Vertical Scope's Very Real Problem With Racism, Sexism and Anti-Gay LGQTB People! Part I
And Vertical Scope Doesn't Care!
My battle with Vertical Scope (VS) goes back to an issue I had on one of their forums circa 2012. I was helping a cousin out with a video for his aborted Jeep Influencer website called Jeeplab. I decided to do a little low budget market research on a website called Pirate 4x4. That was my mistake not knowing what a bunch of hostile and angry individuals that populated the website I was greeted with instant scorn and ridicule .
Messages like the one above I saved show the utter insanity of the comments I received.Many of the comments were supported by their Super Moderator at the time RoxyWheels(real name unknown) who not only confirmed my email address to users, but, also helped them hone their barbs at me with other personal information. Even after I made complaints in writing to the company Vertical Scope via their website’s email system nothing was done. The moderator was elevated in status to Administrator and the website allowed the abuse of the new members in some arcane hazing ritual that Vertical Scope neither wished to address or speak about. Instead it was easier and more profitable to ignore these issues and to move on. I’m not the move on sort of guy, when I see a double standard of a company’s rules that is designed to improve their bottomline, even if it breads hatred and racism it makes me angry. So, for the last 11 years I’ve been collecting information, and putting together a complete picture of what Vertical Scope is really about.
This image from taken from their investment page on the website paints the real picture of what Vertical Scope’s corporate mission is about. The delightful prose about “enabling people with common interests to connect, explore passions, and share knowledge about the things they love” is really about marketing. For example the Better Business Bureau of Canada lists Vertical Scope not as a social media company but as a digital advertising company. The companies rating is 1.8 out of 5 with a long list of complaints about being banned— to which the Vertical Scope only responds with a canned answer “account was found to be doing x” the problem is that no evidence is ever provided by the company to prove their point. In my years of research I’ve been banned numerous times by by the staff thank god for VPN’s. And yes they will often hit you with the “spam” moniker even when you’ve never posted it’s a nice nonspecific reason to boot someone—an account I just created to look at one forum that never posted was banned yesterday for “bot activity” whatever that means exactly. So, I question how exactly Vertical Scope determines spam , bots, and legitimate users at times. I’ve fought it and sometimes they will reinstate my accounts and other times they will claim I’m part of a Spam operation. It makes little sense. But, what can you do with an opaque system such as Vertical Scope’s?
However, the problem for Vertical Scope is that at the core of the operation isn’t the creation of communities—it’s a data mining operation. And that means it is designed to extract numerous details about what people are browsing before they access their favorite community. This information is stored in what is commonly referred to as a “cookie” the most common type of cookie that websites install on your computer is a “tracking cookie”. This tracking cookie monitors your habits on the internet like big brother staring over your shoulder these cookies record what sites your visiting, search histories, details about news articles you’ve read, and shopping habits— of which they dump off to companies like Vertical Scope so they can analyze the data and develop distinct patterns of behavior for specific users of their websites. This in turn helps them to create more impressively targeted ads to the individual user. Or so the claim is made.
The problem for companies like Vertical Scope is that they're selling ads to dead space . Their investor page states 100 million Monthly Active Users. What in the hell is an active user? This is a useless metric; I’ve created over 50 users in 11 years— some of them have been very active others not so much. My point is that how many of these users are bots collecting data for spam operations, LLM AI training systems, or just annoyed former users? You cannot really tell. How many of these users could be bots for Vertical Scope to boost their own numbers just trolling around their 1200-1400 websites. (The company is even cagey about how many sites they actually own with no complete list available to the public). My point is that the 100 million active user number sounds great, but in reality from my research is almost meaningless. I’ve only seen one website about high rise buildings with fantastic membership numbers and users reaching about 7,000 at one time for both. The only problem is that this site is reported to have a Brazilian Nazis problem with members who were major fans of Bolsonaro attacking supporters of Lula De Silva on the website. Other than that in the 30 sites I visited ranging from firearms to off-roading the hourly visitors and members were never more than 50 and usually more like 8-14 with unregistered guests ranging in the 80 to 1650 range. Hardly, a sign that VS is even achieving these numbers they claim on their investment page. They also claim to have 55 million registered users. This is where the information gets even more fuzzy. Do they still claim banned or inactive users? It would appear they do. The best estimate is that VS owns 1,400 different message boards all across the internet. They claim to have 55 million registered users a quick division of 55 million by 1,400 yields an average of 39,285.7143 members per forum.
One website they own SnowplowForums.com has 8.8 (actual amount 8779) was purchased in 2020 so to was it’s more popular rival website Plowsite.com wouldn’t face competition. How many more of these websites does Vertical Scope own that just exist to keep competition low? As you can see from this screen capture (October, 4th 2023) the site has one member and less than 200 guests at 9:30am.
Its top contributors this month have only generated a total of 16 replies or posts so far.
Not exactly a wealth of information being creating over at this site. Nor does their flagship plowing site Plowsite.com really do better all the much better:
This is an average hour of any day for this site basically- ranging between 8-16 members and 300-700 non-registered guests. Here is the Plowsite.com membership and post content counter:
In case you wondered the 8-16 members represents .009772% to .0192% of the total 83,532 members the site claims. This translates to the following content creations:
That is 2023 unique pieces of content being created per month basically by 3 users. Now, this number is much higher for this website because it has more active users than SnowplowForums.com; but, when you factor in that 90% of this content is created in the “members only off topic” area it becomes depressingly clear that basically this forum is on autopilot heading into cliff. But, the fact is that VS is selling these sites and many more like them as active hubs of content creation is a bit of a problem. To achieve this illusion they need to hold on to their communities’ backbone membership it would appear even if it is hostile, racist , sexist and violent.
These members create the entire content that drives people in theory to these websites and furthermore to the ads that power this media model. But, as Harvard Business Review published an article 2021 entitled: “What Digital Advertising Gets Wrong” by Sinan Aral (a professor from MIT in Marketing) states that digital advertisers are over estimating their effectiveness by up to 4100% (possibly more) when it comes to converting those with no intention to purchase a product into those that do. Instead what is being done is advertisers are reinforcing purchasing trends in their already most dedicated and loyal costumers. And the rest of these clicks result in almost no purchases at all. In short advertisers would be better off with a sandwich board in a crowded city than many of these web based ad campaigns. Which is why again in 2022 the Harvard Business Review published this article “Why Marketers Are Returning to Traditional Advertising” by Christine Moorman, Megan Ryan, and Nader Tavassoli found that people trust traditional media source ads [i.e. television, radio, and print] more than their digital counterparts (unless they are oddly found on a podcast). Also they authors found that marketers are moving to traditional forms of ads in response to consumer disdain for banner ads that has led to some major privacy legislation—the ability to data mine ads is becoming harder without the support of these cookies on browsers like Google and Safari (Apple) both of which will no longer support these bits of software after 2024 (one article put the cookie demise in 2022). It is certainly a bleak future for companies like VS that depend so much on creating banner content based on your personalized use of the internet.
This fact is coupled with fact that a study done in the U.K. by The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in 2020 found that Ad Fraud was a real concern, the study entitled: “Commentary: Inefficiencies in Digital Advertising Markets: Evidence from the Field”, concluded that “The CMA’s review has highlighted the importance of advertisers’ access to data to independently evaluate the effectiveness of their digital advertising on an ongoing basis to support the operation of effective competition in digital advertising markets”. This of course is not what you’re getting in most cases and it would appear that VS cleverly uses metrics of a fuzzy nature to ensure that ads on low activity forums are being sold as still viable sources of advertising. If this is fraud I cannot tell because of the lack of data. However, I can confirm that racist, violent , pornographic and anti-LGTQB memes can be found on many of their websites next to ads for Hilton Hotels or the Big Red Boat.
This happy little home page covers up what is going on in their members only lounge. In the off topic section of the website you will find a post in the lounge called Political Memes, I will now give you a set of examples all taken from this website in the last 3 weeks:
This is only from one site and only over a three week period of collecting data. They are mostly from this year. But the racism dates back decades on plowsite.com. I first encountered the website in 2010. I was looking for an answer to truck question for my father’s ailing GMC 1500 plow truck with oil pressure that was so low it was scary. My specific question never got answered actually— no one knew the oil pressure of a GMC 1500 circa 1998 exactly. The website was different at that time full of people with more like a 100 users using it on the average winter night. It was more about the problems with trucks and benign things of that nature. But even then the website had an undertone of violence and racism lurking at the edges. The membership of both forums always tended towards violence even back in 2010 and earlier.
A casual racism was always allowed to fester under the surface of these websites and it is clear that when Vertical Scope purchased these sites during the pandemic—they didn’t care about routing out these elements. They cared about the numbers that these sites would add to their portfolio. That’s why this racism is allowed to fester by the corporations that purchased these sites over the years the community was rotten from the start. The norm wasn’t being anti-racist; but, being diametrically opposed to all things that anti-racism is about.
This user is the most prolific and one of the oldest poster on the website with 23 years of membership and 64,688 thousand messages or an average of 2812.522 messages per year. This number is equal to 2.412% of the total 2.7 million advertised messages on the website. Let that fact sink for a moment. This one person and his cronies have created over 260,000 messages of 8.06% of the total messages in the last few years. It is clear that if these members were banned from the website their daily creation of content would certainly be diminished to say the least. The question becomes one of necessity for the corporations that now own the these forums to have free content to drive people to their websites. What is the value of this free content to the corporations?
Millions— I know for a fact in 2015 VS was pushing on one website along that its ads were $250 to $10,000 per month.
So, there is a strong incentive to push these sites to appeal more productive in the content production and adverting reach. However, I will demonstrate in a few screen captures how in reality these insular communities become nothing more than echo-chambers for a small group of liked patrons that dominate and create over time the bulk of the content.
Often new posters with no idea of what is going are are discriminated against unfairly and driven away by the older cadre of posters in the name righteous anti-spam attacks like the ones depicted here. The funny thing is the posters that were my alias they were happily helping.
I used this account to help find most of the images I showed with the racism and bigotry. When I used the account to point out racist content on the website I gave myself away. The simple fact is that no one the website even those that don’t agree with the ruling ideological cadre still wouldn’t report this content to the administration. Where as it is my goal to have the administration finally admit in writing that they will never actually follow their own code of conduct when it comes these few users.
This interaction was the last one I was able to make under the account KeyWestPirate (I made it after the demise of Jimmy Buffet)—it seemed like a fun idea at the time. The odd part about it is that they tell me how to report and then right after this message they banned me for “rules violations”. It was a bizarre to see the fact that paid administrators of this website were not going to support their own rules namely this one:
To which their site senior administrator Buff gave a thumbs up approval. And then proceeded to allow the popular cadre of users including users “MarkOomkes” and “QuigleySiding” to create numerous posts discriminating against the race and sex of the Vice President and Communications Director of the Biden admin. Both of these black women have been viciously attacked by this user and others with memes that designed to imply she has used sex to propel herself to the position of Vice President. And in the case of the of Communications Director Karine Jean-Pierre who is both gay and black they have described her as being a toilet bowl brush and not smart enough to work in a M&M factory. The comments are clearly sexist and racist when it comes to both Kamala Harris and Karine Jean-Pierre. Other comments found on the website show a disdain for gay and transgendered rights. Such this gallery shows:
These images are only small selection of the images I’ve collected over the last couple of months. Here is a gallery from the another website called Florida Concealed Carry:
And this would seem like a systemic problem to most reasonable people in reality. A problem that could be easily removed if the company followed its own content moderation rules. However, that would create a new problem for the company it would force them to take responsibility for the the content found no these forums. And that is clearly not the goal of the Vertical Scope’s mandate:
In a great irony VS believes that its volunteer status of its moderators exempt them from the vicarious liability— the concept that Canadian law describes as the following:
In my case I could have sued VS when “RoxyWheels” helped to dox me to fellow users of the Pirate 4x4 community in 2012. Since all of these volunteers work under the auspicious of VS Terms of Service and are directly operating as representatives of the company in the role of a moderator by enforcing to the best of their judgement and direct guidance by VS Admins like Bob and Jeff who I’ve spoken too direct to accomplish their job task. So, it is very hard for me to see any legal leg VS has to stand on when it comes to idea of acting on behalf of the Vertical Scope as a corporation— enforcing the TOS is by its very definition acting on behalf of Vertical Scope’s specific guideline of community behaviors.
As one can see that this excuse even extends to VP of Community Development Joe Pishgar— here was a test using an alias a sent him multiple images of the content on his website Plowsite.com:
As you ca see with two alias I found that Joe Pishgar wasn’t going to actually answer these questions with serious answers. He also blocked me on twitter using the same basic content which he describes as “social engineering” campaign when some one is ejected for “abuse or hate speech” which isn’t the case the case is the person pointing out the “abuse or hate speech” was the one being banned i.e. Me. The problem is that Plowsite.com is probably the smallest active community with a membership but has one of the most blatant issues with racism that is continually happening. The primary reason for this is fact that senior volunteer admin Buff is part of the racist cadre that holds court at the forum:
It’s nice to see that Buff blames gun violence on “broke homes with daddy issues and probably a person of color with a[n] axe to grind” as the reasons. This member has also made claims of why he will love to live in Wyoming is due to the lack refugees:
and if that’s not problematic enough for you how about his position on the Southern Border:
Clearly, these positions are driven by racism. And the fact that VS failed to do any vetting of this person before making them a Volunteer Admin is problematic enough. However, after I’ve given them ample evidence that said user is turning a blind eye to the stated rules of the community and allowing his cadre of friends to post repeatedly racist memes many of which he himself has supported with a positive likes forces us to as if the company is not defrauding its general costumer base when it makes claims that such posts will not be tolerated. These are not one of instances there is a pattern of such racism and violence across most of the websites that VS runs. But this site is exceptional in the fact that is has fewest active members and highest number of racist memes I could find per-capita so far.
In my next segment I will talk by why intern monopolies and dwindling user bases is driving the extreme elements to these off-beat sites to connect with other like minded persons.
They’re criminals.