There was a lot of stuff in the last few weeks I wanted to have a go at. Sure, I have another article in the wings that focuses on a horrible writer for a horrible aggregate website because that’s my obvious white whale currently, but I figured I’d ought to spice things up and tackle a different target. I was going to go after all the retarded Leafy ‘drama’, which was just equally terrible YouTubers like iDubbbz making really awful chin jokes at him and HeyWatchYourMouth putting together one of the worst fucking call-out videos I’ve watched since Markiplier’s video on the ‘Utubzzzz dramaaa’. Seriously Nick, that video and the one you just put up today are awful, and since you and your moronic fanbase are going to assume it’s because I’m a fan of Leafy, it’s not that. My issue is that you spent twenty-two minutes in your first video making claims that you didn’t substantiate, whether out of ‘respecting’ the privacy of others or malaise, on top of a fuck-ton of jump-cuts which made the video look really ugly and raising points that directly ran counter to the point of your video within said video. Then, you made another video to take one last shot at Leafy and say you’re done with ‘all the drama’ because it’s ‘sickening’ to watch other people make free bank off of commenting on your first shitty video. First, if you’re so ‘done with drama’, then don’t make a video saying you’re done with drama; just stop participating in it all together. Second, complaining about other smaller YouTubers using your video as a springboard to get viewers when you expressed the exact same fucking sentiment when Leafy originally contacted you as you stated in your first video is fucking retardedly hypocritical. I know you ‘commentators’ live on making commentary completely off the cuff, but fucks sake alive, if you want to really go at someone don’t make it off the cuff. Script that shit so you can focus on your points and not destroy your argument at the same rate as you make it. Plus, you and everyone like you, which includes Keem, Leafy, iDubbbz and the others are fucking terrible at calling people out. You guys repeat your points constantly and make objectively terrible jokes. Either stop it or work on your craft so that people other than spergy twelve year olds like your content and it can’t be utterly demolished by a true nobody like me.

With that tangential rant out of the picture, I want to focus on the mobile app ‘Candid’ today. This may seem weird to you, as those who have talked about it have generally been paid to do so by the group who made Candid, but rest assured, I’m not getting paid to laud this shitty app. What I’m going after today is the retarded notion that people have about some of the YouTubers who recently did ‘sell out’ for Candid.

Some of the larger names in the ‘skeptic’ community (quotes because I would consider them the ‘open debate’ community rather than ‘skeptic’ community since doing so labels these folks in with shitty people like Alex Jones and Jeranism who, while being pants-on-head retarded, technically fit said definition) recently gave their blessings for the app Candid, which was purported to be the next version of classic 4chan; at least, as close to classic 4chan as you could get. For those who weren’t around before 4chan became an idiot haven, 4chan was an extremely loosely moderated set of imageboards where people remained generally anonymous. Candid was pitched to be essentially the same thing, where you could say what you want, when you want and it could be as offensive or inoffensive as you chose it to be. After some digging by Harmful Opinions and all but confirmed through a recent livestream Bearing held by Bindhu Reddy (the CEO of the group), Candid shadowbans users who post things that are some level of ‘inappropriate’ (what level that is has not been stated), flushes out ‘spam’ and deletes out posts. This is all done via a robot sub-application built into the software. When this was found out, the YouTubers who advertised the product were then deemed ‘corporate shills’, a shitty catchphrase used by thirteen year old (physically and mentally) angst-ridden dipshits who spend way too much time on Reddit and believe they are ‘above’ the idea of ‘selling out’, and ‘fans’ started unsubbing to the YouTubers with comments of ‘how disappointing’, ‘fuck you corporate shill’ and ‘faggot’, as the YouTube fan-base is want to do when their ridiculously high pedestals they put their favorite creators on gets slightly dented.

To just touch on the app itself, Candid is a terrifying app. While I understand that it is Candid’s product and they are well within their rights to stem things that are negative about their product and that true free speech doesn’t necessarily totally apply to private entities, the app isn’t scary for that. Anyone who went to use the app should’ve realized they weren’t getting a paradise because you need to give them your personal phone or information to get the app to work; no app that was truly about ‘freedom of speech’ would require you to give up personal information in order to work properly. No, what’s scary is the idea that robot software is essentially being taught how to moderate. On a conspiracy level, this is essentially the same thing as giving a robot sentience, albeit a much slower rise to sentience. The whole idea is to create a system that is not human, does not understand human emotions and cannot practice actions that only humans have been show to employ, and it is being given the proto-keys to judge what is being said by humans with the ability to adapt and change. In other words, Skynet or that shitty AI from ‘I, Robot’. On a realistic level, it’s extremely disappointing that there are people who are actively developing social wall-building apps simply because there is a very small yet vocal part of the world that feels the need to keep their glass emotions safe. Plus, Candid and Google’s Jigsaw app are based around the idea of ‘expanding communication’, which is a direct counterpoint to how the software works. Even if it doesn’t push us towards a totalitarian state, the idea that people are fine with endorsing facist behavior is unsettling.

Onto the meat and potatoes of this piece. I could go about making my point by just writing words, but there’s no fun in that; especially when some of the comments these ‘fans’ have made are solid gold, so onto the pictures:

Ah, a classic ‘I would never, it’s beneath me’ statement. Expect a phone to ring when you do indeed sellout, because I’ll have fucking called it.

I love when people on the internet purposelessly capitalize a word. I know the point is to give it more emphasis, but the bold-font is there for that reason. I never see this capitalization tactic ever be used in good faith or by intelligent people, so I can only assume whomever is writing this comment is a massive liar and is not, in fact, a journalist as this person claims to be. Not that it matters anyways since a real journalist wouldn’t be fucking writing comments on YouTube, nor would a real journalist imply that their work involves covering two sides of a story. Moron, there are thousands of news outlets that exist specifically to present one side to a story, and millions of news articles and reports are created every day when only half of the information is out. Then again, I wouldn’t have taken your statement seriously anyways because I’ve also never met someone who employs an anime icon and is intelligent and honest. I’m not saying it can’t happen, just that I haven’t seen it happen yet and my experience has reasonably painted my expectations this way.

The rare one-hundred percent incorrect statement.

Same guy as above; he posted a lot of stuff I found really quotable. Integrity doesn’t sell you in journalism; only a naive freshman in college/university studying the theory of journalism and writing would say this. You spend time online, so you should know who garbage of a statement this is. A place like Buzzfeed, which is a journalism-based organization, lives on making content that is controversial and lacks integrity. Also, what in the hell does popularity have anything to do with anything here? I guess you’re trying to say that a more popular person has a wider broadcasting range, but popularity doesn’t determine a person’s real value nor the value of a point being made. These YouTubers fucked up and, so far as I can see, they’ve only done it once. If some of them double down on what this shitty app, then yeah, I’ll take their recommendations less seriously so long as their other content stays on par with what was there before. If they’re really going ham on the app, I might just stop watching all together, but I’m not going to make these retarded comments saying ‘I’M LEAVING WATCH ME GO ARE YOU WATCHING PLEASE WATCH ME LEAVE PLEASE’ like a teenage girl who feeds off of negative attention. As for the ‘good companies’ bit, those don’t exist. Companies that own up to their mistakes do that when they can’t pay it off, and it works because the average person is a simp who eats platitudes for every meal.

Look at ‘er, the wild ‘I’m leaving, please notice me I need attention’ in the wild! Crikey!

I love how people complain about Bearing being a ‘shill’, even though it’s become a meaningless buzzword for shitheads to use to try and enact some kind of power fantasy via shaming, when he already ‘shilled’ for a recreational drone company months back. I haven’t heard shit about that, and he actually got the goddamn drone for that one which is worth more than the apparent ‘fourteen bucks a day’ that he’s getting from this Candid sponsorship. ‘But Sahltines, that first one wasn’t shilling!’ No, you age-old can of beans, it is. Shilling is the act of helping sell a product by hyping it up. He did a good job giving that drone positive press, so why the fuck didn’t you guys get mad about that. Oh, I know why, it’s because you fatheads are looking at this situation via 20-20 lenses (like all morons do) and trying to retroactively employ your anger and that can’t be done. Never mind that this much rage is ridiculous for something as minor as hyping a product that was pitched to the ‘shills’ as a far different product than was actually advertised. I hate the term ‘privilege’ because it’s used improperly constantly by people with horrible agendas, but this would be an excellent usage of the term; you whiners are fucking privileged to call this an ‘outrage’, as am I for being able to tell you all you’re goddamn privileged.

More importantly, this fucking fetishization of unsubscribing is nuts. This shit is filled on the World of Warcraft, League of Legends, DOTA, Overwatch and every other goddamn huge online multiplayer game imaginable and it’s all fucking smoke and mirrors. Why do I say that? It’s because nobody who actually ‘hates’ these things writes a long, self-indulgent post about why they’re doing it. The people who do that, like this winner here, write these to shame their target while also trying to ‘assimilate’ people into their bullshit cause. It wasn’t that long ago that if you didn’t like something, you just stopped using it. You didn’t write long fucking letters to anyone, and if you did, you then the only two reasons would be that you are actually insane or you really, really hated the product. Writing a ‘here’s why I’m not using your garbage anymore’ letter meant something, but thanks to all you moronic millennials turning everything under the sun into a self-aggrandizing event, that impact is now gone and nobody but you gives a shit that you wrote a dissertation on why you don’t like something. ‘But you do that, Sahltines! You’re a hypocrite’. You’re right, I do write dissertations on why I hate things, but I don’t do it to bring mindless cloud-brains into the fold, I do it because I like doing it and I’ve liked doing it for almost fifteen years now. It’s unfortunately a subtle difference, so some of you won’t be able to grasp it, but it is a difference nonetheless.

To this guy and any other people who write this garbage, please know that if I had as much time in the day as you to spent writing, rewriting, editing, rewriting the edit, editing the second rewrite and then posting the final draft of your shitty ‘notice me’ YouTube comment, I would go out of my way to get another one of whatever I needed to make up for your ‘disappearance’. I put disappearance in quotes because I highly doubt this asshole is going to actually unsub and it’s all just a bunch of posturing and blustering to sound like an online alpha-bastard, despite it being a total weak-spine move all around.

The ‘sceptic’ term is actually funny here despite it being a complete misspelling.

Oh wow, thousands of dollars! God, I wish I knew what it was like to get thousands of dollars! I’ll never know that joy! Oh woe is me! Oh, wait, of course I will because I, like most of the people who have a computer, which requires an internet connection, which requires ludicrous sums of money no matter where you live, which requires a table to put the computer on, which requires space for the table, which means you likely have shelter, which costs money (as does everything else I’ve stated so far), which means you either have a job or an overly loving family. Less verbosely, I’m saying that this idiot and other idiots who are on YouTube likely have a five digit salary above the poverty line. They might not, but I think it’s a fair assumption since a person below the poverty line likely wouldn’t waste time putting idiotic comments like this on a platform where the vast majority of people don’t read the comments. Thus, complaining about making a sum of ten grand over a period of two years is fucking chump change compared to most people who work in this day and age.

To put this in perspective, a human resources manager in the US makes about $60k median. Over twelve months, that’s five grand a month, or what Bearing and these other ‘shills’ made over the course of twelve months. To break this down even further, you could roll out of bed and do mediocre work for four years straight to get some sort of simple sociology or humanities degree, get a job in Human Resources and be eleven months ahead of the Candid sponsoring YouTubers. More directly, eat a dick; a few thousand dollars means nothing.

As for the size of this mistake, it is objectively small. In fact, out of all the ones who pitched the app, I don’t know of one that has been actively dishonest until this point, and this isn’t even active dishonesty. This is poor foresight on their end at worst and a total scamming by Candid’s design group at best. Since Bindhu is tight-lipped about this whole situation and cannot seem to not hock the app at any given chance, I don’t think we’ll get a straight-on answer unless the group is backed into a corner. Regardless, these YouTubers did make a mistake, but it’s not that big of a deal. Unsub if you want, but telling everyone else to as well because we should all share in you one-dimensional outrage even though the channels are all about discourse and sharing diverse opinions is both dumb and it runs counterpoint to the purpose of all of these YouTubers.

Gold. Just absolute gold.

These are the kind of people who hear about some ‘injustice’ or whatever that they don’t like, and enter the conversation by saying, ‘This is horrible, we should start an online petition!’ No, we shouldn’t, you jackass, because petitions don’t do anything and never have, just like you. Honestly, if I were Shoe0nHead, Armoured Skeptic, Bearing or whomever else pitched this app that isn’t The Amazing Atheist (simply because he blew up at Harmful Opinions for no reason when asked about the app), and even TAA, I would be thrilled to see two asshats like you go and never come back. In fact, I’m going to address my small audience now:

Dear Audience,
If you are ever butthurt by any of my decisions, what I write about or what I say, instead of telling me why I’m not Zeus in your eyes anymore, please leave. Not only will you save yourself the trouble of looking like a needy attention whoring idiot and me the time of stomping your ass back into the dirt verbally, you will save the time and mental capacity of everyone else around you who will have to read your inane drivel and waste energy processing it and responding to it. Save your words; you vote with your wallet for physical goods, so do the goddamn same online.

I mean it sincerely when I say I hope these two absolute and true fuccbois get hit by the school bus that will pick them up tomorrow and take them to their 7:30 AM middle school grammar class. Not only are they spouting this ‘holier-than-thou’ nonsense that only comes from people who are mentally teenagers or those studying a super easy liberal arts degree in college like Philosophy, they aren’t even fucking contributing the community. ‘Oh no, Candid ruined the skeptic community.’ No, Candid saved the community because now we’ll see who the real skeptics are, because real skeptics can divorce flippant emotions from their arguments and focus on building rebuttals and statements with solid fact and immutable logic. A real skeptic will be able to understand that these YouTubers fucked up, but it’s not the end of the world and it doesn’t taint their message forever. Get your goddamn priorities in order and be fucking thankful that, like I said before, your biggest problem is that your favorite YouTubers fucked up a little bit.

WATCH OUT, BIG MAN ON CAMPUS WALKING AROUND.

I nearly woke up my roommates when I read this one. Here’s to hoping you get boneitis, you walking bag of fecal matter. ‘That’s mean, Sahltines!’ Yeah, so what? Not only is it a fake disease, but it turns you into a cool dude from the eighties who makes tons of bank, gets what he wants and takes life by the horns and whips it into shape until the symptoms catch up out of forgetfulness of having boneitis and he dies.

You may also be wondering why I left the thumbs up/thumbs down in the last two screencaps. Shitty commenting websites like Reddit and YouTube allow the user to upvote their own post. As we can see, each of these has one single upvote, which means whomever upload the comment upvoted it; fucking hilariously pathetic. I also down-voted them to right the ship because people like these flamers don’t even deserve one.

Oi vey, the amount of people who don’t understand binding contracts.

I know I’m getting to this part extremely late in this post, but while thumbing through all these comments, there is a massive lack of understanding about how a contract like this would work and what likely went down with this whole Candid debacle. I am not a lawyer, but I’ve been around long enough and read enough contracts in my short time on Earth to get a beat on some the basics, so here’s my take but again, take this all with a grain of salt.

I firmly believe that Candid pitched this initially very informally to these YouTubers and pitched as a ‘anonymous shit-posting app with virtually no boundaries or limitations’. This naturally piqued the interest of those who disseminated the pitch on down to us, and they likely flippantly signed the contract. Now, you should never flippantly sign any contract, but considering how many people never read the EULA to video games with online play or the ToS of any major software program (like iTunes), it’s impossible to keep everyone from being stupid. This doesn’t mean I advocate for people being stupid, just that if you want to go ahead and be a moron, then by all means do so.

From this point, Candid likely functioned as advertised and these guys got to play around with it. Fans and watchers also don’t realize that the ‘weeks’ some of these guys mentioned may have been accurate; a company isn’t going to get all this paperwork solved instantaneously and they’re going to want to hook the pitchers as much as they can regardless if the intent later on down the line becomes skeevier. So a bit of time passes in this pre-beta (alpha) and then they get the go-ahead/push from Candid to push the app. They do it, and everything is hunky-dorey; sure, some people will be skeptical that all these people are advocating it, but those folks a minority.

After a bit more time, Candid pushes an update that changes the functionality in the background to test out the real features they want to employ and sell later on, and these changes get pushed silently. I know this idea of ‘undocumented changes’ will freak out people, but every software that gets updated (which is nearly everything in existence now) has undocumented features. As a really good quick example, go look at World of Warcraft patch notes. Usually undocumented changes get put in all the time; they can be small things and indeed are in video games, but they can also be huge changes. Huge secret changes is far easier to pull off in a mobile app since you can direct your idiot user-base towards features that you want them to use, allowing any seedier changes to go undetected for a long time, if ever.

As for the contract itself, which everyone seems to think is the lynchpin of this entire ordeal, the contract is likely worded to be unbelievably fucking vague so that it absolves Candid of any possible wrongdoing. Anyone who has read an apartment contract knows that contracts are written specifically to be as unintelligible and as lengthy as possible to get people to give up at some point and sign the damn thing, and to cleverly weasel the owner providing the contract with as many ‘outs’ as possible. In other words, the contract likely doesn’t mention anything about notifying guys like Bearing about the updates, just that his job is to advocate for the app and do his best to get people on it. At least, it wouldn’t mention anything crazy specific like, ‘We will give you details on every single change that happens along the course of the open testing period’ because, again, contracts are designed to protect the company from getting their asshole legally reamed. It likely says, ‘You shall hock this product to the best of your ability. You shall not disparage this product in any way. You shall perform these duties for a minimum of twenty-four months’. Again, I feel like a goddamn tool for having to keep repeating myself on this but I’m not advocating in favor of Candid’s contract or how they operate and I’m not condoning anyone to not read the contract. I’m simply saying what I think is the most plausible reason as to why this went down as it did.

Lastly, the ‘non-disparagement clause’. This is similar to an NDA that ‘journalists’ (read: awful, biased and agenda’d writers) get when they get access to games early or new products and what have you. The only difference is that instead of not talking about the app, those pushing it cannot say negative things about the app. However, this clause is likely written specifically so that ‘negative statements’ and ‘positive statements’ are the only terms defined. What this means is that while saying ‘Candid fucking sucks’ is a breach of contract, saying ‘Candid is okay, I guess’ or ‘Candid is neato-ish’ or something else completely neutral is fair game as it isn’t defined within the contract and it is not a negative statement. Even better, while Bearing and the others can’t ream this shitty app, people like me and Harmful Opinions can, and those who are under contract can do other things to undermine their contract legally, like how Bearing invited Bindhu onto a live-stream where she proceeded to dig her own grave and Candid’s grave as well. If anyone seriously wants to use her app after this point, it’s going to be an incredibly small minority and the bot is not going to be able to develop properly, so Candid is effectively six feet under now.

As one final point to hammer home that it is very likely these YouTubers got hosed, here is the ‘Notices from Candid’ section from the group’s own Terms of Service page:

It’s that tiny, even scroll-zoomed up to 175%.

While this should be obvious to those with functioning brain cells, for those without, this statement is saying that Candid can update these terms of service at any point in time and not tell you, but whether you read them or not, you’re still beholden to them at any time. Some companies have a similarly worded ToS notification, so you can bet your ass that if they’re cool with not telling you about when the ToS updates, which is a huge fucking change, then you can bet your ass they aren’t going to tell you what updates they’ve made outside of the big ones that they want you, the moron user to focus on. This very reason is why big games will always flash the EULA at you after every patch or expansion or major update; it’s to cover their asses because an EULA can’t be worded as shittily as this is.

In closing, hopefully those reading this take away two things:

1. You probably have no idea what these YouTubers are tied up with and it’s very likely they got bent over the desk without knowing it. They did screw up, but give them the benefit of the doubt should they slow down or outright stop directly sponsoring the app.
2. If you feel the need to write a message on why you’re unsubscribing and how everyone should do the same because these YouTubers are ‘corporate shills who have sold out their life for a shitty beer’, please find the nearest cliff and jump from it. The world is full of morons, the less we can have, the faster I can get better internet and a means to get off this water-encased rock of retards.

Thank you, and good night.