Bruno Block, CEO and chief architect of Oyster, has claimed that yesterday his company was subject to “a coordinated FUD attack”. FUD, a common acronym in the crypto-space, stands for “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt/Disinformation” and refers to the spreading of (dis)information, often to lower prices within a market.
According to Block, the attack covered the company’s “Telegram groups, Reddit, Bitcointalk.org, and even our email” and represented the work of a “a single person” who had created multiple identities, possibly involving bots, to “lower the price of PRL and buy in at a discount”.
Oyster and its PRL token are an attempt to change the advertiser model of web content. Users give up a “small portion of their CPU and GPU power” for “users’ files to be stored on a decentralized and anonymous ledger”. Website owners “get paid indirectly by the storage users” while “website visitors can enjoy an ad-free browsing experience”.
Taking advantage of a delay in a planned airdrop, Block says that the person or people in question posted numerous messages to Telegram saying that the reported participation of Kucoin in the airdrop was a lie, designed to “pump the price” before the founders pulled an “exit scam”.
Block announced that as a consequence of the “FUD” the company would be changing the way it runs its community. Moderators will now delete any posts using terms like “exit-scams” or “dumping the market”, and the posters banned.
Though the Oyster community seem broadly supportive of these measures, some worried that “even legitimate criticism will be called FUD” and banned by the moderators and that an approach of “we’re going to start censoring things as we see fit” was a “slippery slope to super toxicity”.
For Block though, “participating in the community discussion is a privilege, not a right”, and the conversation must now be filtered to ensure that it remains “constructive”. People are still free to complain or gossip on third party platforms, but not on channels hosted by Oyster.
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