Fighting The Tentacles Of Horizontal Monopolies In Social Media.
Vertical Scope Trapped In A Failing Social Media Landscape With Right Wing Users It Cannot Jettison To Save Itself!
The great irony of social media is its incestuous relationship with its members in that it both feeds on their creativity and exploits them at the same time. As I pointed out in the first part of this series of articles about Vertical Scope the key to their growth is the appearance of activity on their websites. Activity that is translated into these nebulous figures of active users and content creation by millions of active members. If this were a Venn diagram it would seem to me that much of the over lap in these categories would encompass a small portion of the actual membership in question. As I’ve pointed out before many of these forums solider on with a few vocal members that over time become the engines of content creation often to detriment of the website’s overall health. And this might be one of the great problems of Vertical Scope business model.
Note: The graph excludes communities that were minimally active, meaning communities with less than 1,000 monthly active users. As of the end of March 2021 there were 1,221 communities being operated.
Vertical Scope when you get past all of the nonsensical Silicon Valley disruption speak is at bottom a profit generating machine. This machine is based on the simple principle of dominating the market of forums by purchasing as many of them they can find. Its tentacles are in all forms of media content as I’ve stated before from Guns to Snowplowing. Over the years this pushed their stable of forums 1400+ under their control—which is just an estimate because Vertical Scope isn’t very forth coming with this type of information. It could be many more they use a metric of only talking about forums with 1,000 or more visitors per month. By this metric they claim ownership of only 1221 forums by 2021. Which of course tends to make numbers look more attractive to investors. As I’ve quoted above the company claimed in 2021 that 1,221 is the number of communities, that meet this minimum requirement of 1,000 monthly active users. What does that exactly mean is a bit fuzzy— is an active user just a person that reads articles with using ad blocking software or is it a spam bot creating endless ads? Does an active user have to click on an ad to be counted? Your guess is as good as mine because every attempt for an interview by the company have been thwarted with absolute silence. I guess I’m too small to worry about. But, my point here is simple this is the creation of a horizontal monopoly.
That is the big question is what sort of chilling effects does this type of integration have on the social media? I think it is pretty clear that having one company controlling a large chunk of the online forum business is problematic to say the least. For example let us consider the following issues with model that Vertical Scope has chosen to use to distribute their ads— online forums. Forums that require constant viewership and use in an active manner. If forums turn into zombie lands they are no longer able to draw and retain active users effectively. There are no more free reviews of products that vendors can tout as being representative of their products and their demographic user base. In short no more influencers to write free reviews of your products and tell the world how fantastic your stuff is. And it won’t matter how many of these websites you own if 30% of the portfolio is full of these rotten carcasses online that just take up server space and yield little value. In this sense monopolization is a weakness—yes, you might own all the car forums in the market but if they cannot generate views they are just liabilities. But even more problematic for this type of horizontal monopolization is the fact that these zombie lands become the breading grounds for rightwing extremists. These types are often drawn to the internet’s forum scene because of its anonymity and historical friendliness to extreme ideologies.
For example in 2015 the Southern Law Poverty Center declared Reddit the new home of racism on the internet. And I wouldn’t say that Vertical Scope has reached the level of racism that Reddit has or still has potentially. I’m not sure; I’m not a Reddit user. And Reddit’s claim to fame is that it is a totally free user generated space designed to “promote free speech”— in reality it is an advertising space designed to mine people’s data and turn it into a profit for Reddit, Inc.
But, it has become very apparent that some of the most important content on Reddit’s 13 +Billion posts are those from subreddits calling themselves names like : “Chimpire” and “Coontown” and were allowed to exist for years on their website. And probably still do in some form lurking in the midst of the other subreddits. Racism was still a major problem on Reddit in 2020 when the Atlantic Magazine published this article “Reddit Is Finally Facing Its Legacy of Racism”— I hope it really has. But, like Vertical Scope Reddits horizontal integration in this case the supply of bloggers has created this very problem for themselves. It demands the appearance of vast user ship. And in reality any user ship will do when you’re talking about profit margins. Which is why the horizontal integrated business monopoly forces both Vertical Scope and Reddit into a strange position of having to maintain vast numbers of virtually dead space. Dead Space that has only one redeeming quality the ability for these properties to add to the count of active users while requiring next to nothing in maintenance for the most part. Instead they just let these zombie sites continue on like archives. This leads to the next issue the vocal minority with extreme views.
These vocal minorities with extreme views can become the dominate elements on otherwise dead forums. These users will create small cadres of like minded users that ultimately will create the preponderance of content on the forum over time. I am speaking out about users that spend 8-10 hrs per day long on to websites and create several thousand messages per month alone. These minority members become the nucleus of the forum’s membership. And that makes VS unable to enforce their own rules after awhile.
3. Discriminatory remarks of any sort will not be tolerated. This includes degrading and/or offensive remarks about an individual or a group of individuals based on their race, color, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, age, nationality, religious affiliation, or indeed any other basis.
These types of rules become irrelevant once a forum de-evolves into a club for a small group of like minded high frequency members. These members go from obeying the rules to actually setting the rules. This is because the weakness of s social medial advertising is its dependence on social media creators. Something that Message boards don’t attract actually—you’ll never see the major social media figures on fringe forums discussing their favorite hangouts. But, the extreme-right wing of the World Wide Web who have colonized these message boards predominately have their own sorts of media figures. The Average Righteous Joe with his favorite minority to hate and his favorite meme factory.
I would like to make one disturbing fact very clear— many of these posts were made while the Plowsite.com property was owned by Group-C Media. A company that specializes in publishing magazines for business professionals and maintenance professionals. I personally contacted the then director of digital content one Mr. Dan Ulrich(2018) who denied this content was problematic or that these users were racists. And then reached out to Mr. Neils Eisenberg VP of Marketing. Mr. Eisenburg declined to even respond back to me. What I am getting at this corporations aren’t concerned with racism on their forums. They aren’t upset by the fact that their core membership post things like this as long as the corporation and the executives themselves are shielded from any form of negative blowback. The fact that this type of behavior has become so ingrained in the online forum world is a problem that no corporation from Reddit to Vertical Scope wants to address at this point. Manly due to the fringe nature of online forums and the need to increase content creation each month leaves these corporations not competing against better forums but against the greatest wildcard element of all the audience-content creator.
Take nothing personal. As CM, the forum is a tool in your hands, and like any tool should be treated as an extension of yourself. If someone expresses something you find distasteful, or gets personal on the boards, try to remember that this takes place in a realm where you have absolute power by virtue of the Terms of Service and EULA. There is no such thing as a “public” forum online, and discussion happens under the auspices of your will, in a privately owned setting. Consider your forum to be your living room. You can make someone to leave; it’s your home! There might be consequences to those actions, but remembering the quote from He-Man: “I haaaaave the power!” can take the momentary sting out of being called a doodyhead in a thousand creative ways. Eliciting an emotional response is often the intent from the trolls – don’t give in.
As I’ve quoted above and with my alias [sometimes you need to test, to see what the off cuff reaction might be] on LinkedIn (that Pishgar blocked) we can see that Pishgar’s rhetoric doesn’t match the community that he over sees at VS. And part this has to do with the ineffectual business model they are using that depends on constant content creation from free resources. In this case the small but loyal membership of many of the VS properties are allowed to break any rules of conduct:
But it turns out that infractions of these rules are meaningless to certain certain members. That is because if you generate 8% of the total content of a message with 2.7 million messages and of the stated 83,700 members only .0016% of the membership is viable, then this overactive minority group has community organizers like Joesph Pishgar stuck between a rock and hard place. On one hand he could easily ban everyone of his problematic members which if we use the example of Plowsite.Com that mean probably less than 50% of the regular cadre of posters would still have access to the website. And that wouldn’t allow the website to last very long now would it? Remember the vast majority of these sites that I have been looking at now over 100 since my first article never seem more than .05% of their total membership active per hour. Most of these sites are hovering in the .01-.001% of the membership active any hour from estimates. That is abysmal when you consider that average over 100 websites— and VS claiming 55 million plus active users per month—you can understand why Pishgar never rocks the boat of any cadre of long term users. Yes, even if they are homophobic, racist, sexists and post violent memes—content is king!
It’s ironic this turn of events when you consider that Pishgar loves to talk about how important is to mold leadership into your community managers. For example on his linkedIn page he wrote this article where he tries to impress people about Holacracy’s failures. For those that aren’t aware Holacracy is a non-hierarchical organization system much like Anarcho-Syndicalism presents for social organizations. Pishgar dismisses this idea completely and instead tells his readers that :
If you're doing genuine holacracy, your organization will fail. If you're organization is succeeding and has adopted holacracy, then it is pretending at it, and the dirty secret is that you've got one or a few silent workhorses or nexus point personalities calling the shots. Even in an Amish barn raising, while it may to the outsider appear as though it is a emergent coalescence of effort and planning, there's still one person who leads the project and originates it, and only certain specialists are permitted to work on critical jobs.
Pishgar LinkedIn.Com
So, we cannot accept the idea that Pishgar is allowing these forums to create their own guidelines and rules of conduct—since we can clearly see from the the standard TOS that every website uses this is a homogenized corporate affair. Which then implies that this decision to accept Racism , Sexism , Anti-LGTQB , and the glorification violence in the comments on the sites is in fact a conscious decision by not only the admins that directly pick the moderators on these forums but also by Vertical Scopes’ very own Executive Branch as well. Let that settle in for a second when you are using or advertising with Vertical Scope Forum’s— it is very possibly that your ads or content is nestled next to people that are racist, sexist, anti-LGTQB and promote violence. And if you’re not in the in crowd there is also a good bet that your voice will never be heard!
In Part III I Will Discuss How We Can Change The Internet So Companies Like Vertical Scope Will Not Dominate The Online Discourse!