Looks fairly legitimate to me... Anyway,
I guess I was a bit disappointed when my earlier call for "two-sentence horror stories" about Dave basically yielded bupkis, but sometimes that happens. (Okay,
usually that happens.) I probably shouldn't have placed all those rules and conditions on it, but it's just as likely that people have become happy with the
status quo in which Dave spends most of his time bashing the crypto industry — and despite occasional flareups, leaving Wikiland alone for the most part. Most of the really bad stuff he did dates back to the 2004-2014 period, which is a long time in internet years.
The main thing to understand about Dave is that he was never all that interested in improving Wikipedia, or Usenet before it — he was much more interested in
scrapping with perceived "enemies" of the "project," especially organized ones, and using that as a way into the leadership clique. He wanted to be the "Lord Protector" and show that just one guy with enough cleverness and "moxie" could take on Evil Corp. by himself and win. He didn't even have to be successful with this approach, since he got away with his high propensity for screwups by the usual means we associate with combative/narcissistic personalities — deflection, blame-shifting, minimizing negative effects, pretending it never happened at all, insisting he was "right all along" despite copious evidence to the contrary, or just-plain lying about it.
And he does have a sense of humor, at least — not a very good one, but better than a typical Wikipedian. That, combined with the fact that he doesn't care how he's perceived by outsiders, makes him a trickier target for critics.
