Play Stupid Games…..

Statement from 2Shot @cryptocloan in response to my numerous Telegram DMs

First, I would like to wish all a Happy New Year.

THUGS.FI recently ran a contest called #THUGSMAS with a substantial prize pool. The intent was to award community members for their talents. In the process we realized that many community members would miss out on this opportunity because, well fuck, I CAN’T DRAW. These brainiacs (me) came up with a plan — we were going to have the community help us decide the winners. BRILLIANT — How about we trust the cryptoverse full of greedy scammer bots to something that could financially benefit them or their friends…. BRILLIANT!

Our official contest entry form had accumulated almost 12,000 entries, but after about 8 minutes we were able to weed out the greedy scammer cryptoverse bots and identify 167 real entries. That is an awful lot of entries to judge, and that is where our kindhearted, eager to help, honest community would come in. This would make our jobs easier, and we would reward anyone who followed the rules and took the time to review the entries to cast their ballots.

This was an ART contest. It was not a popularity contest. We asked people not to promote their entries in our groups. But not all groups got this message. We explicitly told people that any manipulation would result in the ballot getting thrown We had a system in place to do this. And the system worked. They told us that people could game the system, that they would cheat, that they would gather all the entries from their community to submit and try to win a popularity contest. We had a system in place. And the system worked.

“Play stupid games, Win stupid Prizes,” Many of you may know that is one of my mottos. They even made a fucking sticker for it….

We had almost 700 people who joined in the community vote, but only about half of these ballots passed the acceptance criteria. The other half got cut by our Thugs Protection Posse bots (you down with TPP?). It kicked out entries for many different reasons — duplicated entries, entries not associated with a Thugsfi Telegram member, but it mostly caught coordinated voting activities. (is this the voter fraud we have all heard so much about??) We had a system in place, and the system worked.

From the start our plan was to reward community members for putting in the effort and following the rules. If we would have said “AIRDROP if you vote”, you know what would have ensued. So we kept it quiet. We let the Thugsmas vote deadline pass, and followed through on the plan to send 10 Thugs to all 350 plus community members that made it past the TPP. We knew the people who received would be happy, while the ones who were caught gaming the system or not following directions would be upset.

After things cooled down, we were made of aware of a situation — or let’s say numerous situations that caused many individuals to be kicked out by this cool ass TPP. TPP wasn’t wrong. It has no emotions; it just does it’s mothafuckin job. It’s actions however made me reconsider the situation. It really made me think. You see, there were numerous groups where an admin or other community member decided to collect all of the Thugsmas entries of their community and then direct their community to vote for said entries. And they did. In droves. They didn’t even try to disguise it. We have whole communities that did what they were directed to do by fellow community members get disqualified. And that sucks. To me, this was a dilemma.

To be very honest, I felt bad for the community members that did what they were told to do causing them to be disqualified. I thought about ways to fix it. And then it dawned on me — Even though they “followed instructions” — the instructions they got were wrong. I’m not going to say that these community members cheated, but I am going to say that trying to turn our contest from an art contest into a popularity contest was wrong. I am going to say that had these community members not missed out on 8ball’s Christmas Love (it’s a great movie, HOT), they could have given a fuck about trying to game the system. So now, I don’t feel so bad. I’m sorry, but that’s it.

Homie’s this is tough love. This is THUG LOVE. Learn from your mistakes, and next time be better for the good of all.