Moderators please clarify the rules on nootropic vendor recommendations

I have no issues with you asking questions. The other mods answered your questions, as they are the ones making the rules you are upset with. I am literally not involved in that. I have issue with you making the definitive claim that /u/Majalisk works for or is connected to me, so he needs to be tagged. That's just false. He has no business affiliation with us at all, just as /u/Metacognition is not affiliated with us, either. The only people on Reddit that work for me are the accounts we have tagged on /r/NootropicsDepot. They stay on /r/NootropicsDepot. I don't even have them come here. They don't respond here. For all intents and purposes, we ignore /r/Nootropics these days because of stupid drama like this. We just don't have time for it. It has been eight years of people accusing me of impropriety. Eight years of people calling my integrity into question. I am sure you can understand why I get upset when I have typed these same words so many times over the past 8 years since the launch of Ceretropic.

I know you are a customer of ours. Many people in here are. Many people making these claims are. I tag people all the time, so I know who everyone is. When you have been around as long as I have, you interact with a lot of people. I am fully aware who everyone here is. There are even people that fell for all the propaganda about this being a sub controlled by me for years, then one day decided to actually write me. After writing me and talking to me, they realized it was all just BS spread around. Now they are regular customers of ours and speak to me all the time. Again, I tag everyone and do a lot of research through post histories. I think more people should be clicking on people's post histories regardless. You start to really get a good picture of the situation that way.

Regarding /u/Majalisk, you want to know the real reason he is a mod on /r/NootropicsDepot? A few years ago, when I was a bit more outspoken about shitty vendors, we were getting attacked a lot. These attacks were getting worse and worse. They hacked one of our crypto wallets, and stole a few hundred thousand dollars from me. That crypto today would be worth over $5 million... They went after my family and workers. They got pictures of my wife, and were trying to post them on Reddit. They posted pictures of my employees cars, and said that we needed to be ready for them to come down and shoot everyone at our office. We had to get the police and FBI involved, and the Tempe police sat in front of our building for a week just in case they were serious about the threat. They monitored my interactions on Reddit, and timed their posts and comments for when they knew I was not here. Literally for 5 years it was just me handling all our Reddit shit. If I was not on, it was not getting handled. They knew that, so they timed all this shit when they knew I was asleep or just not able to be on Reddit to catch it. I had to do something, so I added /u/Majalisk to help catch things. He's been a mod on here for a long time. He knows the systems. He knows the automod configs. He has seen all the crazy shit we deal with, since I always write the other mods via modmail when stuff happens, so they are in the know. It was the only feasible way I could prevent all this stupid shit from getting through, not only on /r/NootropicsDepot, either. They were posting on /r/Nootropics and /r/Supplements, too. Having a long-time mod that I trust watching out for this shit allowed me to breath a bit, and actually get some sleep at night. I was just sitting on Reddit all day long monitoring it. It was nuts. /u/Majalisk is always on Reddit, so he could catch the things I couldn't. He was nice enough to volunteer to help, and I really needed the help. I get the optics, but I just really needed someone I trusted to help prevent personal and private shit from getting out on Reddit by a competitor that was attacking us. Nobody on my team had ever moderated Reddit before. Nobody had even really used Reddit, other than my product specialist /u/pretty-chill. He was too busy with other projects to focus on Reddit, though. Luckily I hired more people, and I was able to get my team to start learning Reddit and taking stuff over. Now /u/nootropicsdepotguru is on there monitoring things. I taught them how to moderate, what to look out for, how to use Reddit's tools, how to edit the automod config. However, until recently it was just me handling things. I needed someone that knew Reddit moderation to help.

So that's the /u/Majalisk story. He doesn't work for me. We have never paid him. We have never asked him to moderate a certain way here, nor change what he is doing. I was just happy to have someone that knew Reddit moderation looking out for crazy shit to ensure it didn't get through. I also don't always 100% agree with the decisions of the mod team here. Everyone acts like all these rules and such are all my doing, but I mostly give opinions and provide extra information if I have it. I don't make the rules here. It's not me pulling the strings. Honestly, I would do things a bit differently merely to avoid shit like this. I don't care about PGLchem. To tell you the truth, I wouldn't know their name if I wasn't reading the modmail discussions about it all, or my PMs with /u/sirsadalot. I certainly don't want to stifle discussion of novel nootropics! I was a pioneer in that side of the industry. The last thing I want to do is to slow down the advancement of nootropics. I am fine with jokes. I make them all the time. I don't want people all upset. I would prefer open, honest, and interesting conversations surrounding human cognition and how to improve it. That's all I ever wanted... well that, and for companies to take lab testing and quality control seriously. However, you wouldn't believe the shady shit vendors in this industry try. Hell, just recently we busted a big shilling ring for one of our competitors that sells a lot of NMN. They used tons of fake accounts to make fake reviews here, /r/Supplements, and even on /r/NootropicsDepot trying to get people to come over to that vendor and buy their stuff. All the accounts were made at the same time. They tried to make it seem like they were real people, but their wording and histories clearly showed they were all working for one company. We sent that to the admins of Reddit and they used their tools to look at IP addresses and other info, and they confirmed they were shills and banned some of the accounts. This is basically a monthly occurrence. Another competitor of ours has been attacking us for years on Amazon. They use sketchy methods to essentially hijack our listings in other countries, then add wording in there so that Amazon's systems think our products contain illegal substances. We know who it is, but we can't definitively prove it yet. However, they are the next highest ranking vendor on the products in question. When our product gets removed, they get all the sales during that time. With how broken Amazon is, that can take 6 months to get fixed sometimes. It happened to our NMN. I happened to our lion's mane. It happened to our tongkat ali. We lose hundreds of thousands of dollars with these competitors taking down our stuff. That same competitor also uses shill accounts to attack us on Reddit. There is also a downvote bot being run on /r/NootropicsDepot right now as well. I can see the posts before they actually show publicly, including comments removed by the automod, and they get immediately downvoted by a bot. It has to be a bot because of the speed at which it does it. These posts and comments are only up for seconds before getting caught by the automod, but they have already been downvoted by the bot. It's a difficult thing for the Reddit admins to battle, though. They can just switch the accounts that the bot uses once the admins find the one they were using. It's just a never-ending battle in the background as a mod.

That's the other thing, the Reddit admins have been involved in this stuff many times. Do you know how many times over the years people have reported me and my companies to the Reddit admins? We are talking hundreds of times. They make the same claims you see people make all the time. "/r/Nootropics is run by me. I remove posts and comments from competitors. I have tons of shill accounts." Blah blah blah. The Reddit admins can see everyone's IP addresses, and they can see the mod logs, mod mail, and even private messages and chats. They can see I am not doing anything that people are claiming I am. They can also see the ones that are, which is how we get some of these shills banned from Reddit. However, they don't like to use that forceful of a method unless there is serious and flagrant violations. They take care of the bad ones, like threats and posting personal information. However, they expect us as mods to handle it most of the time. But the admins have looked into these things multiple times over the years.