Correct. As someone who has been reading through the registration queue for the past few months, I can confirm that. There are so many new members who decided to join this forum after they saw that video and it seems there are enough people who see through his bullshit - so many people in fact that we had to turn off registrations for a while. And a large junk of the new members told us they saw the video first and when they did their own research, they realized the video was deceptive and misleading on purpose. But that's the reason why Tantacrul didn't want people to find the forum because it's a lot harder to convince others when people can do their own research and make up their own mind.
So essentially, Tantacrul did two things.
1. He gave us thousands of new active members, people who appreciate this forum for providing a space to talk about their struggles.
2. And he gave us a Wikipedia article, making us mainstream, which will lead to more new members in the future.
I don't like either of that but it's not exactly a win for those who want to see this forum gone. And that's important for me. They increased the visibility of this forum and that's it. That's all they achieved. Here is a graph, showing the timeline between December and February and you will see that the registrations blew up in January, when he released that video, and when we re-opened the registrations a few weeks later, we had another spike. It doesn't matter how you spin it, that video was a complete failure. Tantacrul knows what he has done, he is just to arrogant to admit that. But I think it's eating him up and that's why he made accounts in this forum, trying to desperately justify his actions.
View attachment 4704870
As I said on the forum, before Tantacrul released his video, people had to do very specific research to find the forum and that was a good thing. It's a lot easier to find us now, people just need to go to Wikipedia and click the link. The only people that ever advertised this forum are the people who want to take it down, so no...
...the only people that lure "young people" to our goddamn forum are people like Tantacrul who exposed his audience consisting of minors to this forum and when Youtube gave his video an age-restriction, which was completely justified - he actively fought against that, which you can read here.
View attachment 4704800
(
link)
Why? So more "young people" could see his video. This is so messed up. If you really think our forum is such a bad place, then why are you working so hard to give us exposure to your young audience, which will lead to more new members? You're shooting yourself in the foot, why is that so difficult for you understand?
I already addressed this else where but this forum is immune to bad publicity. And the people who oppose this forum are unable to grasp that, instead they think releasing more news article and more viral videos will eventually make this forum disappear for magic reasons. That's not how it works. Every single time a news outlet would talk about us, it only increased our member count. And here is one fundamental issue, the topics discussed in this forum are deeply neglected in our society and there is strong need for a place like our forum. You might not like it but every time you talk about a place that exists out there, that allows people to talk about deeply personal struggles without censorship and without the moralising undertone, and a platform that recognises individual autonomy and the right to decide what happens with your own life, you will
increase the member count of this forum, period. There is no way around that. If you turn this forum into a "forbidden fruit", something you're not allowed to talk about, something you should never look up under any circumstances, you simply make this forum look more appealing to people who want to participate in a community that respects and understands their struggle. It's as simple as that but these people don't understand it.
I could literally beg them to stop talking about the forum for 10 seconds and they wouldn't do it. Incredible. That's how thick they are.