So I thought it's time to put this chapter to an end. We have survived all the potential backlash, in fact we are stronger than ever before. I want to engage with
three arguments he wrote under his own Youtube video. He wrote plenty of comments, addressing some of the criticism under his video and I thought I'd deconstruct some of them.
Comment number one.
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When someone brings up my response to him, he says he doesn't want to respond to my criticism in this thread, saying his intention first and foremost was to get people out of the forum. And apparently two members decided to leave the forum as a result of his video and he uses that as an argument why his video was a success. There is just one problem. As a result of your video, we had thousands(!) of guests visiting this forum, people who are now aware that this place exists and we had a significant increase in member count, approximately 3.5k new members joined this forum since you dropped that video. That's a huge increase of new active members. So when you say you made two members leave, let's make it 20 or even 200 just for the sake of argument - it doesn't compare well to all the new members that came from
your community, people who joined us because they saw through your bullshit.
Let me visualise the scope of the new attention we've received thanks to your video. This is a graph of all new registrations from December to the end of February. Before Tantacrul released his video, we had approximately 30-50 new registrations every day. Now it's several hundreds
each day. You can see we had zero registrations when we turned them off temporarily but as soon we opened registrations again, we had another spike. Not even the NYT article caused so much incoming traffic over such a long time.
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Honestly, I don't want this forum to grow exponentially but that's we experienced in the last few months. I don't want advertisment for this place and as I said previously, it was a good thing you had to do very specific research to find this forum. But you've singlehandedly changed that. Thanks to you, anyone can find this forum now. That's what happens when our opponents can't stop talking about the existence of this forum for one second. Years of activism to get us deplatformed, only to help us grow in size and that's not exactly a new thing. This has happened every time when a news outlet talked about us, this has been a reoccuring theme since 2019.
But it gets even better. Thanks to Tantacrul, we are now mainstream, so much that we even have a
Wikipedia article now - with a direct link to our forum. Sincere question, is that a victory for you? How does it feel to be responsible for all of that, Tantacrul? Maybe you shouldn't have listened to these "grievings parents", because they've been helping to grow this forum for approximately three years now. Streissand effect, I'm pretty sure you know about that. And I knew that would happen, one day before your video released, I made this comment on my profile.
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And it turns out, I was right, don't you think? I hope you'll sleep well tonight, Tantacrul.
Interesting choice of words though. Someone points out that we criticised his video (and it literally contains false information btw) and he implied his only goal was to reach as many members as possible with that video and make them leave the forum - which is the reason why the video consists of nothing but slander. That was always his goal and nothing else. It was never his intention to have a meaninful conversation about the topics discussed in this forum and that just shows he doesn't care about the struggles of our members. He doesn't really care about suicidal people. And look. He could have used his time and energy to create something productive, instead he released this hitpiece that doesn't improve anyone's life. And what's worse, he is still making alt-account not only in this forum but also
on Kiwifarms, acting like a troll instead of taking care of
his community. You would think that would be his main priority now instead of wasting so much time with such
nonsense.
Comment number two.
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2. he says another reason why he doesn't want to respond to criticsm is because he hasn't seen any counter-arguments worth engaging with. I find it a little bit difficult to believe. There is a reason why his entire video is based on slander, why he doesn't show any of my countless efforts defending the existence of this forum or the response of the community. If he engaged with the arguments I've presented in my thread or the arguments of other people in the favor of this forum, he would expose his audience to pretty convincing and common sense arguments in favor of individual autonomy and consequently the right to die. And he doesn't like that. It's as simple as that.
And all the new members from
your communtity, who made up their own mind after reading some of our posts, prove that point.
Comment number three.
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He also justified the existence of this video and exposing his audience to the forum with the fact that the community is already huge, implying he doesn't really contribute to the popularity of this forum. But wait a minute, isn't it people like him that made the forum so big in the first place? I thought a meme might be an appropiate way to explain in very simple terms why videos like his and the coverage we received from every single news outlet on this planet in the last 3 years are the reason we have such an "enormous reach", as he claims.
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Over the past few years, we had excellent exposure thanks to the media. And just a little reminder for all the people out there. We don't advertise for the forum. It's you people that give us free advertisment for this place, over and over again. We never asked for it and honestly, I never wanted it. It was never anyone's intention to grow this forum so quickly. But what do you expect, when you advertise the "forbidden fruit" to people, do you really think people aren't at least gonna take a look? Something that's so bad, we can't talk about it openly? Something so horrible you should under no circumstances look for this place? News flash, people are gonna do the exact opposite and that's a pretty human thing. People don't like to be told what they're allowed to see and read. That's why we had so many guests in the past few months and I can assure you, even if they didn't make an account yet - there will plenty of people that bookmarked this forum just in case. You never know when you might need the ressources in this forum. And maybe people like the fact that they can use this forum to talk about the "forbidden fruit" so openly and reading through the registration queue, that seems to be a common theme among people who want to join this forum.
I'll end my response with a
quote of mine from 2021.
"Every time you mention that there is a place out there, in the distant corners of the internet, that allows people to talk about deeply personal struggles without censorship and the moralising undertone, a platform that recognises individual autonomy and the right to decide what happens with your own life (which you essentially treat like the forbidden fruit of the 21th century by the way) you will increase the member count of this forum - deal with it."
It doesn't matter how you spin it, this forum is immune to bad publicity. In our case, all publicity is good publicity and that's why our opponents struggle so much with this forum. They can't grasp the idea that people actually want this forum to exist - because it addresses very important and neglected needs.
And that's all I have to say about Tantacrul and his shameful video. He is obviously not interested to have a meaningful conversation about the topics discussed in this forum and he doesn't even want to portray our position in a fair light as seen in his hilarious engagement on Kiwifarms. He is scrambling to find a good justification for his video and I said, it has already backfired. And let's be honest, he probably knows that his video was a huge mistake, he just can't admit it. His desperate attempts to control the narrative on Kiwifarms, all his alt-accounts in this forum - it's just pure cope.
Here is my final question.. was it
really worth it, Tantacrul?
I'm out.