Solana-based memecoin generating platform Pump.fun has been facing a lot of backlash from community members of late.
Background
- Users have been broadcasting harmful, abusive, and violent acts via the platform’s live stream feature
- Community members say that the content being streamed isn't just distasteful, “it's literally a pipeline of felonies”
- They've also branded the content shared on Pump.fun live streams as "uninteresting" and "conceptually lazy"
- To tackle the issue, the platform has paused its live streaming feature
- It will remain disabled for an “indefinite time period” until the moderation infrastructure is ready to deal with the heightened levels of activity
Why should you pay attention?
- A Pudgy Penguins safety project manager pointed out that someone on live stream threatened to hang themselves if the coin launched did not attain a set market cap
- The Pump.fun team says,
“We acknowledge that recent events on our platform's live streams have caused concern”
- The team has taken a “firm stance” on moderating inappropriate activity
- This includes proactively removing coin images, names, descriptions, and comments, tagging any NSFW content, taking down live streams, and more recently, taking down videos
Who said what?
- Commenting on the current state of affairs, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT said,
“Even more wild how the people creating these coins barely take any measures to mask their identity”
- The detective, however, doesn’t have Pump.fun related projects on his radar
- He clarified,
“I currently am not really tracking this stuff. People who choose to trade Pump Fun coins are gamblers not victims”
- Meanwhile, the Safety Manager at Pudgy Penguins underlined that,
“Don’t think it’s just about money, but also for clout IRL with friends, etc”
Zooming out
- Another community member asserted that there is an art to shock value on stream
- Simply sharing shocking and horrific content ain’t innately interesting
- People seek stories and novel concepts that engage them, and that should be prioritized going forward
- Binance founder ‘Changpeng Zhao’ encouraged building “real” applications using blockchain technology
