I want to start off by offering a hypothetical question to you. If you recently won a good amount of USD worth of RTM and received a cold DM from someone who has never spoken in the community before: would you find that suspicious? I'd imagine most would.
Not too long ago, that happened to me. I won $100 USD worth of RTM from an easter egg and almost immediately after I received a cold DM from someone who has -never- previously said a word in discord. No chat history, no mentions, nothing. Here's how that conversation played out. Remember, this is immediately after I won $100 USD.
https://imgur.com/O3ZFZcwAfterwards, I sent a screenshot of the conversation to a moderator in which I stated that I did not want to flat out accuse this person of being a scammer, but to be cautious.
I was then thanked by this moderator.
Now, you might say I was a bit aggressive in my initial response, but I'd say it's quite justifiable considering I just won $100 USD worth of RTM and discord DM scams are rampant (that's even an understatement, especially in crypto). My next actions were to ask the person mentioned in the above image if they knew who this was. I sent him a screenshot of the conversation in a private message (NOT public). They responded yes, that they were vetted, and everything was fine. I replied with something along the lines of, "well, if they were vetted, then they're good." The suspect in question then joined the conversation and apologized, to which I said there was no need to apologize and that they were fine. That should have been that.
Queue BigPiggy. I wake up one morning and get tagged in discord. A new rule was specifically made for me to be more 'inclusive towards new members'. Now, I guess they decided to ignore the fact that I often helped people who came into the discord and did so in public channels. However, upon asking what I did to deserve a rule being put in place specifically for me, I was immediately told to "fuck off" and was banned from discord without any farther explanation.
Now, it wasn't just a discord ban. I was banned from other discord servers in which the pig moderated that weren't even related to RTM. I had some RTM in a shared node, and with the discord ban, I couldn't even contact my node provider without -begging- to get 10 minutes back in the server to simply withdraw my RTM from the discord bot and contact my node provider. I was then promptly banned again.
Now, you may say, "hey, that seems a bit excessive for protecting yourself from a potential scammer", and you'd be right. However, the pig decided that due to this individual being a "potential large investor", he felt the need to completely remove me from the community, bash my name, blame me for a price drop, and as previously mentioned, ban me from unrelated discord servers of which he moderated.
https://imgur.com/UJp9zHWAt no point in time did I publicly "bash the hell" out of this individual. I didn't even "bash" them in private.
Let's throw in a casual threat against me while we're at it (not that I'm even the slightest bit concerned).
https://imgur.com/AatnQ3JIt didn't matter that I had been a part of the community without issue for over 6 months and mining for just as long at the time of ban. All that mattered was protecting a potential investor who recently joined a discord, doesn't say a -single- word, and dm's people immediately after they win money. I had never mentioned that they were a potential scammer in public (others brought it up), nor did I publicly/privately bash this person like they tried to make people believe.
The inconsistent and favoritism moderation that goes on from the people at the top is excessive, greedy, and downright ridiculous. Specific moderation is heavy when they feel like it, while letting things that shouldn't slide, slide. They don't moderate their favorites, and have no problem giving anyone else a hard time even if they are doing exactly what their "favorites" are doing. The favoritism and inconsistency in their ability to moderate is flat out disgusting.
To sum up: protecting yourself from potential scammers could leave your name bashed, your discord account banned from unrelated servers, and most importantly, potentially locking you away from any RTM you have in shared nodes if you don't have outside contact with the providers. All in the name of protecting someone who has never said a word previously; with no explanation or warning.
Call me salty if you want, but after seeing all of the posts coming up about unfair moderating, favoritism, and silencing of people speaking opinions, I decided to post this even though it happened months ago. I kept mining afterwards, but it seems like nothing has changed in the world of RTM. After seeing the update which seemed to mainly revolve around some new front-end, a knife, and a music video. I'm out.
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Above is what I posted in the RTM subreddit. Very shortly after, I was promptly banned from the subreddit and my post deleted. So, I decided to come here where they do not have the power to silence people calling them out.
https://imgur.com/dPTKnHjBe careful with RTM entirely. They will silence and remove any negative posts even if they are substantiated with proof. They promote constant shilling even if what they are shilling is an outright lie (they claimed Amazon had a CPU shortage because of new RTM miners. Right.), and will ban/remove any content that proves they are as shady as they come.