Shoutout to that $50 I threw away on a 'memoir writing course'

I signed up for a weekend workshop in Austin back in March through some guy named Dave who guaranteed he'd get my banned blog turned into a book. After the first session, he just handed out generic templates and told us to 'find our voice'... never mentioned how to actually publish anything controversial. Has anyone else wasted cash on a course that was just fluff and no real strategy for getting around censorship?

3 comments

3 Comments

emerychen15d ago

Nobody's talking about how these workshops might be a tax write-off scam. Dave could be running that whole thing as a business loss, collecting $50 from 50 people and deducting the hotel room and his lunch. Real talk though, if you're dealing with genuine censorship issues like from a banned blog, the actual loopholes involve things like using PDF hosting on Proton Drive or archiving on decentralized services like IPFS. Did Dave ever mention that the algorithm crackdowns are mostly automated and you can dodge them by using plain text with no hyperlinks at all?

milar4615d ago

Oh man, I've been there too but honestly, is getting past censorship really that complicated for a regular memoir? Like, most platforms just flag stuff for obvious rule breaking and you can usually work around it with a few edits. Your mileage may vary but I feel like the whole "banned blog" thing gets played up more than it needs to be by these course guys.

taraw1615d ago

Ha, yeah I used to totally roll my eyes at the whole "banned blog" thing too. I thought it was just marketing hype to sell courses. But honestly, after seeing some friends get their whole sites nuked for pretty mild stuff like health advice or personal stories about their kids' school stuff, it changed my mind. The automated systems really don't care if you meant well, they just see a keyword and boom, your whole account is gone. I get now that it's not always about breaking obvious rules, sometimes it's just hitting the wrong algorithm flag and you have no way to appeal. So yeah, I didn't use to buy into it at all, but now I see why people actually need those workarounds like PDF hosting or plain text. It's way more real than I gave it credit for.