Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025) @joepie91@pixie.town

@whreq Right. But that is a very small minority of people in practice, and that is Their Problem, to put it bluntly. It does not create an obligation on anyone else's part to accept that goal.

And in practice, most people just are not *that* growth-obsessed, and are more just operating on assumptions about what 'success' looks like, and are entirely capable of finding a middle ground. Including many of the people who are loud about it.

@TechConnectify That is definitely a major problem, though it's unfortunately not the *full* problem either. I always make a point of explaining to people that "capitalism" is an ideology rather than an economic system (and therefore different from "markets"), though in more words - and then very often run into people simply not wanting to believe that a) this distinction even exists, or that b) capitalism is ideological in nature, no matter how much evidence you can provide.

This doesn't happen with everyone, and explaining what I mean with 'capitalism' is definitely an improvement over not doing so, but it's unfortunately not a miracle solution either, even if I do agree that it's a *prerequisite*.

@whreq I do not believe that there are circumstances where there is no middle ground. I do agree that there will be a non-zero amount of people who will not compromise on anything under any circumstances, regardless of whether there are any concrete concerns. I do not think that that would have done anywhere near the damage that has occurred now (and I am also talking about damage to the *existing* community, not just "scaring away newcomers").

@whreq I was there when people were trying to have that conversation and got paved over.

@serapath @joelving @powersource The rich do not get rich through printing money. They get rich through exploitation.

@serapath @powersource Sorry, but this is just completely false. Early forms of money were often collectively-managed exchanges of value where the money was based on existing things and a mutual agreement about their value. There was no central issuer. These kinds of systems were even cited as an inspiration for Bitcoin!

@whreq And that is how we ended up with the overall hostility. It was entirely avoidable if said people actually took the time to talk this through with others.

@whreq It may not be. But that is not a reason to just storm ahead and not give a shit about the rest; it's a reason to tread cautiously and carefully think about how to approach this without causing excessive issues for others. And that simply didn't happen.

Basically, in any conflict, the healthy way to resolve it is to collectively find the solution that works the best for everybody. What happened here is that one group went "well I don't care what you want, *I* want this network to grow bigger, so fuck you" and just went full steam ahead on their own preferences.

@whreq (And I understand that this wasn't very clear to many of the newcomers - they mostly just ended up being collateral damage in the conflict, more or less)

@whreq My criticism is not so much towards the newcomers, to be clear, as it is to a specific contingent of people who just stormed ahead and started trying to Grow The Network without talking to anyone else, and basically trying to speak on behalf of the entire network with no acknowledgment whatsoever of the lack of consensus on this.