Many years ago, famous basketball player Michael Jordan was getting pressured to become involved in a political matter he wasn’t passionate about. When asked why he was unwilling to make public statements that the person talking to him wanted him to make, he replied:
“Republicans buy sneakers, too”
The point being that if you take a strong position on a controversial issue, you’ll make one segment of your customer base happy, but you’ll offend another segment enough that they might stop buying your product.
Obviously, I’m using this (my first post here) as a reference to Alta. Yes, instituting draconian censorship will please blue haired, anxiety med popping, marketing employees. It will super-piss-off the vast majority of:
- Gym owners
- MMA fighters
- Prospective MMA students
- Regular MMA forum posters
I know these people, and you know these people. They’re not a normal cross section of society. They’re super high in testosterone, low in anxiety, and high in desire for autonomy. They also enjoy locker-room humor, as well as male bonding through frequent insults and occasional harmless pranks.
Hundreds of analogies come to mind.
Alta buying the OG was like having an LGBTQIA+ friendly company buy a chain of Christian book stores, and forcing the stores to place rainbow colored dildos next to the registers - because bibles might be offensive to some customers. It was like a popular barbecue restaurant changing the recipes to be fat-free vegan and high fiber. It was like a Christian group buying the biggest gay bar in the city so that they can hand out tracts.
As I’ve said before, it’s like buying a skate park; then painting over the graffiti and putting up no skateboarding signs. If you try to shove your beliefs down customers throats, at some point you have no more customers to kick around. They find another place to go, and they don’t come back.
I think about this with companies I use for software and software services like e-mail. I think about this with banks and other financial institutions. For example, when PayPal announced it’s fines for ‘misinformation’, a bunch of customers (myself included) were done with them forever.
When I signed up for this place today using an e-mail address, I had to think that in spite of having used that e-mail provider for decades, someday, I might suddenly be through with them for good.
That’s how it is living in a time when faceless corporations hire woke freaks to be content moderators and political commissars.