The main problem with Substratum Network right now

"Censorship is getting worse every single day"

Justin Tabb
Dec 6th 2018

Hi, my name is Rui Pedro Moreira, you might know me as rpdorm on reddit. I've been an active community member on r/substratumnetwork for over a year and my reddit account is 4 years old. I am writing this little essay (rant) to clarify some things that were left unspoken, and mainly to draw Substratum's attention to a pressing issue that needs to be addressed ASAP in regards to their PR strategy. While I do agree that FUD posts such as these and those should be stopped, as they add nothing to the discussion, I also firmly believe that it is in Substratum's best interest to provide proper information to those who are new to Substratum Network.

There have been some claims over the past year about posts getting deleted and users being banned (on Substratum's reddit, telegram and slack server) for no real good reason. For the purpose of this post, I'll focus on reddit platform.


These are a couple of examples with almost a year gap between them.

While there are plenty of people out there that can confirm this, there are some mods and admins who refuse to admit it to be true. Not only that, they are completely silencing those who opose them. Just head down to redditsearch.io and see for yourself the sheer amount of removed posts. Simply type [removed] on Search Term and SubstratumNetwork on Subreddits, and do not forget to set period of time to All.

Like so.

Who are those people?

Currently on reddit, 80% of moderators are not part of Substratum development team. So let's break this one down, shall we?

Username	Substratum Team Member?	Claimed Given Name	Acc. Creation date	Last Seen	Activity (Posts / Comments)
flippingstones	No	James	16-06-2017	12-01-2018	>10 / >10
eastcoastcurrent	No	Dane	29-09-2017	05-01-2018	0 / 3
chronic_crypto	No	-	04-08-2017	03-12-2018	0 / >10
briannloboo	No	Brian	22-07-2017	07-05-2018	5 / >10
christian-pope	Yes	Christian (verified)	16-01-2018	04-12-2018	5 / >10
abramcookson	Yes	Abram (verified)	22-01-2018	23-01-2018	1 / >10
dcatt47	No	-	24-05-2014	06-12-2018	>10 / >10
OmeDuo007	No	-	12-01-2018	31-10-2018	4 / 7

As you can see there is a single moderator whose account was created way before the altcoin ICO boom, and only two are members of Substratum's staff. Six out of eight have done nothing else on reddit other than posting on crypto related subreddits.

If we roll back a year, there was only four of them (AmanuelManny left for some reason), and the way briannloboo was appointed in January 12th was hilarious to say the least. Coincidently (or maybe not), that was the exact same day flippingstones was last seen, and OmeDuo007's account was created.

Just ten days after, I posted my concerns about the stagnation of the subreddit, and this is the result:


Needless to say, Mike's work got diluted and much of it's content was copied to a sticky post done by the proud newly appointed moderator.

What about that guy, 707bwolf707? You might ask...

As we all know by now, censorship has been on the daily menu with this one, which is quite ironic. He bought during ICO and resisted the temptation to sell at $1, $2 or $3, claiming it to be the "Best investment i ever made". Shameless shills everywhere coupled with referral codes before joining reddit.

A year ago, the general attitude towards honest basic questions in any crypto related subreddits where often met with "GTFO DYOR!" between all that euphoria. Everyone was doing it, me included (I do assume mea culpa on that one). As the markets crashed and dust settled, things started to be a bit less toxic, but bwolf insisted and still does in perpetuating this unacceptable behaviour. Perhaps out frustration for holding the bag for so long. I can only assume! He firmly believes no one shall have a different opinion other than his. He's the exact opposite of The Old Man of Restelo, being overly optimistic and vocal about it.

With that said, let's get to the facts.


The image above is pretty self-explanatory. Bellow, you can see their modus operandi when it comes to censor the reddit community.


a rare case of public coercion

A Tough Week

Upon reading this I decided to intervene and politely cast some truth to it.



What followed is a complete shit show of false accusations and misunderstandings, manipulation and gaslight, and ultimately censorship.

Allow me to paste my censored OC

So, let me start by telling you all that I was r/raisedbynarcissists which gave me the opportunity to develop amazing powers of observation and resilience to incoming attacks, manipulation and gaslight.

"Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder with a long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, excessive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. Those affected often spend much time thinking about achieving power or success, or on their appearance. They often take advantage of the people around them. The behavior typically begins by early adulthood, and occurs across a variety of social situations." - wikipedia

Notable people in crypto space that exhibit such traits are (strangely enough, heh?) Roger Ver, Craig S Wright and Bruno Blocks.

With that said, let's get into business. (Not looking for recognition, glory nor fame. Just stating the facts. I'll also let you, the reader, be the judge of my coherence or lack of it.)

I've been invested in $SUB for over a year now, and was one of the first users to interact with the team via slack server and telegram. Obviously, I saw this enormous potential on reddit as part of an eventual PR strategy to divulge Substratum Network. When I first heard about $SUB this subreddit was already a thing, so I naturally subscribed and started interacting with all sorts of people who were genuinely interested in the project. We would offer some help for those seeking to know more about the project. This guy even made a comprehensive FAQ! Few months passed and paid fudsters started to invade this space with all kinds of cheap tactics with the intent to prevent the community to grow, calling Substratum among other things a scam. At first it seemed like some isolated cases but soon after, the copypasta became evident and some people started to panic, asking for moderation team to come forth and put an end to it. I was one of those people who pointed out the extreme importance of having someone from the dev team to also moderate or at least make the bridge between the office and reddit. mcx basically said reddit is not a priority as it is quite toxic (unfortunately, slack wants me to pay to have access to those logs). Can you please provide some pasta of your reply u/Christian-Pope ? I cannot find it anywhere.

Today I was scrolling past comments on a random post when I noticed this. This guy accused r/SubstratumNetwork of threads "being buried/blocked/deleted", which u/707bwolf707 promptly denied. He was immediately called out by another user, calling him a liar, which he replied with sarcasm. I felt sorry, but I could not disagree. Posts were being taken down no matter how much he denies it, so I felt entitled to politely add into the conversation and show him that he was wrong and in fact one of my posts had been taken down in a matter of minutes upon it's submission. It was merely a repost and the title I gave was "these boys have learned nothing in over a year" or something along those lines. Y'all know that post, the one where someone dubbed u/707bwolf707 as the "Carlos Matos of Substratum". Only me u/_microoo_ u/dcatt47 and u/cr0ft were willing to fight guys like u/krispykream2012 and other notable paid fudsters. If I'm not mistaken, u/707bwolf707 was the one uncovering the true identity of u/decryptoBL, making the connection to paid FUD. And I fucking loved him for that...

Anyway, things escalated pretty quickly, as bwolf's arrogance grew into blindness. Perhaps he mistook me with some other fuder, or he thought I was the same person he was talking to before. Either way, he wasn't paying much attention to the big picture. His suggestion of jealousy in regards to u/briannloboo getting promoted is laughable, at least. Again, I've said time and time again that I do not have the will nor the skills to become a mod in any community. Said that to mcx on slack, to Christian Pope (see above), and recently to r/CryptoCurrency (#Iamatroll). Can someone please explain to me what is the motivation behind begging for promotion only to abandon the community a couple months later? Am I missing something?

Back to u/707bwolf707, he asked me a question in private and then touted me to stop sending him private messages. How amusing! So I gotta ask, is this what people down at Substratum Network have in mind, not caring if the people representing you are more or less qualified to moderate or admin one of your bigger vehicles of communication to the outside world? Do you really trust unpaid volunteers to do your PR job without any hiccups (or fuckups)? Someone who doesn't know how to admit he's wrong and gaslights the entire community with rules of conduct only to break them in the next minute? Specially when you have so many people agreeing that this is not the way to treat the community? Maybe it's time to rethink your approach. This is the only thing I consider urgent rn, so take your time to wrap up production version. WE ARE PATIENT!

I'll just drop all the screenshots in case someone decides to edit their posts.

This short lived post was taken down just 30 minutes upon it's submition. Curiously, and as you can see bellow, only 3 minutes have passed between bwolf's reply and my perma-ban.




This proves to me that this is indeed a shill cartel. Not really the vision I subscribed for a year back, and definitly not Substratum's vision, or at least I like to convince myself of that.
While we're at it, allow me to to refute right here the above statement (lie) by bwolf.

Solutions

Now that we cleared all the trash that was swept under the rug, it's time to address SubstratumNetwork's CEO and CMO.

We, the real community, would like to let you know that we're tired of this dictatorial treatment. It is in your best interest to get rid of such bad players who only give you a bad rep, and take full ownership of your own PR and Community Management in order to get your reputation back up and running full steam ahead without any more dramas. We need to be able to ask sincere questions without being bashed or silenced, wouldn't you agree? Fortunatly I am not alone in this one, I'd paste dozens of screenshots of private conversations I've been having for the last couple days regarding this issue, only if I had permission to do so. I fully respect people's choices not to get publicly involved in this. Christian Pope (CMO) has been made aware of all this, and I keep on waiting his reply.

Edit: Stellar's Community Vision just came out. What a lovely piece of text, specially in the Reddit Governance section. Enjoy it!

Disclaimer

This is not a FUD article, much less a paid one.
I'm only here for the technology and I sold my bag back in February which means I am not monetarily invested in $SUB.