"Electronic beggars" angered the public, and Starknet and Scroll encountered public opinion crises one after another

Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Azuma

Recently, Starknet has once again encountered controversial moments.

The cause of the incident is that Starknet's core development member Abdelhamid Bakhta (abdel.stark.eth) recently openly called community users who asked about the airdrop status "e-beggars" on social media; another developer od1n was also suspected of "using emoticons to insult Chinese users"; in addition, Starknet also added a sub-channel called "e-beggars" in the official Discord channel, accompanied by a bug icon;.

The "Electronic Beggars" subchannel in the Starknet official Discord.

od1n is suspected of insulting Chinese users

As Starknet has been rumored to be airdropping recently but no actual action has been taken, users who have been waiting for years are already close to the critical point of explosion emotionally. Not surprisingly, the actions of Abdelhamid and the official team directly ignited the anger of some users.

As the incident unfolded, a large number of users began to express “polite condolences” to Abdelhamid and Starknet; some users also mocked Starknet by creating various memes; the funniest thing is that some users also dug up od1n’s “face-slapping records” of frequently discussing the potential airdrops of various projects on X (which was Twitter at the time) in the early years, and believed that od1n turned his back on them after “rebirth as the project party”.

Community created meme images.

One of od1n's early records of frequently discussing potential airdrops

Seeing that public opinion was gradually getting out of control, Abdelhamid issued an urgent apology last night, admitting that his use of the term "electronic beggar" was inappropriate, and explained that he initially just thought it was fun and did not consider the consequences of his choice of words. In addition, Uri recently resigned as one of the CEOs of StarkWare due to family health issues, which further controlled his emotions and made his reaction too strong.

Afterwards, Starknet also deleted the "Electronic Beggars" sub-channel in the official Discord channel.

Although many users expressed their understanding after Abdelhamid's apology, many users still did not buy it and continued to "output" below Abdelhamid's apology statement.

It is worth mentioning that after this public opinion storm, the "electronic beggar" concept meme coins EBG and EBGR on Starknet have both experienced a surge, and are likely to become the representative memes of this ecosystem...

Odaily Planet Daily Note: Please be aware that meme coins are highly volatile and have high investment risks

Coincidentally, Starknet is not the only project that has recently caused public outrage due to the "electronic beggar" incident. Scroll has also been in the spotlight. Scroll senior researcher Toghrul Maharramov recently called the other party "electronic beggar" when "confronting" with a user, and even used malicious words such as fxxk in a post to mock the user for seeking airdrops.

Like Starknet, Toghrul’s comments quickly brought Scroll community wrath.

The deep-seated contradictions behind the series of incidents are actually the ideological differences between the project owners and users, including the freeloaders.

It is difficult to evaluate how to define "real users" and "freeloaders". Even if many users use a project for the purpose of airdrops, most users will often perform many targeted operations with clear purposes during the interaction process. These actual usage behaviors will be reflected in the network data. Conversely, few users are really willing to give up the airdrop income and simply "contribute for free".

For the project party, the team hopes to distribute tokens to more so-called real users to maintain the fundamentals of the project after the token issuance. This is understandable in itself, but the team can silently conduct strict address screening based on their understanding of witch behavior. It is really unnecessary to stare at the differences and make verbal output every day. In addition to accidentally hurting some "real users", it will not improve the overall interaction portrait of the project.

To put it another way, as the Web3 industry has developed to this day, "You want my data, I want your airdrop" has long become an industry consensus. Although this concept is not so zz correct, the two parties already have an unclear dependency relationship on the demand side. It is obviously not wise to emphasize the differences too much in such a tangled state.

In this case, Starknet and Scroll's repeated exposure of the user's airdrop intention can be characterized as a major public relations mistake. From the perspective of project development, technical development is important, but the operation method cannot be ignored. We are very happy to see the innovations brought by Starknet and Scroll in non-EVM environment Rollup and equivalent EVM Rollup, and we don't want them to be nailed to the opposite side of users because of such a low-level mistake.

Web3 still has a long way to go, and it is not yet time to treat internal differences as the main contradiction. We are still a "force that can be united."