Social pressures are not so easy in real life. In the extremely murky world of internet grifting personalities it’s difficult to assess whether a newly outed convert is being sincere. Since I’ve been on a kick ranting about internet games, let’s start with a non internet game.
Starweb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starweb is a play by mail game where diplomacy was a real factor in success. Not just some vague in game set up like trining a diplomat character for a boost to your nation’s status in the world, real messages between two human beings. Coordinating alliance activities. And backstabbing others for a boost to your score. Paying for success was quite different than now. Instead of stealing Dad’s credit card to buy a booster package (to be faster, not better) you could run up the phone bill. That’s how old the game is.
Within the game is a character type called the Apostle. Instead of ordinary population Apostles start with converts. And converts make more converts on enemy planets just by being there. That’s all they do, their function as representing real people, their entire existence is limited to making more converts or being eliminated for being converts and reconverted back to “normal”. Both of which require an expenditure of in game resources.
This, of course is a ludicrous over the top example of rampant overzealous behavior. But even more honorable things can have encouragement of overzealousness. After Scrooge was visited by some ghosts he changed from stingy miser to the most pro Christmas of all pro Christmas folk. A real life previously uncharitable CEO may take a step back from making more money than he can possibly spend after the tragedy of his small child’s cancer diagnosis and maybe start his company on joining the fundraisers for cancer research he just found out about.
Being overzealous is not necessarily a bad thing, if one still keeps a sense of what’s going on short term versus long term. A respectable charity’s campaign coordinator will provide some paperwork, slide show presentations and some celebrity endorsements to encourage short term zeal. Send you some return mail labels, try to sell some swag and keep poking for more. And when the zeal fades will know that it’s time to move on. An internet grifter is stuck with encouraging overzealousness without ever providing any quid pro quo other than not harassing you when you leave the fold.
Yesterday, Zach had a master class in live-streaming how to attack those who have had the fatigue set in on his cult methods. The entire point was to encourage his biggest detractors to call in for a “debate”. And one of them took the bait during the short time I popped in. Zach was in full, well practiced Gish Gallop angry rant mode. Every time the poor target tried to make a point he was interrupted. New lies presented to distract and confuse. (All the old lies, like picking every Super Bowl winner forever, waking up millions to his great work, etc…). And just in general putting on a show for the current crop of overzealous converts.
Well, one of his detractors that has provided us with video clips of some of the worst of Hubbard was also encouraged to debate. Hopefully he was paying attention to the claim of waking up millions just in one cycle of football season picks.
Zach has NEVER had a million converts, much less a million overzealous converts. In fact, the internet grifter critics have noticed that the tops on his Patreon never tops out at more than something like 5000 zealous followers. Being generous on the math since he said millions
5,000 / 2,000,000 = 0.25%.
It’s pretty reasonable to assume that out of millions of truly totally awakened converts that more than a quarter of a percent would be present now. Even with some dropping out over the years, they would still be out there converting others. Internet chess cheaters aren’t actively recruiting other cheaters (at least not that they brag and whine about) and they’re still a couple of %. My God, these overzealous converts suck at their job of recruiting more converts. No wonder Zach has so much time to rant about his enemies that are supposedly fellow truth seekers.
And even the 3737 current patrons is dubious. There’s no doubt there’s been some astroturfing in those numbers over the years. Apparently Patreon cleans house once a month and deletes inactive, non paying accounts at the start of each month. It’s been like clockwork. Zach builds up about 5,000 followers, start of the month comes drops 20%. Zach builds up to 5,000. Drops 20%. From who shows up actively in the comments of each video it looks like the overzealous followers tops out at the hundreds, at most. Hopefully he’s paying for fake followers and it at least takes a portion of the scammed earnings right off the top of profits.
And speaking of these things. This was the oddest month ever in the cyclical Patreon drop off. The drop off occurred about a week late. And he’s been stuck at 3737 for days on end now. Hmmmmm.
At least the constantly interrupted would be debater did get one poke in before getting yelled at back into submission. Zach rants are all for drama, all for the show of the few overzealous converts that actually were watching (255 at the time I was there). Drama equals engagement, even if it’s being attacked. Drama is the short term emotional reaction that bypasses the life long convert and gets you hooked on short term give me a football winner now!!! How these overzealous converts are supposed to do a proper job of converting more when they can’t even be bothered to learn how to properly rant by joining the stream - ??? They would be better off being a bit of AI code in a play by mail game.
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