There is a page on this site that answers the question people search most often about me, and a few people have asked why I would draw attention to it rather than ignoring it. Fair question. The short answer is that the question was being answered anyway, just by people with something to sell.
The result already existed
Search my name with the word attached and you get a page of sites offering a folder. That result exists whether or not I acknowledge it, and it has existed for longer than most creators realise. Ignoring it does not make it go away, it just means the only available answer is written by somebody who profits from the question.
So the choice was never between the page existing and not existing. It was between the answer coming from me or coming from a site that wants a card number. Framed that way it stops being a difficult decision.
It also saves me answering the same message forty times a month, which I will happily admit is a meaningful part of the motivation.
What those sites actually sell
Not content. Attention, and occasionally your details. The pattern is consistent: a promised folder, a chain of redirects, a fake verification step, a survey, and a download that is not what it claims to be. The ones asking for card details to 'confirm your age' are the genuinely dangerous end of it.
What is behind the ones that do have something is old material, screen-recorded and recompressed several times, cropped, watermarked by three different resellers, and often not even the person you searched for. Nobody is checking. There is no incentive for anybody to check.
I have had messages from people whose cards were charged by a site with my name on it. There is nothing I can do about that afterwards, which is the specific frustration that made me write the page rather than just being annoyed about it.
Being honest is also the thing that works
There is a version of a page like this that is purely cynical — the keyword repeated forty times, no actual information, a subscribe button. Those pages exist and they do not rank, because search engines have spent years getting good at spotting exactly that, and because nobody links to them or stays on them.
The page works precisely because it answers the question properly. Somebody arriving with a genuine query gets a real reply, including the parts that are not flattering to me, and that is a better experience than every other result on that page. That is the whole strategy and there is nothing clever about it.
It turns out the useful thing and the effective thing are the same thing here, which is not always true and is quite satisfying when it is.
What you can do, if you want to
Tell me when you see something. The ask box on my about page is anonymous and I will not ask where you saw it or why you were there, because it is genuinely none of my business and that is not the point. A link is all I need to file a takedown, and takedowns work more often than people assume.
Do not put payment details into those sites. Not for my sake — for yours. Consider what kind of operation is hosting other people's content without permission and then asking for your card, and how much you would like them to have it.
And if you subscribed at some point and thought about recording something, I would just ask you not to. Not because of a rule. Because it ends up on a site charging strangers for it, and the only thing it produces for me is another form to fill in.
The result was going to exist regardless. I would rather it said something true, written by me, than something written by whoever is best at buying ads. That is the entire reasoning, and the page is linked from the bottom of this one.
Everything real is behind this link ✦
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