Head-Fi DIY Exodus

[morsel]

Head-Fi DIY Exodus

ex?o?dus (ĕk'sə-dəs) n. a journey by a large group to escape from a hostile environment

(July 2005) Readers of Head-Fi DIY may have noticed that some of the regular members have been quiet for the past few months, and some have disappeared altogether. A growing conflict of interest between some members and management at Head-Fi centers around the following issues:

• Head-Fi management is largely unaware of what goes on in the Head-Fi DIY forum
  
• Head-Fi is driven by commercial interests, site traffic, and the need for sponsor contributions, not the well being of DIY forum members
  
• some community service volunteers are labeled "Member of the Trade", forcing them to comply with the same speech restrictions imposed upon commercial manufacturers
  
• DIY group buys are banned indefinitely, although the Terms of Use suggests they may be arranged with moderator approval
  
• some longtime members are banned, others quit or remain silent
  
• moderator abuse of power during May and June 2005:
  
  • hypocritical double standards
    
  • flaunting forum rules
    
  • thread crapping
    
  • use of expletives
    
  • abuse of other members
    
  • appalling negative attitude
    
  • systematic suppression of differing opinions
    
  • sanitizing posts after the fact to destroy evidence of abuse
    
  • rampant deletion of critical or questioning posts creates an atmosphere of oppression
    
  • projects for the masses are disparaged, only one-off projects are acceptable
    
  • discussing the nature of DIY is forbidden
    
  • members fear post deletion or banning for contradicting moderators or discussing controversial topics
    

  [*]community service designers need a level of free speech, benign moderation, and protection from commercial interests not available at Head-Fi DIY

(August 2005) Weeks of negotiations with Head-Fi management via phone and email resulted in a greater understanding and appreciation of the situation and a quieter and calmer forum, but did not resolve the intrinsic conflict of interest.

We were originally given a personal guarantee that we would be allowed to say goodbye to our community on Head-Fi DIY without fear of banning or post deletion should we choose to depart, but a recent conversation implies this promise has been recinded. Head-Fi will ban anyone using Head-Fi resources, posts, PMs, or email relay services to divert Head-Fi traffic. Insulting Head-Fi management on a public web site may result in banning and achieves nothing. We are grown men and women, engineers and college professors, not children or citizens of a military dictatorship. We choose to walk away from abuse, censorship, oppression, and violation of our trust. We do not wish to incur the wrath of Head-Fi management, nor do we intend to abandon Head-Fi completely. We just need a safe place to work on community service projects in peace, and hope this explanation does not offend the powers that be.

Headwize DIY is the obvious choice for our new home. Kevin Gilmore has graciously provided a server with plenty of bandwidth and storage. Chu Moy has been working tirelessly to improve Headwize forum software with new features to make it more usable for community service projects, including the ability to upload 4 200kb attachments per post.

In other good news, aos will be rejoining us on Headwize!

Signed,

morsel ? amb ? kevin gilmore ? stadams ? SnoopyRocks ? n_maher ? drewd ? jamont ? dgardner ? tangent ? peranders ? digi01 ? ppl

(October, 2005) DIY Group Buy Discussion is opened and closed. dgardner replys:

http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showpost.php?p=1643669&postcount=48

This is one of the most intellectually logical, yet emotionally and spritually digusting, threads I have ever read on any forum.

The era of innocent fun and simple sharing is officially dead. What creative and generous person would EVER engage in a not-for-profit PCB design project on this site in the future? Not me. Free layouts & Group Buy PCBs are the backbone of the fun this site. Few things generate as much excitment and trafffic. You guys seem to conveniently forget this. This leaves no room for me. I do not want to start a business. I do not want to tack advertising dollars onto something I was trying to do for FREE. I am a paid contributor. There is no way to extend my generousity into the future and do new projects without leaving. Frankly, that sucks.

Rules. Profits. Control. Moderators. Power. Distrust. Dishonesty. Politics. Advertising. Big Egos. This is all I see.

This is what happens when a good DIY bbs gets too big for it's own britches. Who in the world wants to logon to this mindbending stuff everyday.

M? support on Head-Fi is moved to Headwize.

The Gang of Thirteen disbands after making Headwize the focus for future DIY activities.

(February, 2006) Headcase forums are started in secret.

(March, 2006) rickcr42 is stripped of moderator powers at Head-Fi.

Now what? The DIYers have already resettled at Headwize. Do you want us to move to Headcase, do you want to move to Headwize, do you want Head-Fi to reform enough for all of us to return, or are we to remain separated? Many people will not want to deal with multiple forums on a daily basis.

[PFKMan23]

Even though I'm not a DIYer, it might be more generically beneficial to have the strong DIY minds be at Headwize and have it maintain the DIY headquarters if you will, I mean everyone knows what Headwize is and knows how to get there. This forum from what I can see is stilll hush hush and even if it does grow, I doubt that it would ever go mainstream, atleast not in the appriciable near term. It aslso is much more generic in it's scope, whereas headwize is basically dominated by the DIY scene so it might just be practical to keep the forums seperate.

Although it would be nice to have you guys drop in every now and then...

Personally I'm of the view thathe less movements that are made the better. As far as headfi goes, regardless of whether Rickcr42 is a mod or not it's still a cespool, and heh I mean just look at the removal of the things notifying people for the chat room (headphone hifi), which incidentally might spawn another forum of it's own headphone-hifi.org. So check back in about 6 months to see if headfi really has changed for the better but I doubt it.

[tiberian]

say no to nazi mods, amen. aint rnb and ray samuels DIYers in the beginning?

[McShaggy]

I think headwize is already a great place for the DIY community, especially if the diy wiki is started thats been talked about there. If that takes off, I think headwize will become a great source of knowledge for DIY audio/headphone designs, moreso than it is now.

[amb]

While headwize is a great place for DIY (the projects library is excellent, and the various sticky'ed ongoing project threads are also cool), the posting traffic there is sparse at best. I don't know how many views each thread get (Chu's forum software doesn't provide that statistic) , but I think headwize could benefit from more participation at all levels, including non-DIYers. Afterall, we all share a common interest in audio and music. Take the head-fi Amplifications forum for example, despite the "noise" that get posted daily, there is undeniably an enthusiasm among audiophiles in general and the crossflow of discussions between the general audiophile populace, with participation from DIYers, designers/engineers and others of all levels of technical expertise can be very synergistic.

When we made the move from head-fi to headwize, I had envisioned that we could revitalize headwize and make it the great general headphone-related community that it once was (headwize pre-dates head-fi and used to be the place to be). Our move did boost traffic and membership modestly, but it isn't where I hoped it would be. Maybe headwize needs more targetted subforums, I dunno.

At any rate, now we have headcase, which seems to be making a good start. But it also makes matters a bit more complex. There is a problem of community fragmentation by having so many forum sites. I think we need to unite the community, not fragment it. I know that headcase isn't "public" yet and as such it isn't going to draw the big crowds, so perhaps now is a good time to consider the future. Pardon me if I make a hasty suggestion, but wouldn't it be great if somehow headcase and headwize could "merge" in some fashion and become one?

I appreciate your thoughts.

[hungrych]

Pardon me if I make a hasty suggestion, but wouldn't it be great if somehow headcase and headwize could "merge" in some fashion and become one?

That would be kinda cool.

[Edwood]

As long as Rickcr42 continued to be a mod on the Head-fi DIY forum, I stopped posting there.

I had instead gone back to Headwize (started there first like many others) to post DIY stuff.

Although I think it will be some time before I get heavily involved in the Head-fi DIY forum in the future, as the heavy handed moderation (read. Rick) had created a chilling effect on the DIY community there.

He openly attacked DIY solder by numbers people and then pretty much everyone else, and lo and behold, not a single new project made it to "Group Buy" status. And all that was left was the n00bs he so hated.

As for my opinions about DIY Forum location? Headwize has been there from the beginning, and Chu Moy made some rather significant upgrades to the forum, and the bandwidth is vastly improved. So, I really don't see the need to move it here.

Honestly, I'm still going to frequent Head-fi alot, but the Off Topic Member's Lounge has been getting over-moderated lately (usually is a cycle, though) With the demise of Certifiably Inane, I like the relatively uncensored Off Topic forum here. Heck, might as well call it CI 2.0

So really, I am more or less here for the pretzels.

-Ed

[Edwood]

(March, 2006) rickcr42 is stripped of moderator powers at Head-Fi.

You sure about this? Because Rick has voluntarily stepped down before, only to return later.

-Ed

[PFKMan23]

Here's how I see it. If you really want to merge sites (having one entity rather than many), to me the logical location would be headwize. It has the name that people recognize and such like that, and it would make it more logical to make it a focal meeting point. That said of course, if headwize is the place to meet or whatnot, then what it needs to do is add/expand it's more general forums (1 forum that compasses around 3-5 categories just isn't going to do it).

There's also the issue of clashing ideologies, if we merge, who's going to run the show? Invariably isssues of administration are what forced the issues of exodus to the DIY contigent. And also, I hate to say it but the DIY community is it's own community already and to essentially bring the two communities together is just messy. And yes, I could see a spliterring in a few months anyways over it.

I mean for people like me who are perfectly happy buying a comercial product, I have no place on Headwize, as I have no interest in DIY amps or the engineering aspects that goes behind headamps and other items. *awaits morsel's claws of death* The closest for the forseaable future that I will get to engineering aspects is tube rolling and maybe op amp rolling if I ever get another op amp based product. There's an inherent difference in systems of thought for people like me and people who DIY. I hate to say it but i go by what sounds good and I care little if it's the favorable, neutral or whatever choice from an engineering standpoint.

Would a place like headwize or the members that make up headwize (and hence resonate that ideology that people should somehow have engineering knowledge backgrounds and the knowledge of the aspects of it be a part of the expereince), welcome me? I have have to say no, atleast looking at how it currently is.

I mean I talk to Mikhail of Singlepower quite often on the phone and I told him basically this "You're the engineer so I let you handle that becasue I don't really care to know that kind of stuff". Apathetic though it might be, I don't really care, if it sounds good it sounds good. If anything I'm more a musician than engineer ( I was a pretty big choir buff/budding composer in HS...), which as I see it is almost the polar opposite. And hence for general hobbyists I think it's better to have a sight. If you want to talk about merging we can do that but unfortuantely, I think that the split from Head Fi has created it's own community with it's own ideology, and basically going back the direction it came from might be too messy and essentially a negative thing in the long run. I think if we did merge, we would be just back to where we came from, a year from now or so.

[PsychoZX]

I agree with PFK here. I think this site should stay for general heaphone stuff and headwize for DIY.

[hirsch]

I agree with PFK here. I think this site should stay for general heaphone stuff and headwize for DIY.

In order to eventually develop the traffic it needs to stay vital, Head-Case is going to have to grow, and eventually become open, I think. So, the first question would be if the bandwidth is there. The argument for Headwize is that the bandwith IS there, and it's free. A face lift would be the major improvement needed were a merger of some sort to occur.

amb, I don't see any way around community fragmentation as long as moderation at Head-Fi is random and biased. No matter how good forum moderation is, it's going to piss somebody off, but truly bad moderation accelerates the process. The current problem may not be community fragmentation at all. I think that has already occurred. The real issue may be providing venues where those that have become disaffected from the hobby due to incompetence at Head-Fi can become reinvolved, and keeping the disaffection from evolving to become alienation and disappearance.

[kevin gilmore]

Remember that if its going to be at headwize, it absolutely must remain completely non-commercial.

Otherwise i get in serious trouble. Bandwidth is certainly not an issue with an unlimited gigabit link, but

at some point i have to start throwing more computers at it...

[PFKMan23]

Pardon my stupidity but what the hell does non commercial mean anyways? Are we talking about no donations from companies or something? Or no members who happen to be manufacturers or something? Heh AFAIK, the people from companies, atleast the big ones, would never rule here or at Headwize.

[kevin gilmore]

non-commercial means NO MONEY. No paid ads, No sponsored threads...

that kind of stuff. Its the rules for being a "not for profit"

However if someone wants to donate another dual proc xeon machine

stuffed with 2gb or more of memory and mirrored scsi drives, I'll find

a way to accept it.

I personally supplied the first one...

[tkam]

Maybe it's just me but I've always seen headwize as technically oriented forum that seemed to be lacking in other discussion areas. I don't see any reason why headwize can't remain the mecca of technical oriented headphone/amp related material. The lack of forum categories and general absence of posting in some of the categories (electronic gear for instance) are partially why I decided to start up and host this forum.

Head-Case will eventually become open, I certainly don't want or expect it to get anywere near as large as head-fi is. But yes for the time being the bandwidth is available. The server it is running on comes with 2TB per month of bandwidth. Addtional bandwidth can be added at $100 per each 1TB.

[morsel]

Hypocritical double standards of censorship are still alive and well at Head-Fi. Since erix is allowed to post vile doggerel attacking PPL, Tangent, & me, and rickcr42 is allowed to post about copper ore, not to mention abusing anyone he pleases for the past year, it seemed quite reasonable for me to post this already censored bit of classic verse:

Let the joyous news be spread,

The Wicked old Witch at last is dead!

Ding Dong, the Witch is dead!

Which old witch? The Wicked Witch!

Ding Dong, the Wicked Witch is dead!

Wake up, you sleepy head,

Rub your eyes, get out of bed,

Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead!

She's gone where the goblins go,

Below, below, below, yo-ho,

Let's open up and sing, and ring the bells out,

Ding Dong, the merry-oh,

Sing it high, sing it low,

Let them know the Wicked Witch is dead!

edit: I just discovered email from Jude (stuck in my spam filter - it's a new address) saying Rick left voluntarily. To be fair, it is not unreasonable that Jude deleted my thread, and erix' thread dates from a time when Jude probably did not read the DIY forum. It is hard to suppress exuberance when a hated tyrant steps aside. I will apologize to Jude.

[grawk]

I'd think one solution might be to have a link to headwize in our DIY section, send most of the traffic there...

[hungrych]

I'd think one solution might be to have a link to headwize in our DIY section, send most of the traffic there...

Yeah, that's probably the best way to do it.

[eric343]

The problem I've always had with the HeadWize forum was the crude software: specifically, the decidedly bare-bones search. It's not possible to find, say, all of Apheared's posts, or limit your search to an arbitrary subset of forums. Compare that to the features offered by a modern forum software, like this one or even more so Head-Fi.

[morsel]

Hi Eric, all of those things are possible at Headwize now. Chu has bent over backwards to improve the software for us.

[Edwood]

The problem I've always had with the HeadWize forum was the crude software: specifically, the decidedly bare-bones search. It's not possible to find, say, all of Apheared's posts, or limit your search to an arbitrary subset of forums. Compare that to the features offered by a modern forum software, like this one or even more so Head-Fi.

I wasn't around during the Apheared days, was he really that crazy? Worse than Rick? Or just more rumor mill gossip?

-Ed

[Edwood]

edit: I just discovered email from Jude (stuck in my spam filter - it's a new address) saying Rick left voluntarily. To be fair, it is not unreasonable that Jude deleted my thread, and erix' thread dates from a time when Jude probably did not read the DIY forum. It is hard to suppress exuberance when a hated tyrant steps aside. I will apologize to Jude.

Great.

Rick has already "voluntarily" left before, only to return.

Oh, well, like I said, enjoy it while it lasts.

But seeing as how he can still post, he can still nonsensically berate people as usual.

Except this time, you can add him to your ignore list.

And doesn't it usually stay in the ignore list with PHP even when he becomes a mod again later, as long as you added him in the ignore list when he is a standard member?

-Ed

[Dusty Chalk]

Yes, actually, it does work that way. I made the mistake of taking someone off my ignore list just to read one post by him (on a completely unrelated board), and couldn't put him back on.

[GoRedwings19]

The question is will head case grow and how will it.

At the moment Tkam is supporting it via the server but will happen when it reaches it bandwidth limit. For headcase to grow it will have to be paid for. Will this come from members or via sponsorship? How will this problem be tackled.

Where does the admin see this site going as well as the members?

If this site becomes the site of trolls and the banned then this is not what was intended. Everyone here has a vision of where it should head.

Some may see it as an alternative meeting place, some might see it as a direct competition.

Hirsch is right about the moderation though. No matter how good the intention is somebody will be annoyed at what you do. But bad moderation will kill this forum faster.

Personally I am only here in a temporary capacity to help the boys out. But soon I will be replaced for someone who is more capable than I.

But I do wish every success to this forum and hope it is the realisation of the admin.

Fuzzy HQ out.

[Edwood]

Yes, actually, it does work that way. I made the mistake of taking someone off my ignore list just to read one post by him (on a completely unrelated board), and couldn't put him back on.

Wheeeeee.

-Ed