Responding to the Attacks Today & Yesterday by MusicMan on Cakewalk Forum

[LinkedMusicians]

MusicMan recently received a permanent account suspension from LinkedMusicians due to several months of repeatedly violating our community rules and hostile acts and against the moderator who addressed his violations with him (me). His violations started occurring in May of this year. They were documented and presented to the other moderators for review and discussion in June of this year. There was consideration of a permanent ban, however, I wanted to try to give him another chance, despite him being extremely hostile, via PM and making an attack on me on the forum after receiving a warning.

On numerous occasions MusicMan violated our policy against members posting referral codes in posts. MusicMan has a long history of deceptively using his referral codes at Cakewalk Forum — Wookiee and I discussed this long before I launched LinkedMusicians.  It’s also no secret that MusicMan has a history of grabbing serials members generously give away free and putting them up for sale at KnobCloud and KVR. He has been caught doing that numerous times over the years. And he regularly grabs when developers give away normally paid plugins and puts them up for sale, violating these companies’ policies. In short, I knew that MusicMan engages in a lot of sketchy behavior for years, and I suspected that he’d engage in it here too, and he did. When I confronted him, his behavior was extremely inappropriate and hostile. I can only describe it as strange, dishonest, extremely argumentative and lashing out. And it never stopped after I confronted him. It went on from June until I let him know he was permanently suspended.

In between that time, he started copying my posts to Cakewalk Forum, clearly as his F U to me. It was in his private conversations with me and in his taking my posts and even copying the way I format deal posts (Title +Loyalty Cash +Free Plugin). I confronted him about it and asked if he could adjust his posts to not be identical or extremely close to mine, because — and I’m sure he knew this — it results in Google looking at LM and Cakewalk Forum and de-ranking one of the two pages, and almost certainly it would favor the more established site over LM. And, after that conversation, it seemed clear that he understood this– he’s an IT pro that is highly knowledgeable on digital marketing-related subject matter from a technical perspective. I later attempted to appeal to him again, but his behavior towards me remained hostile and he even insinuated threats of harming LinkedMusicians with the Cakewalk members.

I went to the moderators with the information and my concern that it may be better to continue to work with him than having to deal with him certainly would cause problems if I banned him. I predicted if I did, he would engage in malicious actions at Cakewalk Forum as he insinuated. With some trepidation and a consensus, I informed MusicMan that he was receiving a permanent acount suspension due to multiple violations of our community rules (he used a fake name, Mr Camo — as in camoflague — and a different IP each login, so I really don’t know much about the individual).

After being banned, MusicMan began inserting hostile, trolling messages to me in his Cakewalk Forum posts,. He upped his deal posts dramatically, easily at 3 or more times his prior levels; he was making good on his promise to try to bring down LM. I would estimate that around 60 percent or more of his posts were taken from my posts. More than anything, I have been concerned that his doing that and closely mimicking my formatting style was going to result in de-ranking LM pages in Google, and then AI, something I’ve worked really hard on that has played an important role in the growth LM has experienced.

More recently though, he started inserting claims that I was the one stealing his content. I know that he is friends with AudioSchmaudiio and the two teamed up to mock and ridicule me in a couple of threads, which were clear violations of BandLab’s policy against harassment and cyberbullying, and was eventually removed by Bandlab for that, but they didn’t follow their stated rules and ban the offenders for some reason.

In one of those attack threads, MusicMan and AudioSchmaudio did a contrived back and forth where MusicMan made the ridiculously absurd claim that he was merely banned from LinkedMusicians because he posts on the Cakewalk Forum. Well, we have 4 people besides me with moderator status. Two of them post at Cakewalk Forum too (TheSteven and JoeGYork). Feel free to shoot them a PM or tag them here and ask if they have ever been told by me or anyone on my behalf not to post on Cakewalk Forum or anywhere else. And no, I have never discussed that I would do this post with them, so you’ll have to explain why you’re asking. I’m quite sure their first reaction would be, “What the world is this nonsense about?” It’s just an idiotic lie. But as MusicMan has gone to another forum and publicly posted a lie about why he was permanently suspended by this forum, I am going to share the facts, and two other moderators can verify the parts where I came to them around June. All of it is saved electronically. It’s not a he said she said situation. Everything we’ve ever stated has been preserved and further, I took screenshots and documented MusicMan’s violations.

So, I also want to shut down the other MusicMan work of easily disproven fiction that I steal all of my posts from him — this is so juvenile of him, but I just want to quickly shut that lie down and these two examples do that very clearly.

We recently had two deal posts that were at LinkedMusicians deals forum before any other forum. One was a freebie from Plugin Boutique only sent to their affiliate partners. I published it 10 hours before anyone else. Musicman copied it using his sock puppet account, KingsBay, created a couple of weeks earlier with only two other comments made copying my post from LinkedMusicians, 3 hours before any other site posted the deal (BPB). Even more, while MusicMan used a different IP for every login, most of them were located in Perth, Australia, near King Bay.

My original thread:

🆓 🎁 LM SCOOP: Excite Audio Bloom Bass Groove Lite Plugin Reg $29 FREE!

His thread:
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/topic/92272-free-with-code-bloom-bass-groove-lite/

The sock puppet:
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/profile/31769-kingsbay/

The other recent deal posted at LM first  that MusicMan cut and pasted -- this one identically -- and using his MusicMan account lifting it from the LM post was made by the developer himself, Andrew Fly, who's become a friend of mine and made the joke that MusicMan was syndicating LM content for us (in other words, he's stealing our content and posting it elswhere). This is the original post:

December 20, 2025 at 10:36 pm

🎄HOLIDAY BUNDLE-Cinematic Alpha Floating Ensemble +Deus ExMachina +Exoria $99

Now look at MusicMan's virtually identical post:
December 21, 2025 at 04:22 AM
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/topic/92252-%F0%9F%9A%80-holiday-bundle-%E2%80%94-floating-ensemble-deus-ex-machina-exoria-for-99-615-off-%E2%80%A2-ends-dec-31/

Because we’ve had a few banned members go on Cakewalk Forum to make false claims about their departure, I’m going to do this all in one pass. FTR, whenever there’s a community rule violation, we have a process. We take a screenshot and put it in a document to preserve it. My rule for the moderators is that we treat everyone like a friend and try to resolve things in a friendly manner. What our moderators know is that we regularly see this group from Cakewalk Forum create troll accounts on this site. Some of the names correlate to hate threads that have been made directed at me. Usernames have included ForutneEssayCat, PeterJew...

These four individuals took to Cakewalk Forum and lied about why they have been banned.

MusicMan

He has a long history of deceptively posting referral codes and grabbing serials members post and selling them at KVR and KnobCloud. He’s been doing this at Cakewalk Forum for years – Wookiee and I, a long time Cakewalk Forum moderator, and I had discussed his doing this stuff in the past (Wookiee and I had many chats over the years and he would confide things going on his life). I think a lot of our community members know this. So, wasn't a huge surprise that he started doing the same things here. I confronted him about it around May 2025. He was abusive. At that time, he started copying my deal posts over to Cakewalk Forum. I asked him if he could at least not copy my exact or close to exact posts, as that would result in Google de-ranking LM pages (basically, when Google sees a duplicate page it has to decide which site copied the other and de-values the site that does that, that is why I mainly write my own posts, whether it is sourced from a retailer, developer, blog, forum, subreddit, or Facebook group). But as he had been very helpful to me on one occasion when I was setting up the SMTP email for the site, I cut him some slack. He later took the forum to make a nasty, defamatory post about me.  I took a screenshot and recorded the incident (the process for all violations) and shared the situation with the other moderators. As time passed, MusicMan again did another post with his referral codes. When I confronted him, he was very hostile and showed no interest in being civil.  I again asked him if he could adjust my posts when he make them. His response was to insinuate that he could harm LinkedMusicians. I went to other moderators to share what had occurred and the decision was made to ban Musicman permanently. He has since been posting messages to me in his very prolific Cakewalk Forum threads. We have had at least two other forum members that have expressed frustration with him and referenced him on the site. I have asked them not to do so. Like everything else, there are screenshots for all of this and our moderators were aware of everything.

CClarry

Larry made a post about the US welfare system, claiming that there is a certain group of Americans he referred to as lazy that don’t want to work and compared them to people of the same race in Belize that he claimed had 100 percent unemployment and no welfare system. I replied, “Larry, you’re my friend, but if we get into politics, this place will implode.” Larry posted in response, that I was a “stupid, useful libtard idiot” and threatened to resign from LinkedMusicians. When I PMed him and sent him my mobile phone number trying to persuade him to stay, he responded that I should forget it, that he was done with LinkedMusicians. As his last post was resigning, he violated multiple rules, I proceeded to suspend his account. But I had, for months, continued to send him friendly emails asking him to return. Around June of this year, a LM member PMed me that I should look at Larry’s wall. He posted a chart with pictures of Jewish-Americans in positions in the US federal government, each of them with a photo with a star of David next to them, mimicking the stars of David that Jews were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps. Within a few posts of that, Larry had re-posted a video of the leader of one of the largest and most violent  neo-Nazi groups in the US, boasting that he (Larry) had worked crowd control with a group against the “demon crats.” I’ve PMed with Larry for long over a decade. I knew that he made extremely racist posts on Facebook against people of color, LGBTQ people, Jews, Muslims, and liberals. I did share with him that my family was part Jewish, and he responded with some flat out terrible antisemtitic statements. I responded, let’s not get into politics or stuff outside of music again. And he was able to do that until the above described post on LM which was using a racist trope about Black people -- one that he has regularly posted on his Facebook wall. I did email Larry after seeing the chart of Jewish-Americans and I told him that I would stop reaching out to him after that, and that I was deeply disappointed to see that. In fact, my son was home from college for summer break at that time and I called him into my office and showed him. His response was, "After everything you've known about this guy and what he said to you, are you really surprised?" And, as I told my son, I was surprised. Because I always saw Larry as very much like the guys I grew up with, holding a great deal of racial, ethnic, religious and sexual orientation prejudices about everyone who wasn't white and his brand of Christianity. But to see him posting the leader of a violent neo-Nazi group, the chart of Jewish-Americans with the star of David next to each of them, and then the boast that he worked with a similar group to do crowd control, that was a surprise, and it did hit me hard, because I had many conversations with him and inviting him to be a part of this community. It was a heavy moment to me, and it did hit me hard when I saw that chart more than the video, because it was so shocking to me.

Like everything else, there are screenshots for all of this and our moderators were aware of everything.

Pragi

Pragi was a member that I never had any negative interactions with. But one day, he made two deal posts. Both duplicated very recent threads that were recently made. I did my standard post, writing that someone already posted that deal and I would delete the posts after he had a chance to see it. He PMed me and demanded that I immediately delete his user account and all posts that he made. I tried to persuade him to stay, that I make duplicate posts all the time and mustakatu often catches them, that it’s really no big deal and I wanted him to stay. To my surprise, he responded by calling me a name (basically, that I’m stupid) and need to heed his directive. I proposed that we give it a day and will ask him again. I told him that legally, I am not required to delete his data, that it could screw up other people’s content. He demanded that I delete his account and all posts ASAP. I got back to him the next day and again  repeated to him that I’ve duplicated a lot of deals, that it’s no big deal and would love for him to stay. He responded once again by calling me a name and then compared me to, I believe, Napoleon, telling me that the power of having a forum has gone to my head. I literally laughed at that idea. I’ve been responsible for communities with millions of people. At that point we had maybe a couple of hundred registrants. But he was so abusive to me I closed his account and promised him that I would look into deleting his account. I ended up doing it. But I told him that he had a lifetime ban, that I would not go through this twice. He shot back another insult. I responded that he had been a total jerk to me and I don't get why he felt the need to behave that way. In his Cakewalk attack posts, he claimed that he was banned for simply duplicating two deal posts and that I called him a jerk for it and then banned him. I have a screenshot of his request that I've already posted on the forum back when that makes it very clear, that he demanded to have his account deleted and I was trying to persuade him to stay.

AudioSchmaudio

I never had any interactions with AudioSchmaudio, but if we find that one of our members goes on another site to attack an LM member, the member making the attack will be banned. This is why AudioSchamadio was banned. He was sent an email explaining that. I stated in that email that if ever has a change of heart and promises not to engage in attack posts in the future, send me an email. But, I have since thought, I need to be more firm and my experience is, that anyone whose character would permit them to mock and ridicule someone as he did me is not someone I want to trust again. So I may withdraw that offer.

NOT A FORMER LINKEDMUSICIANS MEMBER, BUT A PARTICIPANT IN THE HATE THREADS

Husker / Grem

These two individuals have a long history of making less than subtle racist and anti-LGBTQ posts on Cakewalk Forum. Wookiee and I got to be close and he confided some very difficult things in his life to me back when I was a member. I had publicly called out both of these individuals for their racist and bigoted posts. A lot of which came around Black Lives Matter protests maybe around 2017 and the Unite the Right rally, then around the time Christian Henson made an anti-LGBTQ post. They used Cakewalk Forum to share their worldviews and hate post about people in groups they don't like (mainly Black people and LGBTQ people). I had spoken up in those threads and told them that the forum policy forbids racist and bigoted posts, that forever made the two men loathe me. According to Wookiee, since then, there were times they falsely reported dozens of my posts within the span of a week. He told me that they were obsessed with trying to get me banned. Of course, Husker participated in the recent threads attacking me. Not a surprise. He's the Mary Worth of hate threads at Cakewalk and VI-Control.

NOT SURE HOW TO CLASSIFY THIS

KiteKrazy

There are a several LM members that I regularly chat with. Some of them still go to Cakewalk Forum. One had informed me about a really terrible situation. There during the summer. It was Pride Month. SoundToys did a special sale contributing net profits to a charity for LGBTQ people. We had a similar thread here. But at Cakewalk Forum the original poster along with another person, who was either LGBTQ or an ally, made a post being grateful to SoundToys for their generosity. KiteKrazy told him that he didn't want him in the community and would be his "demon" until he stopped posting there. He told him that he should go to another forum, and he seemed to reference LM --- which he did in one of the hate threads directed here  -- as a "woke forum." Now, I'll be really candid, while I thought his behavior was reprehensible, I did laugh at being called a "woke forum." If having a policy against any form of bigotry makes us a woke forum, I'll accept the title!

 

That's it. I don't want to do this on the regular forum. This is a members-only, private post. Bandlab appears to have removed the attack threads for violating their policies. I don't want our members to be deceived that anyone has ever been or could be banned merely for making posts that have nothing to do with LinkedMusicians or our members on another forum, including Cakewalk Forum. That's false and absurd. But if someone familiar repeats a lie enough you might believe it. If anyone wants to have an honest, respectful discussion about any of this, feel free. I don't want to spend much time on it, I just wanted to not let false and defamatory statements about me and this community stand unchallenged. I will answer honest, respectfully stated questions.

I plan on removing this thread before Christmas, as this is not what I want this community to be about. This is a passion project. It's about the love of music and the love of others, and keeping this place free of people being cruel to one another.  Clearly, not everyone is a fit for those values and that should come as no surprise to anyone.

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51

[peter]

To be really candid and show that while that stuff does bother me, I have perspective and always maintain a sense of humor, I was going to title this thread: MusicMan mistakes Christmas for Festivus.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

2

[LinkedMusicians]

Yes, I am aware that there was another hate thread with MusicMan and Husker targeting me and LinkedMusicians once again this morning. The Cakewalk moderators took care of it within a few hours, but according to their policies, MusicMan and Husker are supposed to be banned. Well, I’m at least grateful they deleted the harassing posts / thread. And FTR, I had nothing to do with reporting today’s attack thread and I do not know who did.

So for all three of us (max) who care about who is stealing whose posts, the obsessive claim that MusicMan keeps making. He had, in one of the previous threads stated that I am the only one who cares about deals being copied, that it really doesn’t matter to him, but in the last week, there have easily been more than 3 dozen references to me and his claim that the posts at LM are all stolen by me. Yes, this is stupid, and not many people care, but his motive isn’t difficult to discern. He’s trying to attack my credibility. To say that he’s a victim. That I am a bully — he literally posted that in one of the threads deleted by Cakewalk –and I have been the one stealing all of his posts. Now, I would estimate that he has taken around 50-70% of his posts from LinkedMusicians until this week, where that’s gone to a low of around 40%. As I tried to persuade him when he was a member here and doing that, I just wanted him to stop stealing my formatting for titles (PRODUCT NAME +LOYALTYCASH +FREE PLUGIN) because when Google sees that, they derank my pages as they think that I’ve stole them from the much more established Cakewalk Forum. So he’s fully aware that this is harming LM with Google and AI and that I know fully is a part of his motivation. He already expressed to me that he wipe out LinkedMusicians in his past attacks with me in our private messages. There’s no question that he’s engaged in a deliberate attempt to try to harm LinkedMusicians, because he told me that directly.

For those of you following this nutiness. Here are two posts that will tell you very clearly that MusicMan is indeed copying the posts here to the Cakewalk Forum. Although in these cases, while I realize he’s thinking he will make LM irrelevant by duplicating all of our content, he changed the wording on the posts — so it won’t harm us with Google or AI AS MUCH. That said, having original deals here helps us a lot, and we lose that when MusicMan duplicates them at Cakewalk Forum (CF).

I could give literally hundreds of examples that use time stamps, making it clear that MusicMan has duplicated posts me and other members have put up. But I’ll provide two examples that tell the story better than dozens of others could do. In the past week, there were two deals that were posted at LinkedMusicians before they were posted anywhere else – no other blogs, no other forums, subreddits, Youtube, etc. We had an exclusive start on these two. The deal below was only sent to Plugin Boutique affiliates with an embargo. As our site is global and they only stated a date for release without specifying a time zone, I chose to go with Australia time, releasing it 10 hours before any other site, which appears to be BPB. Musicman copied my post info to release a code and free offer that wasn’t available anywhere else until 3 hours after he posted it.

My original thread:

🆓 🎁 LM SCOOP: Excite Audio Bloom Bass Groove Lite Plugin Reg $29 FREE!

His thread using a sock puppet:
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/topic/92272-free-with-code-bloom-bass-groove-lite/

The sock puppet:
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/profile/31769-kingsbay/

MusicMan is an IT pro who used a VPN and different IP addresses on literally every login he's ever had at LM and a fake name Mr Camo -- as in camouflaged. However, most of the IP addresses share in common that they're in Perth, Australia. One of the three sock puppet accounts he uses at Cakewalk Forum to copy LM posts is the above KingsBay -- located right next to Perth. Kinsbay, like MusicMan's other two sock puppet accounts, was created only recently -- only two weeks prior to this post -- and had made only two other posts, comments in other people's threads that followed the same writing style and phrasing as MusicMan, just like his other two sock puppet accounts.

This second example is MusicMan using his own account to copy a deal that was first posted at LM by the developer, Andrew Fly. Even Andrew acknowledged and thanked MusicMan for "syndicating LM and spreading his deal to another forum --- which I did laugh at:

December 20, 2025 at 10:36 pm

🎄HOLIDAY BUNDLE-Cinematic Alpha Floating Ensemble +Deus ExMachina +Exoria $99

Now look at MusicMan's virtually identical post:
December 21, 2025 at 04:22 AM
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/topic/92252-%F0%9F%9A%80-holiday-bundle-%E2%80%94-floating-ensemble-deus-ex-machina-exoria-for-99-615-off-%E2%80%A2-ends-dec-31/

I've shared it before, and I think I will stop doing so after this. But I use a combination of technology to bring together emails from retailer partners like Audio Deluxe, Plugin Boutique, Best Service, EastWest, and various developers -- a number of the retailers I have affiliate relationships send me lists of deals, upcoming calendars. I then use an app that brings together the various blogs for developers, retailers, bloggers, forums, and social media groups, and I look through all of it and pick out the deals I feel are of greatest interest to our community. I curate the deals.

There are only so many deals at Audio Deluxe -- where I have long posted deals from and where MusicMan has copied my formatting and is now trying to post deals before I get to them from there. He's going to frame that as me stealing his posts. But he -- and hopefully everyone who has thought this through -- knows that he's going to the same retailers and developers as me, we're going to be posting a lot of the same deals. That's simple logic and I think he's smart enough to realize that. But he's thinking that a lot of people aren't as smart as him that he can deceive.

Again, I realize this seems stupid to most people, because on one level, his attacks are stupid and meaningless.  But those attacks, which are based on lies and very malicious, are focused on trying to destroy what I spent more than a year on, thousands of dollars, and thousands of hours of time and most of all my heart into building. All over one man's pettiness and venom over being told not to post referral codes. I even came back and offered to post his referral codes on occasion because he had once given me helpful technical advice on setting up the site's email. At that point, was too far gone to try to destroy LM. And he was a member. But as I told the moderators back in June. I didn't want to ban him, because I was confident if I did that he would be even more intent on damaging LM, as he had said he could do in an angry outburst. If any of the other mods want to share anything from those messages I sent here, feel free. This guy lied and attacked me. I am no longer keeping what he did here private. He lied about what happened to attempt to attack me and LM. When he did that, I am going to share the facts of what really went on and why he was banned.

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1

[LinkedMusicians]

UPDATE: He apparently just got a warning and time-out. It’s a real shame. An individual like him or his pal Husker is not going to be able to suddenly transform themselves into stable individuals after patterns of cyberbullying and obsessive harassment like they’ve just engaged in. It’s not a stretch to predict that they’ll soon be back to their old habits. So, I’m going to remove this from being pinned soon, but I won’t delete it, so that people are aware of these folks histories. Can these guys go a week or two without bad behavior? I seriously doubt it. But I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

• This reply was modified 3 months ago by LinkedMusicians.

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[lastcall]

I find it so weird how people throw away their lives doing these kind of things.
It’s just a big waste of time.
Why not focus in doing something productive with your life, so you can improve it?
My comment is aimed at the whole world… (to those whom my description fits).

One way to improve your life is GETTING TOGETHER to achieve certain goal.
Where does all this nonsense and rivalry come from?

I don’t understand lots of human behaviour.
Is it low IQ? Is it emotional trauma? Is it low emotional intelligence?

Worst part is when they look like a very nice person then they explode on you… very very disappointing.
Very very very disappointing.

Then I see some very cool dudes on Youtube wanting to help the viewer (and actually succeeding) with any matter in life,
then my faith in humanity comes back. (2 of them for my case are Paul Third and Emrah Celik, very very passionate guys).

• This reply was modified 3 months ago by lastcall.
• This reply was modified 3 months ago by lastcall.

2

[LinkedMusicians]

On lastcall said

I find it so weird how people throw away their lives doing these kind of things.
It’s just a big waste of time.
Why not focus in doing something productive with your life, so you can improve it?
My comment is aimed at the whole world… (to those whom my description fits).

One way to improve your life is GETTING TOGETHER to achieve certain goal.
Where does all this nonsense and rivalry come from?

I don’t understand lots of human behaviour.
Is it low IQ? Is it emotional trauma? Is it low emotional intelligence?

Worst part is when they look like a very nice person then they explode on you… very very disappointing.
Very very very disappointing.

Then I see some very cool dudes on Youtube wanting to help the viewer (and actually succeeding) with any matter in life,
then my faith in humanity comes back. (2 of them for my case are Paul Third and Emrah Celik, very very passionate guys).

My take on this, and I did, through this experience, try my best to talk sense with Musicman — I have no idea of the guy’s real name, because his record was all fake information. I, on numerous occasions, tried to persuade the guy to put things in perspective. He was just incredibly angry at me for confronting him about his using referral codes in his posts. I went to the other moderators to tell them what he was doing all the way back in June, so the situation with him has long been known to our moderators. His behavior was very unusual; he would lash out in very malicious ways. And before all this, we had gotten along great. Before this, I was setting up the SMTP emails for the site with Amazon and found it really confusing and he gave me some super helpful advice, so I really went out of my way not to suspend him. I even offered a way around the rules for referral codes and there were, I think, three occasions where I made posts where I posted and tagged our moderators AND MuiscMan, offering to use their referral codes as a way to thank them for helping with the site.

I’ll give you my take on what it is with him, because it happens when you moderate and give certain types of guys — and it very much seems a macho guy thing — a rebuke of any kind, they overreact. There was another former member, I’ve never talked about it before, that violated our policy of attacking other members (not me). I temporarily suspended his account. I always got along super well with the guy. Never a run in. And he had made a really vicious, defamatory post about Peter from IK. So, I suspended his account and I sent him an email. I told him that his post violated the rules, and I needed to edit it and I needed his commitment to not do a post like that again.  His response? “F*ck you and f*ck America!” I was completely caught off guard on that one and tried to calm him down. I responded, with empathy. He’s Canadian and at the time the US president was threatening to take over Canada, and I took that into consideration. So I let him know that I didn’t agree with that stuff, I just needed him to promise not to attack Peter or anyone on LM in the future. He lashed out at me again. I hated the idea of banning this guy. I told the other moderators about it, and I recall that Brian really wanted this individual to stay, and I really bent over backwards but this guy, became incredibly abusive. I wrote to him, “I don’t know what’s going on in your life. I’m going to consider that you may be having a difficult time in your life right now. I just need you to promise me that you won’t lash out at another member again, if I remove the suspension.” The guy again told me off with some F bombs and other names, largely about Americans, and I never heard from him again.

I think there’s some macho response that some guys have. It’s this toxic masculinity bullshit, to some extent, I think. We all have our shortcomings, but I know that isn’t one of mine, and that’s the common thread I see with these guys. All I know is that it’s a sure sign that they don’t fit with the values of this community to respect others. There is no question about that.

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[LinkedMusicians]

@lastcall While I enjoy YouTubers, if you’re looking for people who do things to help others, I wouldn’t consider influencers — who make a lot of money from their videos — the place to find selfless, noble people. Influencers are an essential part of digital marketing these days. Developers have to pay these guys A LOT of money to get their products featured on their channels. They’re basically independent promoters. I shouldn’t say names, but I have advised developers and facilitated influencer relationships. What influencers are experts at are building people’s trust and confidence and then they shop that around to brands to pay money so that the influencer can make a lot of money off of the people that trust them. Nearly 100 percent of them violate regulations and laws and DO NOT disclose the financial and product compensation they receive from the brands they promote — and they disguise it as reviews. To be really clear, it is an industry based on shilling. They’re no more than infomercial pitchmen. I’ve interacted with a number of them, including one that I enjoy watching his videos, but even several years ago he was asking $15,000 minimum to feature a developer’s sample libraries or plugins as “reviews” on his channel, he also wanted to partner in products as he became one of the most popular influencers in this space.

Dead serious, if you want to find really noble people who help others with no selfish motivation, look no further than people like @lamia6, @mustakatu, @bluescat / brian, @joegyork, @doug, these people have put in many hours helping on this site with no financial benefit. They don’t get free products. Even cclarry has been getting free products from developers for years for his posts (if you don’t believe me, if you search on Andrew Fly’s posts, he acknowledged that he has been giving Larry free libraries in return for posting his deals for many years. But the people I just mentioned aren’t getting any product or financial benefit for helping out. I realize that there are people who think because I have affiliate links that I’m making a bunch of money off of this site. That’s not reality. November was phenomenal. It paid for around 3 months of operating the site. But since then, December commissions haven’t covered the month’s expenses. I think, in a year’s time affiliate commissions may cover the cost of operating the site, but we’re not there yet. Now, if you compare that to the big deal subredits, and Facebook groups, there is a lot of money to be made for the people who operate those groups because they have upwards of 100,000 members in the biggest ones. They also use a different model. They’re not providing people with the best deals – they’re providing people with deals they make affiliate commissions on.

So there’s often a profit motive in why people do things. Those people who help with this site have no financial or product benefit for what they do. They’re just really kind, thoughtful and wonderful human beings and I know that first hand. It is something I have to remind myself about when I’m getting really down about people like MusicMan who are on a vengeance tour merely because they got called out for their deceptive money-making scheme.  I might be bending the rules a little when I write this, but the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. So is the human ego. The best we can do is continue to focus on being kind and thoughtful to one another and look out for others. That’s what I believe. I do need reminders myself and when I thank others, it is also me reminding myself of the good and decent people in this world and to be thankful for them. And I am. And, yes, I think you’re one of the very kind people that I am grateful for, @lastcall. You and I bonded at this site. I think that’s real. I think that’s special. Oh my gosh,. I can imagine my daughter telling me, “Oh dad, you can be so cringe!”

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