Hey all!
I’ve been monitoring this discussion for a while and purposely held off on responding to give the community time to weigh in and for Yulston to express himself. Some of you won’t like this response, but you can get an “ugly truth” from me or a “beautiful lie” somewhere else. While I considered several different ways to express it, I ultimately chose transparency because I’m guilt-free, clean, and proud of everything I’ve done and continue to do for the network.
This will be a lengthy response, it could be even longer. I’m also available for a lengthy community call with everyone to go over everything that happened or try to solve this situation in the best way possible. Take your time to examine what I have to say, and as you read it, keep these two things in mind:
- Yulston began building the bot before the builders even existed.
- What would deceiving him gain me, or any of us?
Please understand that I made Yulston absolutely no promises. Since I’m not in control, I was unable to make him any promises. I’m only one of the signers; I have the right to my own, fallible opinions, just like everyone else. Since they lack context and may be misinterpreted, I usually avoid publishing these kinds of things, but when Yulston contacted me to request funding, this is what I replied to him:
Over the next few days, we interacted about the best way for him to make a proposal, that is part of my responsibility as a community member and I would do it for any of you, there was various possibilities but I’ll say it again: I made ZERO promises! I’ve never done this, but I hereby offer myself up for the release of all of my direct messages with and only with direct Yulston’s consent.
I would prefer not to but if the community feels it is necessary I have nothing to conceal, none of my reputation or trust is even at risk here. Any of you can ping me at any moment, and I will respond and try to explain everything as best I can. I’m also glad to discuss this with any of you in DMs, or in an L3 call if required, just let me know.
As of right now, I consider the situation to be closed, and I won’t speak out about it again until Yulston decides to return and collaborate with the community. I’m not mad at him and I don’t want to hurt anyone since I understand that we’re all human and will make mistakes. I’ll give him another chance, but he must genuinely want it. I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but it appears I have no choice but to deal with this drama in this way.
The bot was initially created by Yulston as an L3 for the L3, as builders weren’t even thing yet. He most likely anticipated receiving payment from L3, but he did not create the consensus bot with the sole intention of submitting an application for a grant on the Builders. After he began working on the bot, I invited the user to join the Builders group. This was a mistake, I thought he was interested in being a builder. I’m sorry! The correct method would be to ask the opinions of other Builders and undertake personality-based assessments to determine whether his person fits a working group. Because I respect Yulston’s standing in the community and because I was in charge of seeding the Builders, I made the call. It wasn’t because I didn’t care; rather, in certain cases, the process of finding people to seed a group requires beginning to communicate privately until those people show signs of wanting to be a part of something, so I handled it and did it for all the Builders.
What I infer from this situation most strongly is that Yulston misinterpreted Builders from the moment it was founded, and that from the moment he joined Builders, he changed his expectations and future intentions related to his intentions and responsibilities in the community. Builders are not employed and do not receive a “salary”; rather, our goal is to promote growth and build on the network. The Builders Ecollective is a working group whose sole goal is to help the community by providing and supporting infrastructure.
Personally, I find what Yulston is doing to the Builders group and the rest of the community to be heartbreaking. I can only see this whole situation as a misunderstanding by greediness and blindness, mixed with misaligned and emotional damage. I never support “hourly rates” or “tracking hours”. Everyone that knows me, knows I have spent hours discussing with them not using hourly rates. And I often use this video as a way to better explain why:
Yulston had been trying to call me for about three weeks, but I was extremely busy and was unable to. He wanted to talk to me about the funding of the consensus bot. I informed him that if he wanted my vote, he should establish a lesser goal of around $5k as it was ALL that we had in our Safe and I felt that $10k was too high for a number of reasons I can detail with you later. A retroactive award could be considered by everyone if the bot was used and proved to be valuable over the course of the following 6 months.
During our two-hour call, he lost control, insulted the other builders, denigrated other network tools, and bullied me to a considerable amount by yelling, shouting, and using foul language. It was one of the oddest online calls I’ve ever had online and for a series of days it was very hard for me to understand it. He also said that he didn’t understand why I wasn’t supporting his bot because it was not funded by my money and we could all benefit from it. If he get my vote he would win, I would win, and the community would win—I do know what you tried Yulston. Let this be clear to ALL of you, under no circumstances, no matter how much how I like you or who you are, no one will run me down and compromise my ideals. No one!
While trying to defend his case he also made false statements, such as The Eco Accountant is a bot constructed of garbage templates that doesn’t even require a database, which is absurd. I do have some knowledge of programming. I did offer to deploy and submit an EGP for him so he could ask for the $10k directly to the Community Treasury, even though I wouldn’t give him a vote on the Builders Ecollective snapshot because it’s my duty to defend this community and its value. I was interested in being impartial and supporting him, in the middle of that topic I went even further and asked what he would do if the proposal didn’t pass, and to my utter shock, his response was, quoting, “I leave the community.”
I only stayed on our call for that long being bullied and shamefully abused because I was truly concerned with his emotional state. In fact, I begged him to behave himself as he was terrorizing all his image before me and it wasn’t helping anyone. I was nothing but welcoming, friendly, and super understanding towards Yulston despite all the crazy behavior and nonsense. At the end of the conversation, as soon as I suggested using retroactive rewards once the bot had demonstrated its worth, he started calling me a genius and declaring that he completely agreed with me. His personality changed from 8 to 80, but I do believe he misread what I had said. I didn’t ask him to ignore Layer 3, the Eco team, the builders, or me until he had additional financing.
I find it heartbroken what Yulston did and is doing to this community. He did ghost us all who were trying to work with him to solve the situation, ignore my DMs, ignore other people’s DMs, ignored L3 pings, missed every single responsibility as part of Builders, and don’t sync with most of the things. After two months away he appeared out of nowhere and not even a hello or a justification for missing all his responsibilities, all he asked was if there was any chance of getting more funding for it after ghosting everyone for more than 2 months without working actively on it or supporting the community.
Is this the kind of behavior we should encourage in our community? I only see love coming from all of you in his direction and he has been ghosting you all for two months in addition to acting irresponsibly toward the eco-system. Additionally, updating two integers on lines 67 and 147 of this file resolves both of the issues that the community is yelling about in a matter of seconds: eco-discord-consensus-bot/const.py at prod · nisnevich/eco-discord-consensus-bot · GitHub
Regardless of how the Builders grant application has gone, I do think holding the bot hostage, refusing to answer to Layer 3, and helping you all is irresponsible and Yulston has proven to not be the right person to be in charge of such a critical piece of infrastructure for our community. In order to have a responsible Eco engineer or another responsible person in charge of hosting the bot for you, I will make a motion to remove his bot from the community. Naturally, he is still encouraged to work on it and maintain it by pushing to GitHub, it’s an amazing piece of infrastructure that I truly believe should be worked upon over time. However, it’s important to make a distinction between hosting the bot and coding the project, he coded the project and no one will ever take that from him, we’re and will always be grateful for his contribution and I hope it makes great use to the community.
A governance proposal to remove Yulston from the Builders will also be made by me. This is unrelated to the grant of the consensus bot and is being made due to Yulston’s near-constant failure to carry out his duties as a member of the group, including but not limited to, participating in discussions, weekly calls, helping community members, signing on Safe, and voting on Snapshot. This proposal will reduce our Quorum from 5/5 to 4/4 and hopefully new Builders and people interested in the well-being of the community will join to work in a mature and responsible way.
Thanks for your understanding and I hope this long reply makes things clear. If any of you want to discuss any of these comments you can send me a DM.
PS - Although I won’t vote for the consensus bot to get more funds from the Builders as per our guidelines and responsibilities, I’d be willing to help if Yulston wishes to submit an EGP to get access to the Community Treasury and get extra funding directly with a community vote. As I’ve already shown, both platforms are distinct, represent, and are governed by different entities. I will assist with the smart contract’s on-chain submission and deployment as per my community’s obligation so that you can all vote in a decentralized way to provide the consensus bot extra funding. Also, Layer 3 is the community’s governance body and since it is not necessary to obtain permission to allocate points, assuming Layer 3 has the knowledge and understanding of how to evaluate grants to make people responsible for their actions and roadmap, another option is for Layer 3 to fund the consensus bot directly with points, which will enable him to make an ECO claim at the conclusion of the season.