Tbux.com: blah blah rant

After my blog post on May 8th, which was mirrored on the There Voice, I was happy to see KittenKat publish a response there. It really shows how there are two sides to every story, and although the whole thing may come off as airing dirty laundry in public, the alternative of gossip and rumors seems worse to me.

I don't want to make a big deal out of it and publish anything else on the matter in the There Voice, but since this is my blog, and blogs are by nature somewhat self-indulgent, I thought I would make some sort of response here to Kittenkat's response. So if you are actually here reading my blog, indulge me for a minute...

First, kittenkat says I completely stopped responding to emails from her. This is true...she says I glosses over that fact, but I don't think I did. She sent me an email saying "if you're using a bot, stop. If you aren't using a bot, then leave some sales request for others". I wasn't prepared to do that, so I simply didn't answer her emails. It was only a couple of emails! By responding, all I would do is give myself less time to get my own system up and running. KittenKat also implies that it hurt her personally that I didn't respond...and I don't think she is making that up or anything, but at the same time...well, kittenkat and I used to IM sometimes or email, but I've always felt that the only time she would ever contact me was to ask me a question about how to do something in 3ds Max or gmax or to quiz me about how my imvu credits selling site worked and how to use the IMVU payment gateway. Not that she wasn't nice and chatty, and I'm sure she's busy and all, but it doesn't really feel like friendship or a warm, personal relationship when she only contacts me to ask me for information to help her set up her competing business(es). I feel a little bad saying that but...I can't help how I feel.

Kittenkat also says that sellers complained that they wanted to claim sales requests but couldn't because of my bot. They may have had a hard time claiming sales requests, but it was actually easier for them with the bot then against jinx the human being! The thing that made it harder wasn't the bot, but the fact that email was broken so nobody was getting notified that there was a request. Otherwise, anyone sitting right there at their computer would have had a very good chance of getting the request before the bot did. I even turned the bot off at times and watched requests sit there for hours without being claimed. Actually, for a long time there were hundreds of unclaimed requests, because nobody wanted to claim the smaller transactions.

People say a bot is unfair, but just what is and is not unfair? There was no rule against a bot. Before I claimed most of the requests, Viv did. I don't think Viv had a bot, but somehow she was faster than me EVEN IF I was right there at the computer with the proper web page open. How did she do that??? Was that fair? If someone had a boyfriend that was a night owl and claimed requests on their behalf while they were sleeping, would that be fair? Is using your boyfriend to claim requests somehow more "fair" than using a bot?

But ultimately, is it fair to the people trying to sell their ThereBucks TO tbux.com? For years, people asked to join tbux.com as a seller and were denied. Instead, to sell their ThereBucks through tbux.com they would have to go through the "submit a request and wait for someone to claim it and email you" process. There were many more sellers than there were members of tbux.com. Is it fair to THEM to try to make things as fair as possible for the much smaller number of people who are actually allowed to be members, when it inconveniences them to have to wait to be contacted, sometimes for hours? (Or never, as was the case with the smaller transactions for so long.) And who wants a version of "fair" that involves everyone wasting more of their time?

Kittenkat says people were forced, because of me, to sit up until all hours of the night trying to claim sales requests and they couldn't because of my bot. First of all, this is simply not true. My bot would check for sales an average of every ten minutes. Anyone sitting at their computer and checking for requests say...every five minutes...would have had a better chance of getting a request than the bot. And anyway...for TWO YEARS I was sitting at my computer trying to do exactly what she says these people were "forced" to do. Tbux.com has something like 20 sellers now...are they all "forced" to sit up late at night trying to claim requests against each other now???? I think their odds with the bot were better! "Fair" is just completely stupid when it involves everyone wasting their time equally, and then the people selling to the site wasting their time as well.

Kittenkat says she wanted to claim some requests and couldn't,but she just let it go until others complained. BUT...for almost the entire time I was using a bot, there were smaller requests just sitting there. Hundreds of them that no-one claimed! Let's be honest here...people were complaining that they couldn't get the "good" requests, because there were loads and loads of the smaller ones that aren't worth as much, just waiting to be claimed. (Note: kittenkat also recently made a rule that sales requests must be claimed in order, so you aren't allowed to skip over a smaller request, so this doesn't happen any more. That rule should have been made long before, although you can always just ignore the smaller request hoping someone else will claim it until you are "forced" to claim it by an arrival of a larger request.)

To say that what I did was unfair is to discount the much greater number of people who benefited from what I did. My bot allowed faster service for hundreds of people, while maybe two tbuxers lost out on a few larger transactions because they weren't willing to dedicate as much time to it as I had.

There wasn't any rule against using a bot. I've had one person say to me "there was a rule and you just disregarded it", but actually there was no such rule until my last few days on the site.

Oh and finally...Kittenkat says that adding more members to the tbux.com site doesn't add more competition as I "suggest" in my original posting/article, because everyone is able to sell all of their ThereBucks. That's true...the economy of There is strong and so resellers are always able to sell out...however adding more sellers makes the flow of ThereBucks less even, and so sometimes you could end up with 10 sellers selling at once, which makes things harder for the sellers. If you are competing against 9 other people to sell your ThereBucks, it is going to take you that much longer to sell out, and so you are going to have to worry about whether you have any transactions to fill or not for that much longer of a time period. If all the ThereBucks flow through a smaller number of people, it really smooths things out. Trust me, I sold more ThereBucks than anyone through tbux.com for years. It can make the difference between selling out in a couple of hours, or a couple of days.