Last year I analyzed the Ethereum values survey that Jarrad Hope of Status put together. One of the takeaways was a strong sense that reddit is no longer a place for positive and constructive discussion. This anonymous responder nailed it, I think:

“The online community is beset by trolls who I feel manage to have an outsized impact on the community. We need tools that can represent stakeholders better than whoever posts most frequently on Reddit.”

As many of us have seen first-hand, it’s been a gradual shift; what used to be the nexus of meaningful discussion has been somewhat replaced by twitter and a handful of forums like ethereum magicians and ethresearch. This is a good thing! It’s easier have focused discussions around topics like scaling, as well as spontaneous debates. However, the vacuum created by that shift has left a lot of room for three types of posters to emerge on r/ethereum.

Newcomers who are less informed, have no idea about the context and history regarding something like Parity and their plans, and are easily swayed by vocal, noisy shrill opinions. (Edit for clarity: Here I’m not referring to anyone making a certain type of argument, but rather anyone who is being toxic. What is being toxic? Well, it’s the sort of behavior that if you were sitting with them in real life, you’d turn to your friend and say, “man, that person is an asshole.)

People who are simply in it for the money, have no sense of long-term perspective, and mindlessly oppose anything that might not support the price of ETH over the near-to-intermediate term.

Trolls who either a.) loathe Ethereum, hope it fails, and love to bring negativity to the proceedings, or b.) execute sock puppet attacks, taking a page right out of Russia’s playbook in the last Presidential elections.

Please note: I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with newcomers or people focused solely on their investment. Both of these groups are crucial to the ecosystem, and their perspective is important. My general point is that those without historical context might see someone exhibiting an emotion-driven personal attack and assume that they must be right, because they’re so worked up. Regarding people seeking to make money, there’s nothing wrong with that, and investors are an indispensable and important part of our community. But as I mentioned, a short-sighted focus on gainz could lead to less-than-optimal decisions for the platform.

For the concern trolls, there’s a very real value in always pushing the narrative that Ethereum is facing some existential crisis from which it’ll never recover. Anything that feeds that narrative (You can’t sync a full node! Sharding will never work!) is music to their ears. I have no direct evidence of this, but I think it’s very likely that people who want to see Ethereum fail are the very same ones who are amplifying the vitriol.

In many ways this mirrors what happened to r/bitcoin. This is a horrifying prospect. The real danger is that the next time there’s a truly controversial decision for us to collectively make, on par with the DAO fork or BTC’s block size debate, the venom and vitriol boils over and becomes the status quo for our community.

What can we do to stop it? Here are a few ideas. Note that while this article was written with Ethereum in mind, these points could be applied to a wide variety of blockchain communities.