I’ve tried to avoid really ranting about too much on the blog outside of grifters (and Bilt). I think a lot of us are pretty exhausted with grifting, since it seems like everything is a grift these days. But there’s a particularly egregious example in our hobby that is worth discussing today.
There’s no shortage of churning groups out there born out of a grift. While most (if not all?) of the OG groups were tied to a blog or a podcast, the insanity that was the last few years of couch MS inspired a whole new cohort of groups designed around spoon feeding. Much less “join the community’ much more “join and earn $x amount of money via this step-by-step guide”.
As I’ve said before, I don’t think the creators of these groups shoulder all the blame. More like 95%. When the organizers of some of these plays are presenting them step by step at what amount to public meetups, it’s easy to think some things are ok to discuss quasi-publicly.
When it’s possible to cut out the middleman and make money by sharing these things for a much lower price because you aren’t booking an entire convention hotel in the Midwest, why wouldn’t you?
I like to think we know the answer to that now. Most of these groups are now virtually dead, sans people trying to figure out how to meet a SUB in 2026.
To me, that’s a direct result of spoonfeeding instead of actually teaching someone how to probe and be discreet with a play. Maybe giving anyone with $20 that found your reddit ad promising secret MS methods a play that promoted reckless (and obvious) abandon wasn’t such a good idea after all.
You may wonder why I’m talking about this now since I just said most of those groups are effectively gone. Well, we have a new contestant for “churner that ruined their reputation the most in 2026”. I thought it would be hard to top mailer expiry drama and ill-advised mentions on podcasts, but apparently I was wrong.
I’m going to be intentionally vague because this website doesn’t deserve more attention. But let’s just say that a community member uncovered a public website sharing things that should not be shared publicly. Unlike some of the other community discussions going on right now about sharing, this is unanimous agreement.
What compounds the issue is the way in which the website was found – the community member stumbled upon it because this website is the only one short-sighted enough to mention certain MS topics on the publicly indexable Internet.
Everybody makes mistakes, I know I certainly have. I like to think as a community we give folks that do make a mistake quite a lot of leeway to correct them. But like a handful of others this year, this person has decided the grift is more important than their reputation. And as we’ve seen over and over again, your reputation is everything in this hobby.
Maybe this rubs me the wrong way more even more than others because I write a blog that actively loses money instead of trying to earn affiliate payouts or ad revenue. But I have to imagine that most of us are sick and tired of people refusing to listen to the community because they’re too busy convincing people to sign up for AI-regurgitated slop directly from a private community (one that I’ve heard doesn’t take kindly to leaks, either).
In case you’re reading this, take it from me that blog traffic ≠ blog success. If your traffic explodes, it’s because you’re creating controversy, not because you’ve done some groundbreaking work that totally isn’t written by AI.
When I write a long, personal post about how I think about MS, I get light traffic. If I rant about Richard Kerr, I get tons of traffic and FM backlinks. I’d really recommend that you take the advice of the community on this one and think about long term health of the ecosystem over $10 signups.
乾杯！
Pictured: the apparent worldview of some people in the hobby these days