For someone who values facts so much, you've got a LOT of stuff wrong here. It might be better to keep your thoughts to yourself if you're not going to vet them.
1. We didn't refuse to disclose sponsors. This is our first fully-sponsored video. Fully-disclosed as always:
As for the moron who threatened to report us, he did, and it wasn't to the FTC. It was to the Canadian equivalent. Their complaint was thrown out because they complained about this video, which is clearly disclosed lol.
2. We did disclose it. We discussed it on WAN Show when the first one showed up. It's also fairly obvious and other than miscommunications internally (which I've reprimanded the responsible people for) they include showcase in the title. It's fairly self-explanatory and always exceeds the disclosures required by law.
3. It was tap water with a couple drops of iodine vs distilled water for filling water cooling loops. Holy fuck who cares? We weren't presenting testing results and comparing against other products. I just don't like wasting money and generating plastic waste when our tap water is perfectly fine for this purpose.
4. You seem like a smart person. Maybe you can figure out how a live stream went up one day and then a video as if the live stream never happened was uploaded the following day. I'll wait.
5. The poll showed viewers were majority in support of the move. I said that even though the majority said yes I would discuss it with my team before moving forward. I did so (as I said I would) and then disclosed the decision including the rationale. You can't see like:dislike ratios on YouTube anymore, but if you could you'd know the announcement video has a >98% like ratio. Seems like the community is supportive of the move. Wrong again.
6. You can call not being willing to make an undignified face 'integrity'. I call it 'inflexible'. Business owners do what it takes to succeed in their business. I have a hard time imagining myself getting hung up forever on something that clearly doesn't fucking matter.
I guess you don't do anything you don't like because it works better. You just do whatever the hell is most comfortable for you all day every day? Even if the only cost is making a silly face in a picture and the pay-off is improved quality of life for yourself, your family, and the 50+ people who work for you? Cool story, bro 😉
7. I think you're referring to those wooden ones? I'm not perfect. I tried them out. I liked them. I didn't comprehensively benchmark them. These days we're at a scale that I can't personally use every single product we advertise. We also have a lot more people who work here than just me. We always strive to do better, and with certain products - like Vessi, which I obviously don't regularly use since I wear sandals - I rely on the feedback of my team.
We also rely heavily on feedback from our community and are adjusting our sponsor stable for 2022 based on the feedback we've gotten from our community here:
8. Yep that happened. The Vessel days were second most precarious after the first 6 months or so when we were reliant on Yvonne's salary to cover payroll. It was off-topic, and the exclusivity period was finite. We fought to ensure that we could make Nerd Sports available to the masses on YouTube when Vessel went under, and now it is. Cry more?
9. Picture-perfect disclosure. Not only did we disclose the sponsorship, we disclosed the behind the scenes conversation that took place. I stand behind the video. Everything we said in it is factually accurate, and it's a useful tool for deciding which VR headset to buy. To go back and do it again, collaborating with Facebook was a bad move and especially bad timing, but the content itself is fine.
10. I don't think authoritarian means what you think it means. I understand your intent, though. You're more than welcome to question my knowledge. I make mistakes. I'm glad you don't. It must be nice.
For those of us who are human, the best we can do is correct our mistakes as best we can and move on. I feel like my track record on this is pretty good, whether it's a pinned comment, edit to the video, or a clarification on WAN Show, I've always made my best effort to meet my mistakes head-on.
11. Monday.com knows, and anyone who's asked we've immediately answered. No one 'caught us'. Someone asked and I immediately said we use Trello because we do. In terms of due diligence, we ensured that all of the Trello functionality we use is also supported by Monday.com. The only reason we don't want to switch is because it'd be a training and downtime nightmare. We're pretty locked in. To go back and do it again we'd be perfectly happy using Monday. It's a perfectly good product.
Edit: Oh yeah, and you claim in a separate post that we lost a lot of money due to our servers and network infrastructure. Citation needed lol. We've lost a couple of hours of productivity here and there, sure, but the cost of that compared to what it would have cost us to implement some of the dumb shit "pros" have recommended to us over the years (if I had a dollar for every time some wanna be consultant told us to buy an off-the-shelf SAN, I could use it to buy one) is not even close.
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