Today, we had to make the unfortunate decision to ban Hermit. This decision was not made lightly, and myself, @SaintSovereign and @RVconsultant (@DarkPhilosopher was away working on a project) discussed how we should handle this situation for a few hours before coming to this decision.
First, Hermit was NOT banned for disagreeing with us, or for bringing concerns to our attention. After the “confrontation” in the “Honest Feedback on Qv2” thread, the entire moderation team decided to move on and simply let the conversation evolved based on customer feedback as we always do, now that we have the new listening guidelines up, which we believe will alleviate reconciliation issues.
It was then when we received a PM from someone claiming that they had incontrovertible proof that Hermit was lying about a number of issues and was intentionally causing issues to push an agenda that he was more knowledgeable than us. We generally do not look at people’s PMs, as we barely have time to answer questions, but in this case we had to investigate. As such, we reviewed a few of Hermit’s messages and were both shocked and saddened by what we found. We will not post whom he was speaking to in these PMs, and this occurred across multiple conversions, though we are showing the most recent. If the individual he was speaking to wishes to come forward and validate that these are the true, unedited messages, we would appreciate it. There is no obligation to do so, though.
First, Hermit admitted in this message from roughly three days ago that he deliberately made an overly dense sub containing five cores because he wanted to “prove that the amount of cores is an illusion, and so is the amount of modules,” a statement that directly contradicts our recommendations, as we stated in the “Honest Feedback on Qv2” thread. In other words, the statement posted in the “Honest Feedback” thread were false, as he knowingly went against what we’ve said in an attempt to prove us wrong.
When asked how he intended on listening to the custom (and he ordered two), he replied he was going to “brute force his subconscious into accepting two new customs.” Again, this is against the recommendations, and he was claiming on the forum that he was already doing 1 loop per day every other day, and still having “issues” with Qv2, as can be seen HERE.
The individual he was talking to mentioned that @SaintSovereign has said that “brute forcing” was not recommended, and Hermit once again attempted to bypass the recommendations with a vague, “depends on how you define brute-forcing.”
There’s more here, such as him telling this individual (and others) that the number of cores in a custom doesn’t matter in regards to reconciliation, something that’s absolutely not true, and again, in direct opposition of the recommendations:
We’ve actually had Hermit tell people this and then when that person build a custom that doesn’t work, try to demand a refund. We are not just making up recommendations as we go. Saint and myself will literally subject ourselves and the paid private testing team to a ton of loops to see what the effect is. It’s not pretty. Like Saint said the other day, when you see him vanish from the board for a week or two, that’s generally what happened, haha.
The ENTIRE moderation staff has asked Hermit multiple times to stop doing this. We welcome experimentation and discussing those results, but Hermit has taken it to another level. He is now pretending to have advanced knowledge of our products and giving out dangerous information to new customers. We have received a ton of complaints and flags about this and we tried to talk to him in private and publicly on the forum. Saint messaged him twice and asked him to stop pretending to be an authority figure and I have personally done the same.
Now it’s escalating to him plotting to run his customs incorrectly for the purposes of proving us wrong, and then when it failed, he created a post under the guise that he was following all of the rules and there was something wrong with Qv2. As Saint stated from the start, there is nothing wrong with the technology, it just takes awhile for everyone to figure out how to get the nuances of it.
There’s nothing wrong with anyone posting that they think Qv2 may cut a bit deep. We NEED that feedback. When we started hearing that Qv2 was harder to run, we listened immediately pivoted to researching the New Listening Instructions AND we began to working on solving the “hard problem of reconciliation,” and I’m sure most of you have figured out that this is what the OPEN BOUNTY thread is under SubClub Labs. Saint even tested the new listening instructions AND the open bounty (he has some interesting, exciting news soon) himself for a few weeks using Paragon and R.I.C.H.
So yes, we ARE listening to your issues. We’re just not going to go backwards in technology when we know that’s not the issue. And you are always welcome to bring up any problems you may have. However, if we discover that you are outright falsifying information to push some odd agenda, we will have no choice but to ban you. What Hermit was doing is downright dangerous, telling people new to subliminals that the number of cores used in a custom title is irrelevant, etc. You all know what overload feels like. It can floor even the most experienced of us. We have to protect our customers, and when you have someone who is not only giving out dangerous suggestions under the guise of being an “expert,” we have to take action.
Some of you will be frustrated and mad - we understand.
But again, we cannot allow this business to fall under crazy regulations and scrutiny because of the actions of one person. We still believe in experimentation, but please note your deviations from the recommendations as experimentation. Most of you do this very well, but be cognizant of how you’re coming across. And of course, please do not do what Hermit did.
As we can see, and we have debated this thoroughly, there is nothing honest about the “Honest Feedback of Qv2” - and when we are talking about such profound technology and the potential impact dishonesty can have on development and even more importantly our customers, their well-being and progress, we simply have to take action and protect our customers, no matter how much it saddens us personally.
This is that action.
We wish Hermit all the best in his future endeavors, and hope that his journey leads him to his greatest potential.
(a very simplistic way of explaining it but yeah)
