Big News in the Bike Touring World
April 1st, 2024: The bicycle touring world was rocked today when Neil Gunton, creator and owner of CrazyGuyOnabike, announced that he was purchasing competing website CycleBlaze.
According to Gunton, he is paying "in the low seven figures" for CycleBlaze. "I have already lined up financing for the acquisition - I have been approved for about 25 new credit cards with great introductory low rates. I expect to be able to pay all of them off soon, when my long-gestating social media website, TopicWise, finally goes live, Real Soon Now"
Gunton, formerly a bicyclist and currently a well-known shut-in, conspiracy theorist, and fire extinguisher enthusiast, says his first order of business at CycleBlaze will be to "ban approximately 80% of the current membership. Basically, if you ever criticized me, even mildly, you're gone. You're definitely gone if you ever clicked the "Disagree" rating on anything I ever wrote on CGoaB. I might also ban people who didn't click the "Agree" rating on my posts in a timely manner as well."
He continued, "I CREATED THIS THING FOR YOU PEOPLE, AND THIS IS THE THANKS I"
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8 months ago
:-)
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Great article and great replies!
8 months ago
:-)
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6 months ago
As an outsider, it's very easy to see why he feels this kinship to Trump. He and Trump are quite a bit alike. They bring everything on themselves, yet, the consequences of their own actions is never their own fault, it's always someone else's, and they play the part of the poor, poor victim of everything that happens to them, and in both cases, it's an Oscar-worthy performance. "Woe is me! Everyone is out to get me! I'm the only one telling the truth and everyone else is lying! Oh, the anguish and woe! Will this sorrow never end?!"
I'm an outsider, and from my viewpoint, he's absolutely right: He and Trump are indeed soul brothers. Both are weird, immature, paranoid little crybabies. Anyone disagreeing or showing a slight hint of disloyalty is thrown under the bus, even if they're a paying or donating customer.
After seeing how Neil takes absolutely everything personally, to the point that some things that aren't meant as insults do become insults to him, it's very easy to understand how his site has become an utter failure, simply because he kicked all his own customers off.
He simply has no idea that he's running a business, not a social media site, and the cyclists are CUSTOMERS, not USERS. If he'd shifted his thinking just a little bit and acted like a legitimate businessman instead of a "Trump" businessman, he would have started to make money instead of hemorrhaging it. Instead, someone checking a box to agree with someone that said something he doesn't like becomes an act of terrorism or character assassination, in his mind, so he runs everyone off of his web site. It's probably too late, as the word has probably spread through the cycling community that his site can be toxic if you "earn" his ire.
My advice to Neil: Grow up.
Of course, there is a zero percent chance he'll do it. It might simply be too late.
4 months ago
Instead of deciding to be introspective and think about how he can improve, he simply decides that someone who would offer an honest opinion has "TDS." From just the few paragraphs, he's decided I have this fictitious thing called, "TDS." I looked this "TDS" thing up. Apparently, anyone who has anything bad to say about Trump has this "TDS" condition. No more needs to be said about it here because nobody takes accusations of "TDS" seriously.
What I find odd, though, is that Gunton says that he was a liberal before becoming "independent." However, his losing customers didn't start until he started dressing his own users down in his forums for disagreeing with him about subject du jour. It's not his web site or the software that is the problem. The people aren't leaving because they're liberals, or commies, or horrible people. They left because he ran them all off. It's that simple. His page doesn't need new features or bug fixes, and there's not a magic piece of code that is going to make it the magical one true site for cycling tourists. He just needs to act professionally and let the site be about bicycle touring without injecting his toxic politics into it. That's the only thing he needs to do.
There are other special interest pages or channels on the internet whose authors and owners have decided to bring their own personal politics into it. Same thing happens there, too. People leave. They may attract a few replacements who are there for the poisonous dialogue and not the cycling or tech. I prefer to stick to sites that fulfill their actual purpose and eschew divisive topics.
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