From @evan_van_ness

I doubt anyone cares about r/ethereum like I do.But increasingly I think that the sub is at a crossroads and it's time to make a decision as a community about the future of it.Should r/ethereum stay a place for free speech that focuses on the tech and avoids moonboi talk?Or should r/ethereum become more like r/ethfinance, a very moderated community where all price talk is welcome?----

First, some history:

I used to love r/Ethereum. I learned a lot there. Most early Ethereum discussion outside of the mining talk on the forum was on Reddit (or Skype)I even gave an entire talk about r/Ethereum and resuscitating it at @EthCC in 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6vdsw646gY

As I noted in the talk (which btw, I listened to last night and learned some things I had forgotten!), r/Ethereum quality really declined in the 2017 bull market. I became a mod somewhere around January 2018. For 2018 and 2019, I was literally the only active moderator, performing more than 99% of mod actions until I added @twigwam as a moderator (she did a fantastic job!). [Side note: the only active moderators are @BSmokes_, @edmundedgar, @abcoathup and maybe me, but for some reason we maintain a bloated mod roster]. But despite that, r/ethereum quality has been down only.Arguably, 3 things defined r/Ethereum:

1) no price discussion or market talk.

That was all moved to a separate sub, a conscious decision by the community (but iirc led by @avsa?). First ethtrader, then there was an ethtrader fork where most of the mods left and formed ethfinance. To greatly simplify, one of the main sticking points was that the ethfinance mods wanted more moderation, especially of anyone they felt was not sufficiently pro-ETH.

2) being kind

This was an important part of early community. If you weren't nice, you were asked to do so and chided a bit. Sure, there were some bans but they were mostly temporary unless there were repeated offenses.

3) no censorship.

This was mostly reasonably applied although during the DAO fork there was some unfortunate censorship of different opinions (which perhaps partly led to Ethereum Classic?)It's worth noting that the early Ethereum community was particularly against censorship on reddit due to the censorship occurring on r/bitcoin. As I recall it, Theymos unilaterally decided to block all mentions of anything other than bitcoin and immediately ban anyone who mentioned anything else, even if suggesting that there was something Bitcoin could learn from in another protocol/chain/community. This is perhaps one reason why Bitcoiners fundamentally still have such a warped and distorted view of Ethereum, to the point where they constantly get basic facts wrong about how the protocol works.As I recall, the r/bitcoin censorship was also an important part of vital people like @phildaian switching to Ethereum. However, I strongly doubt that today Ethereum loses any important technical contributor because of r/ethereum policies, no matter how wacky they could even possibly be.

Of these 3 things, what remains?

It's been a long time since people were kind on r/Ethereum, but truthfully there's so little use of the comments that it's not actually that bad.The rule against market/price talk has been slowly chipped away but also mostly remained.The sub is slightly more moderated now, though generally speaking we attempt to be as free speech as possible. This is particularly true for people saying things we don't like. For example, there's a troll AmericanScream who dedicates an insane amount of his life to ridiculing crypto, but especially Ethereum. Despite many calls for bans especially from the greater r/ethfinance community, we have repeatedly chosen not to ban him.

Many words about nothing, Evan, what's the point?

I've devoted a lot of time to r/Ethereum over the years and to the goals of the early Ethereum community. But let's be honest: Reddit sucks at giving mods good tools against brigading, against vote manipulating, etc. With current policies, r/ethereum quality will never improve.r/Ethereum is not a primary gathering place of the Ethereum community anymore. Free speech mattered when it did, but things on the periphery deciding to choose to be moderated and decidedly not a place where you can say anything you want....is fine?[A side note: Twitter is the main place for Ethereum discussion, but it has become TikTok and that sucks. Furthermore, because of @Elonmusk, Twitter is now right-coded to very online American left-wingers, and they want their own place that's not Twitter to discuss Ethereum.]

What should r/ethereum do?

I am soliciting opinions.I know the ethfinance mods would love to take over a prime piece of real estate, and while historically I thought it was important for r/ethereum to be welcoming of dissenting opinions, I am no longer sure it matters. In fact, maybe it's even preferable to have a moderated r/ethereum in 2024 where price discussion is welcomed?