Great talk.

While I personally Am a bit afraid of using personal attacks as a means to achieve a cultural victory I do fully agree with the message that Vitalik, in many aspects of Ethereum, has a too big founder-given personality cult around him.

Gitcoin, Ameen's first target in the talk, is a great example. They haven't really managed to build a good product for several years and their public good funding was total garbage. Yet somehow, because they got featured all the time by Vitalik, they had a massive brand and lots of users. They are, most likely, really aligned with Vitalik's goals, which is probably why they were promoted so much. They definitely wasn't promoted for writing good software of shipping quality products.

IMO a reasonable and respectful etiquette in the decentralized ecosystem could be to treat Vitalik, as any other person in the space by asking what he's good at and then trusting his opinions when they're about that. Can he be trusted with opinions on cryptography, game theory, etc? Yes. Can he be trusted with opinions about Ethereum's wallet ecosystem, or if NFTs are useful? Or with culture? Probably not as much.

Tbh, I don't even think it's necessarily just about holding Vitalik accountable. It's also about lessening his influence, which IMO, can maybe also be a goal that wants us to achieve for him.

Just finished watching. Really impressed by Ameen's ability to speak his mind, even when he knows he's going to face a lot of backlash.

Aside from the contents of his talk, my main thought here is that if we people like Ameen sharing their unhinged takes on Kiwi, it might be easier for our product to stand out.

IMO a reasonable and respectful etiquette in the decentralized ecosystem could be to treat Vitalik, as any other person in the space by asking what he's good at and then trusting his opinions when they're about that.

Can't agree more with that. Also, there are things like UX or ecosystem where even if he was competent, he has to talk with the users to understand the problem well enough. Just like every other entrepreneur or exec.

Tbh, I don't even think it's necessarily just about holding Vitalik accountable. It's also about lessening his influence, which IMO, can maybe also be a goal that wants us to achieve for him.

+1. I imagine having so much responsibility and attention must be hard for him, because everyone is looking up to him. And it's in conflict with his goal to making Ethereum decentralized.

BTW that's why I'm bullish on Tomasz Stanczak being EF's Executive Director. He might not be jacked like Danny but he's very technical, and built a company in the space from 0 to 300+ people employed. So he has a more business, non-bullshit approach that could serve as a counter-weight to the current cultural trajectory. Plus he's Polish, so he knows that communism is terrible.

Powerful talk. Agree in general with Mac and Tim’s comments, but…

I think attacking builders - especially ones who have been in the arena for a long time like Owocki, Martin, and Trent - is in poor taste. That’s not how you win a cultural victory.

You can think what they’re building is useless; you can dislike the communities around their projects; you can disagree with them and Vitalik on design choices or priorities.

But getting on a ETH Global stage to call out credible builders for what Ameen perceives as communist-inspired ideas is not cool.

In my view of the situation that is similar but not completely the same as Ameen describes it, and I have made this clear in my prior comment, I think Ameen says that if Vitalik uses his curational power as the founder of Ethereum to promote Gitcoin, then he also needs to use his promotional power as the leader of Ethereum to call out bad things. Ameen is making the case that a leader also has to step into conflict and say unpopular things. And in my view he also says that Vitalik is not doing this enough. Just compare this to how conflict-friendly Elon is. He constantly tells people what the fuck they cannot do and so on. Many people hate him for that. But clearly as a leader Elon is very responsible and you can also see that this responsibility translates into, for example, safety in the implementation of SpaceX and Tesla.

But getting on a ETH Global stage to call out credible builders for what Ameen perceives as communist-inspired ideas is not cool.

Talking about communism was a weaker part of this talk.

I understand that my fellow American friends are cautious about it, but some of them even say that universal healthcare is communism 😂. And I'm from a country where communism literally sent people to jail and killed them, so I'm pretty aware of its lowlights.

Actually, sorry for being annoying, but anyways according to Marx Communist Manifesto, my reading of who is a communist is someone who is enabling a lower class to gain more power over an incumbent class. So according to that definition many people are communist or act communist. Ofc in historical politics who is a communist is another thing altogether. But I second Mac's point that who we understand as being communist is quite culturally specific to who accuses whom

I don't understand why this talk was so political, but it made me remember Brantly's firing and how it didn't make sense to me. I voted against the firing back then.