There’s a lot of discussion on reddit and bitcointalk.org concerning Bitcoin. However, there are other groups with vast amounts of people throughout various social media platforms. Other areas of conversation and sharing arenas such as Facebook, Google Plus, Linkedin, and Voat that offer new playgrounds for digital currency enthusiasts. With all the censorship happening at /r/bitcoin, many are finding different areas to chat about their favorite cryptocurrency — whether it is an altcoin or bitcoin.
Bitcoinist spoke with three moderators from an array of groups located on social media sites. Some of these groups have a very large following and others add a more open conversation towards Altcoins. Avatar X, Geir Solem and James Clayton have been running an assortment of clubs as well as moderating on multiple platforms with thousands of followers. The group administrators let our readers now what it’s like to run these organizations and what they’ve learned from it all.
Avatar X, The Bitcoin FB group, Bitcoin G+, and Voat /v/bitcoin
What got you into Bitcoin and when?
I grew with the privilege of growing with an impulse to be Bilingual from early on. I had Cable TV since 1985 and first got online on late 1993. That among many things allowed me to have access to all kind of information most people didn’t and most didn’t care about. I also happened to be pretty into Sci-Fi and Futurism since always. And long story short I have seen many attempts at creating electronic money. Even if the subject itself didn’t occupy center stage in my mind, it was just part of the idea of “What The Future Will Look Like”. An idea I was very interested in.
Before Bitcoin, I had seen every attempt at electronic money fail. So when I first read about it in late 2009. I was pretty jaded about that and didn’t read the White Paper right away. Which made me put it in the back on my mind. Then in mid-2010 I think, it crossed my attention again and then I finally read the White Paper. And it honestly shocked me in the sense that I just didn’t know what to make of it. But it sent me into the rabbit hole of actually fully understanding not just what money is but also how the current monetary system works. As anyone that has gone into that journey can attest. That just changes you. So, from 2011, I was into Bitcoin. It still annoys the hell out of me not having been into it since I first knew about it.
For another version of me answering how I got into Bitcoin: I did wrote about it back in early 2013 and posted it in late 2013 here: My Stance On Bitcoin.
Can you tell our readers about the group or groups you moderate (How you started them and why)?
Ok, Here is the quick rundown of that:
I fully run and manage The Google+ Bitcoin Community, which was started back in December 1st of 2012 by Cameron Ruggles and myself. I started fully running it alone by the end of the first year. It was started because as soon as Google+ allowed communities to be created. It was a great idea to have one for Bitcoin. Cameron beat me to do it by a matter of hours. But instead of me going my way with my own. I decided to join him in it.
I manage and moderate The Facebook Bitcoin Group, but I am not the top admin for it. That is Cameron Ruggles. I was brought over a year and a half ago to it. One year ago I decided to clean it up top to bottom and just mostly manage it.
I am right now a Moderator at The Bitcoin Subverse at Voat.co, which is a Reddit Alternative. I was brought in less than three months ago to it by BashCo. Who is a moderator at /r/Bitcoin and at the time was the admin of /v/Bitcoin. BashCo is no longer at The Bitcoin Subverse, and now Fred-Stiller-OnAWire is the Admin.
How many members do you have in your group?
The Google+ Bitcoin Community has 17,100+ members.
The Facebook Bitcoin Group has 16,500+ members.
The Bitcoin Subverse has 4,800+ members.
Can you tell our readers how you feel about the current state of Bitcoin in comparison to when you first learned about it?
I feel it is chugging along fine. It is growing at a slow but steady pace. Which is seen as too slow by many people. Only a fair point if you completely ignore the explosive growth it had in 2012-2013.
There is a world of difference from when I first read on it since I did so pretty early. The infrastructure is starting to get to the there. Even if in no way close to where it can potentially be or even where I think it will manage to be. Bitcoin will continue to evolve as needed.
As added context. Right now it would be possible for me to live mostly on Bitcoin even here in Mexico City. Thanks to the fact there are a lot of Bridges and Workarounds from Bitcoin to Fiat Money now.
What I think bothers many of the early adopters and those that got too enthralled with the hype year that was 2013 because of the price. Is that even if you are very engaged with Bitcoin. You no longer can see the entirety of it, just a part of it. In my case, I don’t mind. That is actually a good thing; it means the growth is very real.
Is it difficult moderating a group with a significant sized membership and what kinds of things do you have to moderate?
Not really so far. At least not in the case of The Google+ Bitcoin Community. G+ Content Algorithms are quite impressive, and they are quite smart. To the point, it adjusts to your moderation style. This is the reason I can still fully manage it myself without a struggle.
The Facebook Bitcoin Group is the opposite. Facebook has ZERO automatic filtering. And then there is the problem that the Facebook API is very well known and integrated with tons of Spamming Software Kits. That is why I think Cameron Ruggles did the right thing in setting it up so that each post and each membership is manually approved from the start. Which is something we do there. Otherwise, it would be quite challenging unless your only job was that. But in the way it is set up, it is very manageable. But even then it requires more work.
The Bitcoin Subverse is easy to manage because it is small. And right now, I am not the one doing the 90% of the job. That is Fred-Stiller-OnAWire, and he deserves the credit for that. It, however, would probably be twice as big if everyone that wanted to join Voat, could do so. I have brought hundreds of new members to it since I was brought in. But many people have told me they just cannot join for whatever reason.
Now, on what my way of moderating is. I probably wrote the most detailed Community Guidelines for a Bitcoin Discussion Site on TGPBC. Something I did so there was no guessing on what would be removed and the why something would get removed. You really need transparency at length on that. Otherwise, it is easy for trolls or new users to get into or push an alternative narrative where everything seems to get censored for no reason. It also helps a lot if the membership actually knows you appreciate them and believe you care about your community, though.
Have you gained any insight and experience within your group setting and do you think members learn as well?
Yes and yes. I have gained the insight of sticking to a vision of how to run a community from the start pays off. That you need to be present also as a participant and be able to balance that with moderating the content.
I do think that the members of TGPBC have learned from it. And the only reason I dare to say that is because many of them have given me the support I needed to continue happily moderating and participating in it. Which is by participating themselves and being vocal about being happy with my work in it.
James Clayton, Crypto Currency Collectors Club
What got you into Bitcoin and when?
Since around 2007 I have been running a small business with my brother, Mid Century Gallery, and with it we shipped lots of items around the world as we offered international sales. The standard payment system for this is Paypal or Western Union that most online merchants use, so, of course, we used it as well. This works fine usually, but there are many cases of fraud and chargebacks with Paypal, and Western Union is slow and with a lot of overhead and complexity.
Some countries also have so much fraud it just isn’t worth having an international transaction. Oddly, Australia is one country where there are a lot of chargebacks. One day we just got another chargeback from Australia from someone that made a false claim, and I decided to find out if there was anyone working on some sort of online cash technology, which might replace Paypal one day for some transactions. That is what led me to find Bitcoin, and I believe it was early 2013 right before it started getting popular.
Can you tell our readers about the group or groups you moderate (How you started them and why)?
After discovering Bitcoin I realized instantly it was brilliant, but I was curious about the odd situation with Bitcoin where it was a technology valued by age or first mover advantage, and originality, when in tech almost all value is usually by whatever is latest and greatest, the most updated and evolved. So I was trying to figure out if Bitcoin could hold the early status it had gained or simply be replaced by something that did the same thing as Bitcoin, but better, and I discovered Litecoin.
I mentioned Litecoin in some Bitcoin group, and I was immediately silenced. I found they were using censorship to try and shield people from knowledge and discussion of competition to Bitcoin, which of course would never work in the long run, and ideologically I disapproved of. After repeated censorship in various Bitcoin groups, I just made my own group on Google Plus, the Cryptocurrency Collector Club. It turned out to be quite popular for a Google Plus crypto group, but Facebook is where the people are, so eventually I opened another group on Facebook. That one really took off in popularity! The timing was just right, and it offered a chance for people to talk about all cryptos and not just Bitcoin.
How many members do you have in your group?
There are 4947 members in the Facebook Crypto Currency Collectors Club and 585 members on Google Plus. I think that is a fair representation of how powerful first mover advantage is for Facebook over Google in this particular case. The same content was put out to both groups for a long time, and originally the Facebook group was the secondary group. The Facebook group is also private and not public, and that is really just because of the design of Facebook rather than being intentional. I had planned on making the group public after enough content was moved over and I had additional moderators, but Facebook doesn’t allow changes to privacy settings after enough people are in, so it just remained a private group, but still grew quite well.
Can you tell our readers how you feel about the current state of Bitcoin in comparison to when you first learned about it?
Certainly, Bitcoin is far more useful and serious now than when many big institutions were simply laughing at Bitcoin and denying it, they are not doing that any more. Everyone is taking Bitcoin very seriously now that is paying attention. So despite price fluctuations that everyone spends way too much time focusing on, Bitcoin is stronger than ever! However, much of the initial hype and crazy dreams of Bitcoin believers have also been tempered by reality, and this is going to take a long time, maybe decades. Bitcoin isn’t going to just instantly take over the world. It will be gradual, and it might not beBitcoin itself at the end that does it, but it could be.
Is it difficult moderating a group with a significant sized membership and what kinds of things do you have to moderate?
Yes, the real difficulty is the blowback more than simply deleting posts or removing the worst offenders. People take issue with being censored, obviously, and I created the group originally because of the problems I have with censorship. I have made some mistakes moderating too heavily at times, as I do oppose moderation in all but the worst cases. I try to keep in mind why I created the group originally, and I only remove people as a last resort these days. Of course, there are some really nasty people on the internet, and everything from scams to threats, to just lots of spam or personal attacks, are something I have moderated at times. It has been a learning experience along the way. I never moderate people for just talking about some alt, however. They can post about wonderful alternatives to Bitcoin, or horrible, and all are welcome to share if they can be respectful.
Have you gained any insight and experience within your group setting and do you think members learn as well?
I have learned trading advice is too complicated, so I don’t offer that these days. What can be wonderful to trade one day or week might be terrible the next, and this can lead to lots of confusion to people new to trading. Most traders lose money, we all do at times, so I have learned that while such advice can be useful to some, others it will just cause confusion. Although some basic trading advice I think can be helpful to all. Some of the standard stuff always applies: Always do your own research, never risk what you can’t afford to lose, and make sure to understand that Bitcoin and Alts are an extremely high risk and not just some get rich quick gimmick, they are about the future and a potential revolution of distributed technology. I also think that is far more interesting to talk about Bitcoin and Alts as a revolutionary technology, rather than the price speculation that most people spend way too much time focusing on. As many others have said about Bitcoin, day to day price is one of the least interesting things about it.
Geir Solem, Cryptor Trust (Bitcoin Blockchain a Cryptor TrustThink Tank)
What got you into Bitcoin and when?
I was working as an economic forecaster and investment banker increasingly concerned about the massive rise in regulation, costs and interference related to banking and money, especially in the Western World.
Around the last quarter of 2013 I discovered Bitcoin and the Blockchain and came to the conclusion that Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies were a game-changing innovation, and that the Blockchain opened new business opportunities that I would like to pursue. My friend Maximiliano Garcia (Max) joined me in setting up an International Investment House based on Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency. We decided to fully embrace the new banking and monetary system based on Bitcoin as the core of our operations.
We also wanted corporate entities to be located offshore in free places with territorial tax / law systems like the Marshall Islands, Panama, Liberia, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. Many of these places were widely used by shipowners and others over the last century (and still is) to place their assets like vessels, oil rigs, yachts, airplanes and organize them in legal entities like partnerships and corporations.
Our first challenge was to see if any jurisdiction would accept us to denominate our legal documents, issue shares and handle bitcoin as the unit of value. We achieved that and were actually the first company to make it, worldwide. We were also fortunate in having the chance to bring onboard highly skilfull advisors. Forming regional advisory boards made a lot of sense.
So all in all, that was a great starting point!
Can you tell our readers about the group or groups you moderate?
We observed at the time; this was in early 2014 that the use of Bitcoin still had a long way to go before they would reach mass adoption. We figured out it was needed to collaborate on building a larger sense of community and spread the word to the public. With that in mind, the idea of developing a Think Tank around it came to us naturally. Everything was (still is!) so new: a new technology, new language, new paradigm, a total disruption of one of the oldest industries (banking). We thought that social media would work well for this purpose. We needed to build a professional network that collaborated into demonstrating that bitcoin was a serious thing and not a hype/fashion in the geeks world or a tool of the deep dark web only. If we managed to achieve that, then we would be relevant to the community and position our organization in the way we intend. So the same year we started our first Bitcoin Blockchain & FinTech group on Linkedin, part of the Cryptor Trust Think Tank. This group is now the top ranked group on Bitcoin, Blockchain and FinTech on the Linkedin platform, and certainly the most active!. As we gained more insights about the needs of the community and where different types of audiences wanted to connect, we started the Bitcoin Blockchain & Fintech group on Facebook, G+, and VK.
How many members do you have in your group?
We have four groups on the following platforms and members, Linkedin with about 5.000 members, and respectively Facebook with about 6.000, Google+ with about 700 and finally VK the Russian / Eastern European group founded by Pavel Durov (Telegrams founder) with around 100 members.
Can you tell our readers how you feel about the current state of Bitcoin in comparison to when you first learned about it?
Bitcoin and Blockchain have continued to evolve over the last few years and so have the related ecosystem. This lead me to be very optimistic about the future, both for the cryptocurrency monetary system and the possibilities created by the blockchain.
We feel the progress is solid and consistent now as opposed to when we first started to learn about it. At that time, it was all about trading and/or expecting the next 1k valuation. Today we see many more people involved, from the most diverse areas of knowledge, both the private and public sectors (entrepreneurs, investors, regulators, legal experts, tax experts, insurance, top trading players, government agencies, banks, R&D agencies and institutions, non-profits, you name it…) and the dialogue is more broad. Also bitcoin keeps expanding widely internationally, something that let us understand much more about the challenges it faces and the opportunities where we can add value.
Bitcoin has emerged from an elite of visionary technologists that managed to take it far enough to make the world think, reflect and understand there was something big on this that cannot be hidden/blocked by nonsense excuses like the ones we used to hear and hear frequently still today: “It’s a new bubble like the .com bubble” / “it’s a tool for drug and arm dealers” / “it’s a money laundering scheme”. At the end of the day, you have to realize it’s not possible to block out the sun with one finger.
Bitcoin is today a solid, thriving industry that is building its infrastructure block by block, involves the brightest and most energetic people around it, in a global scale, and is capable of breaking into areas of enormous relevance like unbanked populations, remittances, proof of ownership and so on. We certainly celebrate the current state of it and defend that the world with Bitcoin is a better world.
Is it difficult moderating a group with a significant sized membership and what kinds of things do you have to moderate?
We have some work with the Facebook group as that audience is more free in their behavior and what they post. We moderate members if it is not about Bitcoin, Blockchain & FinTech. We made the rules clear and available, and also following a bit of common sense of what could help maintaining a healthy networking space.
Have you gained any insight and experience within your group setting and do you think members learn as well?
Yes of course. The groups are one of the main places people learn more about Bitcoin and Blockchain trends after they have been introduced to it. Our groups turned to be like a content hub, a curated source of news, tools, advice and idea exchange discussion board. The “introduce yourself” section of our Linkedin group has given us a lot of understanding of the different type of professionals getting involved with Bitcoin. Lately, it’s great to see how many people from traditional industries are coming to learn more, and even those who left that world to come into start their own bitcoin venture. We will release new activities to engage with our community members progressively, promoting the sense of networking and learning. The first goal was to make the community robust enough, so there is value to be there. We strongly appreciate the time our members put to collaborate/participate there.
Thank you guys for speaking with us and letting our readers on the inside. It’s quite a task running multiple discussion groups held on the web, especially when the following is in the thousands. We applaud your efforts for holding common meeting areas online to discuss our favorite cryptocurrencies.
Do you frequent any of these cryptocurrency groups? Let us know in the comments below!
Written by: Jamie Redman
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