[DAO:850f552] Should Tudamoon be Unbanned from the DAO Discord

Governance
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by 0x76fb13f00cdbdd5eac8e2664cf14be791af87cb0 (Matimio)

Introduction

In December 2022, the user “Tudamoon,” was banned from the Decentraland DAO Discord.

The DCL DAO Discord Rules state that in the event of a ban from the server, the user “may appeal the ban through a governance poll, explaining why they should be allowed back in the server.”

This poll is being submitted by Matimio, the moderator who made the banning decision in the Discord. This is an imperfect and interim solution, and this specific case should fall under the DAO’s broader Discord Community Moderation Policy, if and when this policy is modified and adapted by the Decentraland DAO Community.

For the ban to be upheld indefinitely (until a broader policy is enacted), it should pass successfully through all stages of the governance process - as this is the only established governing pathway we currently have at our disposal. If a simple majority of voting power is in favor of lifting the ban (with or without conditions), the ban will be lifted without progressing further through the governance process.

In the interim period, the user will be allowed back into the discord, however muted in all channels.

The Case

The following provides a short summary of the case for and against the ban, based on publicly shared information by Matimio and Tudamoon on the DCL DAO Forums. This information was compiled by Matimio, with the aim of being objective, and there have been no changes to any of the text from how it appeared on the forums.

Reason for the Ban according to Matimio:

“Based on those [Discord] rules I made a decision to remove you from the discord. Here is my reasoning, and it is based on a series of events, and pattern of behavior in the community:

4.1. You made a racist attack against a community member on the forums.

4.2 I received four harassment complaints from active community members against you, and deemed these complaints to be credible. I received numerous messages from long-standing community members and creators expressing fear of unfounded reprisals for statements and/or votes they made, indicating that they would no longer be a part of the discord or participate in discussions as a result.

4.3 In our final back and forth you told me to “get the fuck out”

4.4 After the ban your pattern of behavior continued and intensified.

So the reason for the ban:

Toxicity - constant and insistent personal attacks and antagonistic engagement that made the discord and other governance forums an unsafe and uncomfortable environment, leading community members to refrain from posting in the server, and in many cases voting on proposals, due to fear of targeted, personal and public attacks.

Personal Attacks - in the discord and on the forums used misinformation tactics, including the selective use of information and highlighting of old or irrelevant information to make prescient arguments and/or attacks.

Harassment - continued and unrelenting monitoring and personal posting tagging of community members on forums and in discord and use of race-based attacks on the forums.”

  • [finally] Yes I did share my personal background because of my role, and did so in a professional way as part of our grant proposal. However, in this “governance proposal,” [to remove me from my position] the information about me you include in it and how it is laid out and framed, is a type of doxxing. It is entirely unnecessary and targeting and is in complete violation of the “norm” of pseudonymity that we operate under in our community, and as a result in itself could be viewed as a form of threat or harassment.

Reasons against the Ban according to Tudamoon:

Text in [brackets] was added by Matimio to help highlight the key argument of a claim

“I am going to start this off with two words: ZERO EVIDENCE.

[Banned for Personal Gain] You banned me right before you proposed your grant (a few days later) which you would be making an income of more than $58 an hour. You knew I would have a problem with that and have other questions as I usually do. However, you figured if you banned me, you can just blow off my questions like this is a personal thing I have against you which is untrue. I disagree with your tactics and political manipulation of the DAO to fit your needs.

[Banned due to Politically Motivated Vendetta w/ No Evidence] You know I am very active and ask questions that actually matter to the community. But you knew you could get away with banning me for zero cause. You have yet to show evidence backing your claims and I am authorizing you to do so in front of the community. Please share your evidence. I wish I had the screenshot of you talking crap about my ideology of Libertarianism. I can’t even go back because guess what? My conversations with you were deleted. Same with ZumMond. You are good at deleting evidence and censoring people. Ever since I said I had that libertarian belief, you have consistently found ways to find issues with me. You made this personal.

[No Proof of Cyber Harassment] Prove the cyber harassment on the DAO Discord. Please do. It sounds like you disagree with my opinion and wanted to censor me. Once again, please share the evidence for the permanent ban.

The last conversation I had on the Decentraland DAO Discord was between Chris Metatrekkers and myself. His [Matimio’s] job is to facilitate DAO conversations, he instead chose to be one sided in a discussion rather than mediating a problem with Chris Metatrekkers. Then he didn’t like my responses, so he banned me. There was no cyber harassment

[Incident Not Racist and Not Related to Discord] I never made any racist attack. I called him a Nigerian Prince Scammer, which unfortunately that’s what Scammers from Nigeria are called in the U.S. when you receive a phone call from a scammer in Nigeria. Chris Metatrekkers is from Nigeria and I called him that because of that reason. Not because of his race. I will admit it was disrespectful and if I could take it back I would not have said it. However this has ZERO to do with the Discord page. It’s almost as if you were holding this as a grudge against me.

Personal attacks from me never happened on the Discord Server. The only attack was on the forum. None of which was misinformation. Please provide evidence.

You are claiming this happened on the forums, but where has it happened on the discord to result in a ban? The answer: It hasn’t. There is no reason I should have been permanently banned on the Discord.”

  • Unban
  • Keep Ban
  • Unban but Mute
  • Invalid question/options

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

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Yesterday i asked why Matimio didnt banned jar0d in DAO Discord, as he did with Tuda, though not so long time ago jar0d also violated rule #1 in Discord. Matimio answered that “situation was resolved.”

All this lead to situation where 1 person interprets the rules at his own discretion and in one case he bans someone, in other case he says that situation was resolved.

Do DAO needs such “objective” facilitator ?

I think we should be careful voting for grants to squads and not controlling them, instead of facilitating community ideas gathered by users in DAO Discord work groups such as “whale voting”, “vp distribution”, Facilitation Squad is spending significant time with Tuda unban…

Thanks to HP who created discord-moderation channel where community gathered ideas and got to consensus of creating auto-moderation bot which will help avoid such centralized decisions as Matimio did.

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Tuda was banned by one person in Discord and now Matimio instead of making voting in Discord where 1 person = 1 vote, holds voting here where Tuda opponents that he had dispute with, have significant voting power.

Is that fair ?

No! Hope DAO will open eyes and stop giving power and grants to such “facilitators”.

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This is why we established the Discord Moderation Channel, and are working toward developing the Bot that community members have access to.

Discord moderation in a decentralized system in particular is a challenging process. The rules as established in the Discord call for a Governance proposal. They also say that each instance should be evaluated on a case by case basis. These rules were established with the opening of the server over a year ago, and 100% should be expanded upon and the process of moderation decentralized.

Even if “opponents” of Tuda have “significant voting power”, for the ban to be upheld it would need to be promoted through all three stages of governance, garnering very significant VP. The onus for the ban being upheld is far greater than it being reversed/lifted. I believe that the outcome of this proposal will result in either a full lifting of the ban or a lifting with muting till we have established new rules and the case falls under their purview. I of course could be wrong on this, but that would be my personal vote on the issue.

The decision to establish a Discord Moderation channel was also a collective one, and we have all been involved in the process of discussions and development of the bot. HP of course has done an amazing job constructing it and putting into action! So please do not try and single me out as making a ban and not trying to move us toward a collective betterment of the situation.

I 100% agree with this. We have been dragged into an extremely time consuming and emotionally draining back and forth over this ban, when there are far more important issues to be focusing on. This is in part because of how much the issue has been turned into personal attacks against myself and our team. I hope this proposal moves this specific issue to a close, and we are able to focus on pertinent issues to our community and “government.”

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In the interim period, the user will be allowed back into the discord, however muted in all channels.

Tuda is candidate for the accountability committee, he wont be muted in accountability committee channel.

As HP has mentioned:

We can remove the ban, and mute from every channels but the accountability committee channel until that get resolved.

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Disputing with you doesnt make any sense.

Actions speak for themselves, work groups for such sharp questions as whale voting and vp-distribution were created in summer 2022 and you still didn’t gathered community ideas that were posted in them in reports,forum discussions/proposals to move them forward.

What to say even building of this work groups - “Process for Establishing Formal Working Groups” was voted via poll in August 2022
Process for Establishing Formal Working Groups , and only now since 6 months you put it to draft…

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This tough. I understand the annoyance since we all know me and my projects get called names and trolled all the time too even in these forums examples:

“simps” - @Tobik
“bots” “meme proposals” - @Peanutbutta
“This proposal is in nearly all cases plain useless.” “Big 100% No from me!! Not so good idea!:dark_sunglasses:
Let’s prevent this all from getting through” - @HPrivakos
“This proposal is so stupid that it hurts” " ate lead paint chips as childred" - @ZESTYBEAM
“A massive big YES” - @nwiz

haha but in the end we have to ask ourselves do we want this to be a place of freedom of speech or censorship. I vote YES for freedom of speech. I also gonna say “EASY YES FROM ME!” even tho legit @Tudamoon told me to my face in twitter spaces I always saying that in the comments “is worthless to say and does not help anyone.” Hopefully he will now see the irony in that.

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We did. We also lost our team member whose primary responsibility this area fell under, and returned funds to the DAO; and had several iterations of the Working Group process that were tabled and then scrapped after consultations surrounding implementation, before ultimately coming to this conception of the process.

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Your another answer is about nothing, to take eyes off the problem but not the solution … :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

You sending link with some facts about DAO and its proposals such as :

Decentraland DAO is driven by voting power, commonly referred to as VP. There is currently a total of 69.8M active VP in the Decentraland ecosystem, distributed across over 3,125 unique wallets (DAO Transparency Report Dashboard - 9/19/2022). VP is accrued through LAND ownership (1 LAND = 2,000 VP), MANA holdings (1 MANA = 1 VP), Name ownership (1 Name = 100 VP)

OR

Research conducted by community members in the VP Distribution and Whale Votes Working Groups - which were established to flush out community perspectives and build consensus on this issue - indicate that 80% of active VP is controlled by 3% of active wallets. Data from the DAO Transparency Dashboard similarly depicts the holder counts significantly decreasing as concentration of VP increases.

OR

While the Decentraland Community discusses potential pathways to address this issue in working groups, and within Core Units of the DAO (i.e. dApps Squad, Grant Support Squad and DAO Facilitation Team) there is key existing pathway for expanding VP distribution in the DAO: Voting Power Delegation !

Yes community suggested many good ideas but you didn’t gathered them in report, didnt facillitated them for clear understanding in proposal/forum discussion.

Delegation is good but not one which solves the problem. If you look in forum discussions and DAO Discord work groups about vp distribution and whale voting you can see that there are many good ideas which I DONT SEE IN LINKS YOU POSTED.

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Yes. Like this entire back and forth. The issue at hand is about lifting or upholding of a ban. Which I hope we can resolve, so everyone in the community can get back to focusing on the important issues at hand, of which, community moderation is one of them.

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Voting to UNBAN Tudamoon. It has been almost 2 months since Tudamoon has been banned and believe he should be given a second chance and see where it goes.

Sure the way he went about petitioning about a few topics in the discord may have been interpreted as anger by a few, he still has contributed to the DAO by spreading awareness of a few concerning grants.

I think it’s time to close the wounds and proceed with next steps. I am in favor of always hearing what Tudamoon has to say. Give him a second chance!

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I am voting to Unban. While I do not agree with the methods that Tudamoon used, I don’t think his methods were very diplomatic, he did call out a project that ended up having its grant revoked. Saving the DCL DAO a lot of $$… Debates for the accountability committee position are going to be starting soon and I think he should be able to participate in those upcoming discord conversations, him being someone who has actively made efforts to hold grants accountable. I believe everyone deserves a 2nd chance and I am not a big fan of censorship/banning people even when we disagree with the way that they speak. Hopefully we will see a more diplomatic approach from him going forward, because holding grants accountable in a DAO is an important task.

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Sir, are you trying to make an enemy out me? It’s working.

He explained clearly the difference already, and yet you want to bring me into an unrelated issue.

It’s moving towards harassment at this point since you’ve had this question answered multiple times already and are now just defaming me.

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I dont agree with difference and try to show signs of double standards. Nothing personal. Anyway i am sorry, wont mention you anymore. :neutral_face:

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imo - this proposal is a waste of time to not say dumb and should not be the way we handle bans on a discord server, even if the discord server is for the DAO community.

The responsibility of moderating a server should fall under who ever created that server or the assigned mods/admins otherwise if anyone feels offended or think someone is out to get them just because they didn’t like what another said then we can expect many proposals to either ban or mute people and I feel this sets a bad precedent, if Tudamoon’s wallet/name was banned on DCL, it would be a different story.

I feel most think that moderating and censoring are the same thing while I disagree. I believe everyone has a right to express ideas/concerns and also think everyone has a right to oppose those as well, all while being respectful or at least considerate of the rest of community. It’s the internet and unfortunately we will still have trolls/disrespectful people or straight keyboard goons (not saying that anyone is one atm but we should expect these anyways). I don’t believe we should ban people on being intense however Tudamoon expressing what I think were valid concerns and eventually saving DAO some money does not give him the right to use the methods he used to point those out which no matter how successful they turned out to be, they were pretty toxic.

The discord server should be for us to communicate with each other not a place for DAO community to govern chats/channels, however I believe that if we want to go thru voting systems for discord moderation, it should be done thru discord and not the DAO, therefore I see this as invalid.

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I like the method that you all use in the DG Discord server to moderate discussions, which is just a temporary time-out when it becomes really necessary to keep the conversation constructive. And I 100% agree with you that this proposal should not set a precedent for others to use this every time they disagree or want to get someone banned/unbanned. There is a lot more important issues for the DCL DAO to focus and vote on. Hopefully this is a one time situation since a better structure was not already in place and going forward the DCL DAO discord can self moderate or use less extreme measures like muting/time outs instead of bans.

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Because I believe in free speech and decentralization I must vote YES! I don’t agree with things that were said and/or how they were handled by many but that is just my opinion. There definitely needs to be rules that are followed, and Web 3 harassment is an issue that needs to be defined and addressed. IRL perception is everything, I’ve been told, therefore if someone perceives something as racist then it must be racist. How do we handle what is offensive to some and what is not thought of to be offensive by others? We have people from all over the world in Decentraland and we must consider that what is commonplace in one part of the world it may be different in another. Either way I must vote yes because I also believe in second chances. The matter of muting or unmuting is another matter and since the muting is not on a temporary basis, then unmuting in order to provide that second chance is how I must vote.

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This was one of the reasons why I didn’t propose it myself. I don’t like this policy and there were never clear guidelines that this policy was ever enacted. This was recommended policy which was by the Decentraland Discord, which BTW I am still banned from that. I guess I will have to make a second proposal to be unbanned from that one. Then I will make sure that this precedent is invalid. Because that Ban was bogus also.

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No disrespect intended, I think the ban was justified and if it was to be reverted (which I don’t see harm in doing) then it should be a simple discord vote, I don’t understand how DAO has a say over a discord server it didn’t create or had a proposal to create one and dictate how that should be moderated. A waste of time imo.

P.s I always thought that banning/unbanning people was up to the discretion of admins/creator of server, I just went into the rules channels which says this is the way to appeal a ban so I guess not an invalid prop.

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This was subjectively made by the Moderators while also having no proper procedural guidelines to ban people. So you can be banned at a whim, but can’t be unbanned unless you go through this unreasonable process? This is a slippery slope, but if this is what people want, then so be it.