TeamPH First Meetup & First Trolling
"Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood" ~Stephen Covey
The date is March 31, 2023 and TeamPH is having its first official discord meetup in voice. Lasting about 2 hours and having no expectations I wanted to put here some of the moments that stick out to me the most.
A Top Hive Influencer
To our surprise the 23rd highest ranking (by HP) Hive community member @azircon showed up to our first meetup. We welcomed him and carried on with our meeting. After getting through with our scheduled topics we began to ask questions that we feel would help our community level up. Please note that these are from my notes and not exact quotes.
Q: As a Philippines focused community what do you think will be our disadvantages and advantages.
A: Your advantage will be a weak local fiat and cheap wages mixed with cheap cost of living. Your two greatest risks will be retention and entitlement.
I personally am a fan of quotes and they remind me a gif or a meme but in text form. They say "A picture is worth a thousand words" and in my opinion a quote is worth a million. It can be overwhelming to break into the Hive ecosystem and there are many moving parts. azircon left us with a lot of wisdom and here is the million words he left us with to end our meeting.
Unwelcome Trolling
A first meetup would not be complete without a bit of drama and we had or first. Before I get into this lets define the difference between a joke and trolling.
- Joke: Something said to cause amusement or laughter and usually has a punchline.
- Trolling: a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online, with the intent of provoking others into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception, thus acting as a bully or a provocateur.
Now that we have that out of the way lets roll through the turn of events as I experienced them.
First let me note that definethedollar still had a green leaf next to his name and had just joined the discord the day of our event. My grandpa always told me "one thing about a first impression is you never get a second chance".
Our first guest during or event and the person responsible for opening the first doors for us into the Hive ecosystem was @jim-crypto introduced to us by @daddyspardan . Jim started to tell us about his project and...
Joke or Trolling? This wasn't funny nobody was laughing and clearly checks all the boxes of trolling.
- Insincere ✅
- Digressive or depart from the subject ✅
- Extraneous or irrelevant or unrelated to the subject ✅
- Provoking or causing annoyance; irritating ✅
- Manipulating others' perception ✅
Jim was our guest in our community and this was noted in a PM in real time.
This post may not seem like a big deal to a westerner. Let me remind you that definethedollar was well aware that this was a Filipino community. In the Philippines this type of behavior is extremely frowned upon and seen as arrogant and inappropriate. Filipinos are the masters at showing a modest or low estimate of one's own importance.
This was in reference to value extractors. It was said in voice that a person who isn't interested in our ethos would be kicked from the discord. A person who buys a Bored Ape or TeamPH tokens are not entitled to being part of the community. A place in or community is earned not bought. definethedollar is welcome to have his own opinion and we welcome the interaction. Just seemed like a lot of passion for his first 24 hours in the community discord.
Next up was our surprise guest azircon he was someone we were all waiting to hear from. As a new community on Hive we have many questions. We don't have the depth of knowledge and we were looking forward to the opinions of a Hive community member who has 1M HP.
The trolling started almost immediately with each text comment diverting the speaker into giving attention to definethedollar.
Notice the laughing emoji again and again at the end of all his replies. I will remind everyone again trolling is "manipulating others' perception, thus acting as provocateur. Also having no respect for the guest.
The next day there was a few back and forth statements made and ultimately define the dollar left the server. My motivation for writing this post is so that everyone involved can learn and grow from this experience. I also would like to use this as reference for future similar events.
There are many characteristics in the Filipino culture and I would like to take a second to highlight one of the more common ones. Non-confrontational or avoiding difficult conversations or conflict. The side affect of this is that often a Filipino community, family or organization will rally behind a "dog of war" or "guardian of the gate". TeamPH will always welcome everyone but belittling and western arrogance will result in immediate reciprocation or basically a taste of your own medicine.
Going into a foreign digital community is similar to landing in a foreign country, be humble and selfless, seek to understand first. The lesson to be learned for a westerner mentality is don't pass judgment, just accept that not every culture has the same opinion as you. Selflessness is not the act of thinking less of yourself, its the act of thinking about yourself less.
I appreciate the kindness, levelup.
I am neither an OG at hive nor at Splinterlands, but I have been at both places for a while. I have seen people come and go. I can quite easily tell who we need and who we don’t.
I said this before, the leadership and the community focus you and Mango have shown is a beacon of hope for me personally. Just keep doing what you are doing.
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In every road to success, a challenge will always come that we need to conquer.
Things like this will make TeamPH a better community.
It's as if you understand me more these days Levelup. I am glad you choose always to defend your Community, On a side note, I feel this is one of your best articles yet. Well done bro!
This won't be the last but it's important that we're able to set the precedent that we won't be bullied or belittled.
I understand in your culture how you can see @definethedollar as a troll.
I will say that no matter what Discord you go into, he speaks the same way. So to him, he wasn't trolling. He was himself, from what I see above.
I will also mention I disagree with how he talks but calling him a troll I do not feel is fair.
I also agree he came into YOUR house and made it hard, from what I see above, for you to run a meeting and get questions answered in a timely manner. Irritating, for sure. But again not a troll, just him being him. No harm was intended from his end.
I can not believe I am standing up for him just to be precise. I do not care for his type of humor and he knows this too. but......
This is more of a case of cultural differences than trolling.
Maybe make a list of rules someone must check off when joining your server, stating that it is a Philippines Server and a short description for foreigners of what is expected in your Discord server? It might be helpful to future people joining your server the bigger you get.
Thank you for listening.
Snook
I think Snook gives some good ideas. You guys can see a brief discussion of the troubles with culture differences in the Pimp server (#pimps room). He wasn't being a troll, he was just using dry sarcastic humor. That kind of humor is mostly understood and accepted in American circles, but I can see how it might be perceived differently by people not familiar with it. I have had my own problems with culture differences having lived in Japan for 20 years (and having taught people from all over asia), so I'm pretty familiar with the topic. A disclaimer on your server for people not very familiar with Ph culture might be a useful idea.
Something people might not know is that although @leveluplifeph is one of the pillars of TEAMPH and is an honorary Filipino, he actually is American and privy and familiar with that type of dry sarcastic humor. The fact he spoke up about it and not even one of the local Filipinos was evident to how much insight he had on the situation. Although I do agree that disclaimers or rules can help... yet trolls exist even in such discord servers with these types of rules.
Ah yes, I thought he was, but I wasn't sure.
Yes, you are right of course. Discord rules are like those software agreements that everyone clicks "accept" without actually reading. At the same time, someone might note them and be a little more careful when they enter the server than they would otherwise. It's just an idea, at any rate, to help avoid future misunderstanding.