Firstly what is Salty Droid about?
A. Salty Droid – http://saltydroid.info is a site focused on the abuse of internet marketers who make too much money, and written by a looser who failed to make money himself, and therefor spends his time abusing those who are more capable and more successful than him.
B. Alternatively Salty Droid is almost an art installation, where the Salty Droid robot, the alter ego of a certain Jason Jones, adopts a language that is so extreme that it can be nothing but funny – unless you are the sad victim of one of his tirades.
C. A third view is that there is an element of validity in both A and B above: Jason Jones must have gone down the internet marketing path, did not make much money, saw that some things stank, and started to get self righteous, and decides to use some legal training to always stay just on the right side of the law.
…or something else.
You have to look at the site to make up your own mind.
Ordinary Joe’s view is that Salty Droid is more effective than the FSA in derailing internet fraudsters. The outrageous language in a way goes hand in hand with the outrageous methods that are used to exploit generally vulnerable people into parting with their money for useless information products, or ‘frauducts’ as the Droid defines them. Also the tone of the site seems to be based more on genuine moral concerns rather self righteousness.
As to whether Jason Jones is really Jason Jones? Who knows. Having a pop at people who make huge amounts of money online, and yet hide their contact details, is not something for the faint hearted. Having a pop at Scientology is not for the faint hearted either – but Salty Droid has a go, and correctly compares the marketing techniques of Scientology with those of ‘syndicate’ internet marketers / gurus*.
Jason Jones, crusader that he is, should keep his real identity hidden as much as possible. And, finally, if you want to get a very amusing self expose of internet frausters in action, you could do worse than to see this video of Andy Jenkins and Jeff Walker discussing deceptive advertising tactics.
But what is Jason up to? Well – he probably will monetize his site in some way – it is generating a good following, and thereby opening himself up to accusations of hipocracy. Who cares. If a site is built on a good principle, offers useful information to the internet browser, and has a large community of followers, it should make the owner some money. Other option is that the site is just a public service to help expose some of the worst corners of the IM market place – eitherway, the site offers a service, and starts to balance out the volume of affiliate spam selling anything regardless of quality to anyone, so long as there are a few dollars coming back.
*Fortunately there are more sites debunking Scientology than praising it, and there is just enough out there to keep this sinister organisation struggling, an unfortunate journalist working for Panorama had a very rough ride when getting down to the nub of the organisation – see the programme here.
