I'm surprised this is getting very little attention on ET when you think of the precedence this court decision could set potentially for ET and for Baron.
This one bit is just too fumny. BM is one of the biggest Internet forum dictators, manipulators, censors working hand in hand with sponsors to control what is allowed to be posted. "Freely express their opinions". LMAO! ET is not even better. Begging for money is even funnier. This guy is so unprepared. Not a big surprise he went broke.
Here is my take on the lawsuit: The interesting part is that it was caused not by customers complaining about and criticizing a vendor (which would be a free spreech issue and I would be behind it), but a contract worker bitching about not getting paid according to agreement. Since we or Mike didn't know the details or who was right, it is a he said/she said situation. In cases like that Mike shouldn't have let the contractor bitching or if he did, he should have given the vendor equal time and space, and we are back to the he said/she said situation and nobody is the wiser. But he banned the vendor, so only negative posts were allowed from the bitching guy. Obviously if you are in this kind of business where reputation counts, something had to happen. A very important issue here is that the suing vendor wasn't a paying vendor on the site, which would have made a HUGE difference and they would have been protected by Mike. A very easy example is how TST was treated here and there. Althought TST was originally an advertising vendor Baron let us criticize the company, what they didn't like and they eventually left ET. Over there I was threatened with banning for being critical towards TST, and asking too many questions. Guess what, they are still an advertising promoters there... So to me the case is more about Mike providing an UNFAIR playground where parties weren't given the same opportunities to express their views..... ---------------------------------------- Unrelated but since I like to predict: I am betting on Big Mike leaving Peru in less than 2 years and moving to another place... If I ever pay the Elite membership it is because I want to read about his Adventures and see more of his dogie pictures...
The same things happen here at ET too. Bans of users who make comparisons between A and B. Threat messages sent via PM and other laughable stuff. Both ET and BM are shitty places. No idea who is worse.
AMP did not pay "protection money" aka advertising income to BigMike. So they got hammered. If they did, like Mirus, Big Mike would simply have deleted any unfavorable post.
Baron allows negative posts aimed at sponsors. I am certain he's lost revenue as a result. You would never see that at BMT.
There is nothing special on BMT. I am a long-term user of ET (got me a second nickname for this post because unfortunately I chose the same nickname on BMT as here) and got into BMT when it was much cheaper than today. I never got something really interesting out of BMT. In contrast here on ET I found some very helpful postings over the years (especially from the quite old times). I can also follow the people that claim that BMT suppresses opinions that are not following what they want to read. Finally they have some competitions about who is posting most and so on. I see a direct correlation: Higher post count -> less value.
I've barely looked at BMT's site but I think it's a catch 22. Their site looks cleaner with less wackjobs but is probably way overmoderated. ET is pretty much anything goes, but dude, the quality over here sucks. I mean I have no idea where some of these recent posters are coming from. I mean we have some seriously weird dudes here. I don't know which I prefer. Probably neither. Doesn't seem to be much middle ground.