Let me paint the picture for you.
A couple of weeks ago I was consistently hitting the top of the news aggregation website N4G. Visit the site between November 10th and 14th and you’ll see that in the first few days I used N4G I was at the top consistently.
The articles I published on N4G included: What Nintendo Is About To Do Will Stun You
And Fool Absolutely Killed His Career in 3 Words Of Hate (I know I shouldn’t have called someone a fool. But the person in question said extremely racist things on Twitch and I try to fight against racism where I can).
Of those two articles, the first article is an in-depth look at Nintendo’s business strategy with the Nintendo Switch. The second is about an esports player who got fired for making racist comments while streaming.
Both these articles performed very well on N4G, as you can see below. Oh, and N4G ended up changing the name of the second article to the (less inspired) “True Esport On Twitter” and also removed the link to this site and replaced it with one to Twitter, without notifying me at any point.
I’m fine with N4G changing my articles on their site
Obviously, N4G has its own owner and its own policies. And I am absolutely fine with them deciding what should and should not be posted on the site.
The editor / administrator saw fit to change my article. Fine. I get that. It’s their site. They are free to do what they like.
But why not notify me? Why not just reach out and say, “We had to make a few edits to your article, here’s why”. Why not explain why you are changing someone else’s work? I mean, if you did a job and I altered your work, I would let you know first before changing it, and I would give you my reasons. That just seems the decent thing to do. But instead, they altered the work, removed the link to this site, and did not notify me at any point.
Of course, N4G’s admins are busy people. They can’t PM everybody.
I completely understand that N4G’s admins are busy and that it would be unrealistic to notify everybody of changes to posts. But this article was one of the hottest article that month (by N4G’s own stats) and should surely therefore warrant at least a little bit of attention.
Either way, N4G did not see fit to notify me of changes. Oh well. Life goes on.
What happened next surprised me. N4G banned my site without a word of notice
I took a couple of weeks off of blogging. And so it was only the other day that I returned to N4G and tried to post a new article.
At this point an ugly pop-up flashed on the screen telling me “This site has been banned”.
No warning, no message from admin, just banned. And you will likely be thinking, “What did you do to get banned?”
The two articles I posted above, and three others along similar lines, are the only articles I posted to N4G and the only input / contribution / interaction I’ve made with the site.
Again, no word from admins, no nothing, just straight-up banned.
So I thought I would take it upon myself to reach out and message N4G’s admins.
This is the message I sent to N4G’s admins. I think it’s quite polite. What do you think?
I felt this message was polite enough to merit some sort of response. But obviously N4G did not.
And what happened after that was an absolute insult
N4G did not decide to contact me. Instead, the next time I tried to log in (two minutes ago) this is the message I received.
What do you think about this treatment? I’d love to hear your thoughts on N4G. Leave a comment.
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