lancehedrick not a sly dig at you @lancehedrick not at all. In fact I posted a very supportive comment on YT and on this forum of your Vostock review.
As someone who was run out of HB by the pitchfork brigade I know a little, but only a tiny bit, of the xxxx you must put up with.
In preparation for a review on a grinder I started a thread on Home Barista asking members what they would like to know about any particular grinder (I did the same here). Some genius Googled my name because my avatar is the same and discovered that I was a marketer and that I had given a couple of hundred interviews on marketing.
It was a very minor equivalent to “he’s black + running = guilty” so let’s get the shotgun.
In my case “he’s a marketer + posting = gulity” so let’s shut him down.
As soon as said genius identified me as a marketer by profession, some members formed a posse and grabbed the lynching ropes. It was a very unpleasant glimpse into human nastiness.
Guilty until proven innocent.
Worse, admin arbitrarily shut the thread down without, as he later admitted, zero reference to my history of posts and without a “please explain” DM.
And that’s exactly my beef with people who post to the effect that reviewers/influencers as a group can’t be trusted.
That because they are reviewing and/or promoting a product that they must be committing errors of omission or commission and embellishing or hyping or trying to pull the wool over our eyes or mislead somehow. Some will be, some won’t. Let’s not stereotype, generalise or fall into the trap of profiling.
And while I’m at it, the other beef I have is with people who post to the effect “oh well you’re an influencer so I guess you knew what you were getting in to”, as if that somehow gives everyone in the world a permission slip to throw s*** at them. There can be a human cost to that.
Anyone who thinks like that, has probably spent all their time in the grandstand and exactly zero time on the field, playing the game of reviewing.
One of my favorite quotes