I don't think hypocrisy is a good thing intentional or not. No one could argue that BFL is somehow under the radar and it CLEAR without doubt even that BFL has done and is doing things are more or less 'illegal' and harmful to this community well beyond the current HF fiasco and it obviously begs the question why weigh in on HF and not BFL? That is simply a question that never seems to get answered.

I don't know what mechanism you think it could have accomplished that. I moderated here then purely as a volunteer. Recently the forum started paying mods based on activity out of its substantial war-chest— makes it a little easier to not feel guilty about spending some time on it instead of other activities— but that started after all the major BFL drama went down, though I'm completely ignorant about the advertising stuff. I have no idea who pays what for what, I know there are auctions, but I don't believe I've ever even loaded the one of them.

I think I must not have been very clear. In the pre-OP posts Entropy-uc expressed the view that people shouldn't care about protecting others from getting ripped off. I disagreed, expressing the view that miners getting ripped off is bad for Bitcoin as whole.  I subsequently elaborated that this Bitcoin-as-a-whole concern is primarily related to mining breaking even, and that this concern is addressed if the miners break even, even if the vendors are slimely-slimeballs-who-slime.

The reason I pointed it out is because this bitcoin-as-a-whole concern is a problem with practically every vendor right now, not just the supposedly dishonest ones. Some of the better liked hardware makers are turning around their sales and using the income to buy a multiple of the hashrate for themselves. This worrys me because I am concerned that it undermines the security model in Bitcoin. I've expressed this concern many times, and specifically in a few vendors threads.

I try to be somewhat conservative about it, because I don't want to be one of those sociopath miners who tells everyone else mining can't be profitable while they're happily buying up all the hardware they can.

[Not that I don't personally care about the people who get jerked around by poorly managed companies or scammers, but bad things are going on all the time all over the world— and especially in Bitcoin.  I damaged friendships in begging people not to invest in Pirate40 and in warning people off of many other outright scams. My heart can bleed for only so many wounded, and at some point triage sets in.]

I am not your mommy— wellI'm actually quite paternalistic in places where I have full reign but the style of the forum is that you need to look out for yourself. This is advertised everywhere. The forum leaves known, even admitted, scammers to post. This is not necessarily policy I agree with (although I suppose I understand the arguments: better the known threat), but its the kind of open community that exist here, and really not all that many other places.

There is simply nothing I can do, as a moderator, to help about these things. I have no power over these companies. And even when I express even the most mild disapproval— just as a regular user of the forum, which I also am—  I am met with vicious attacks by the companies supporters. I only know what I've experienced too. People do make fraudulent scam accusations on the forums (and elsewhere on the internet) in order to try to extort reputable vendors and persons.

As you should. I'm not just a moderator here, I'm a miner who's bin around longer than the vast majority, and one of the developers of Bitcoin-QT, there are lot of different perspectives I can speak from here. The moderator one is the least interesting. In some communities "moderators" get called "janitors": It's more accurate, sometimes I pull out a mop and clean up after some crazy person has crapped on the floor.  What policy I make is generally procedural: Vomit goes in the green bin, used diapers in the red bin.

I absolutely haven't. Companies have come and gone without me even noticing them, I didn't know about bitfury until people on IRC were talking about waiting for shipping on theirs. Fully keeping up with the threads here could easily be a full time job. But my job as a moderator isn't to police the companies, nor do I have the authority do so.  I contribute intermittently as a regular miner, picking and choosing what threads I read and offering my opinion where I fee like it, and when I act as a moderator is usually either because someone has reported a post or I keep seeing one constantly at the top so I decide to start reading it and find that it's gone repetitive, off-topic, or outright animalistic.

I'm afraid I have to agree with OP.  It always seemed weird to me why the mods here appeared (from my perspective at least) to be actively looking to bury as many "bad PR" type threads for BFL to the virtual geek dungeon of OT or SA.

Honestly I thought (and maybe still do if I am honest) that the significant amount of money BFL was spending on advertising here influenced mods decisions.

GMax are you now surprised that HashFast is coming along and asking you to bury their dirty laundry as well?  Because you made estimations that BFL customers could ROI so it wasn't as bad as HF because their customers won't ROI .  You shouldn't be making estimations on ROI to conclude an companies legitimacy.  BFL was clearly illegally with holding refunds and you seemingly not only turned a blind eye but made the information presented less available for the rest of the poor schmucks.

Honestly I don't put any more weight on what Mods or admin or hero members have to say.  Their content always speaks louder than their status, but I personally think you have not treated all companies the same and as a mod I believe you should have.

Nothing personal mate, and I do understand you have a chunk of change wrapped up here where you didn't with BFL and your only human, so with that I wish you good luck with your HF order and whatever other pre-orders you may have!

Me defending my integrity is, I think.  As is the yabbering about the rules. At least it has nothing to do with the subject of this thread, which is "A call to the Custom Hardware community: Please let the world know about HashFast".   Not "Let the world know about Gmaxwell, and HashFastCL's interpertitive dance to Gmaxwell's stunning prose".

I'm kinda afraid of crapping up speculation.  If it's confined to a couple threads does it matter?

Not a bad idea at all...

This could also curb the pitchfork storm somewhat and the desperate HF "CustomerFister" wannabe forum moderator deputy dog rules specialist...

If we are talking about moving this all around, which you can get rid of this post for being OT but, can you also move the main HF thread to speculation as they haven't really provided any information that has a result to it.

They posted about being a new company and developing a product but it seems everything they've given / provided this forum = nothing that works. Bad PCB's etc. So until they actually can show proof of concept (not just a hey look somethings mining on x address, showing errors, not operating at announced specs) it should be more of a speculation. A we think all this will work but not sure yet.

I really did. But there was such as cesspool of bad behavior on all sides that it was hard to be crisp in my disapproval. Especially to those adopting a highly factional perspective "Anyone who says anything positive about my enemy is my enemy, anyone who says anything negative about my friend is my enemy."

I even thought for a while that most of the shrill anti-bfl voices were actually BFL shills trying to discredit the complainers because they were so ... anti-persuasive ... but that guess was thrown out the window by the BFL employees acting in ways which I would have attributed as being the output of anti-BFL folks in disguise, if the fact of their employment didn't exclude that possibility.

At the same time, BFL was late and under-spec for every product. I successfully predicted that their asic products wouldn't be a good deal and stayed clear, and— perhaps unfairly— I wasn't really personally shocked until say march or so.

What bothers me— in terms of long term risks— isn't the mistaken (/deceptive) product claims or missed deadlines. If some mining company was late and lied to their customers, and delivered an underspec part— but the miners were still able to break even that bothers me less than a company which is honest and on-time, but through a combination of pricing, order-book non-transparency, and self-mining delivers a product that can never break even.

When BFL was initially delayed they seemed an anomaly, a not very reliably company with habitually late products. But for a long time they still looked like they'd break even for some time. Ha.  In the time since then _most_ of the products sold have not broken even and likely will never break even vs just sitting on your Bitcoin.  The rapid appreciation of coin has enabled some miners to lie to themselves about their losses, but they're losses none the less.

If you look you can see me complaining about practically every mining hardware company (I think) I know anything about. (Including ones that I generally like)

Mining products are sold for a particular purpose: To mine Bitcoin. A miner which mines a nearly guaranteed loss is defective, no matter how timely the delivery or polite the sales staff.

A thread which had fallen to the second (third?) page when you asked me to unlock it so you could bump it.

FWIW, I strong disagree with any hardware company "testing" hardware on the production network. There is a dedicate test network, and system testing can be adequately tested on a private network. I lauded avalon's initial commitments to not do so (which were subsequently violated), and complained about other companies doing so. When you mine instead of shipping you are taking from your customers, even if you don't use their hardware to do it, because you are elevating the future difficulty which will reduce their income on the products you eventually ship as well as any equipment they are currently mining with.

There is a sure way to avoid complaints about minor amounts of things like that: deliver on your promises.

Well, I can't deny being human. Looking at at >100 BTC loss does tend to increase salience.

When HashFast started it was looking for well known and high profile people to help promote its products. I didn't get involved in any promotion or whatever, but I did eventually buy a product (and a second one a month later in September, since everything was "on time").   The advantages of affiliation with high profile people cuts both ways however: Had hashfast delivered on time and to spec I would have been singing praises, and now that I'm out a lot of coin and getting outright _offensive_ settlement offers for a contract that HashFast has defaulted on entirely on their own... well there you go: You're damn right I'm going to speak up about that too. I suppose one lesson might be that one ought to take as much care in picking their enemies as they do their friends.

As far as moderation goes, there is actually very little control I have over things here. I've been pruning out offtopic crap to keep the threads readable. Feel free to complain about anything you think has gone wrong and I'll try to fix it.  If you think the pitchforks are making it hard to hear your product updates, create a self moderated thread for product updates. Cheers,

[And now I have to go figure out how to split all this OT stuff out of this thread. ::sigh::]

Wow - for a company that has been bending over its customer base while eagerly withholding the spit.. you come in here and bitch a fit about "forum rules"?  

You want someone to honor "forum rules" when things like an original "ToS" isn't even being honored by HF??? lolsauce!

Lol...well we can't really talk about your custom hardware now can we, since you took all our BTC, lied to us, and gave us nothing.

This is obviously a Scam Accusation:


Gmaxwell's rules for this sub are here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-point-of-order-conduct-in-this-subforum-139380

They are very well written.  Like any good set of rules they are clear, concise, and leave little open to interpretation:

yes he has a HF unit on order.

You really didn't care when it was BFL ripping people off, so what makes this different?  Is it that you are one of the people that were deceived?

Don't get me wrong, I've been screaming about this for 18 months now.  But I'm surprised to see this new attitude from you in particular.

If you want to improve things, as a mod you can easily have a positive impact. Abolish all discussion of hardware that hasn't shipped in volume to mining speculation.