Click to view our Accessibility Statement or contact us with accessibility-related questions
Showing 1 of 8 conversations about:
Kavik
5531
Feb 24, 2021
bookmark_border
The one thing I saw in relation to this was a comment in one of these items where someone from Drop said the increased price on Amazon is to cover the additional cut that Amazon takes, and because prices are up due to a 30% import tax on knives from China.
Much of that sounds suspect to me, but I didn't really feel like getting into it further at the time.
Here my thoughts though:
1 - first and foremost, "exclusive" goes out the window the second you start selling them elsewhere. All references to that should be taken down. Admit that you're screwing the core of your member base who gave you the money in advance to get these projects off the ground, like some sort of Kickstarter with no perks for buying in early.
2 - I didn't look it up, but 30% sounds higher than what I thought it was supposed to be? Either way, that's been going on for a while, and those prices were already included in the original Drop pricing
3 - most people pay for the ability to reach larger markets, be it through advertising costs or fees for selling through another platform (ebay, Amazon, whatever)
Why should the customers be paying extra to cover your "exposure costs"?
I didn't notice the in stock / out of stock part of this until seeing this post.... But yeah, that's messed up.
This whole place lately feels like a big F You to all the long time members, but this one here now feels a whole lot more like a hard push to grasp every last dollar in any way possible.
Edit : the link to that conversation -
https://drop.com/buy/drop-eric-ochs-otter-titanium-liner-lock-knife/talk/2776417?utm_source=appshare&referer=94FC7J
(Edited)
reswright
3852
Feb 24, 2021
bookmark_border
KavikYup. Aaaand they're still quiet as church mice whenever confronted with some shady BS like this, which is, let's face it, on brand for Drop.
Kavik
5531
Feb 24, 2021
bookmark_border
reswrightLol @ the Princess Bride bit
Yeah....they've completely lost touch with being involved in the community here... Been this way for quite some time now
Oddly enough, it's also been quite some time since I've cared enough about any of their offerings here to jump on them.........coincidence? 🙄
reswright
3852
Feb 24, 2021
bookmark_border
KavikI'm sure they'd prefer it if we just shut up and went away, and to a certain extent can't figure out why we haven't. Absolutely guarantee they have some bonehead sitting there going 'if we could just get rid of some of these squeaky wheels without alienating the rest of our shoppers we'd be golden'.
I've had some good interactions with individual staff at Drop but it's pretty clear that the Drop corporate definition of 'community' starts and stops with 'people who buy our stuff'. Reality keeps blindsiding them as a result.
Kavik
5531
Feb 24, 2021
bookmark_border
reswrightI guess no one ever taught them that you get rd of squeaky wheels by greasing them, not by throwing salt at them lol
Couldn't agree more. That mentality here became abundantly clear to me back when I was invited to participate in the pre-release passaround reviews for the knife community, then the offer was immediately rescinded as soon as I got a little too critical about one or two of their prior products and pricing inconsistencies.
At this point, the only reason I even visit the site anymore is for the member contributions. The company hasn't provided anything of two interest to me (knowledge or new products) for ages now 😑
reswright
3852
Feb 24, 2021
bookmark_border
KavikIt's not just you. I figured it was some system hiccup, but with these guys, who knows. I'm sure they've tried to think of ways to diminish the immediate credibility of longtime members who have caught on to some of their shadiness, and they love masking actions with system changes. They dampen hot threads that aren't actively cheerleading one of their products by putting a delay on response appearance (yeah, that isn't a glitch, that's a feature in forum management software), they lower real engagement rates by setting up policies that just happen to not share email alerts about new traffic in those threads. Things like the ano thread and the Chinese knife thread may bring traffic to the site but they resent not being in control of what gets said there and as you note they definitely don't like it when one of us has a criticism of what they're doing, however valid it may be, so they manipulate their settings so these threads just never ever trend anymore. When your job is to tend a community you tend to participate in the community, but when your job is to manipulate consumers you tend to end up seeing consumers as marks and fools who won't ever notice stuff like this happening. I know which one I see happening at Drop. Very loud silence if you follow me.
Some of them are probably still a little hurty in the behind about not getting to sell loot boxes to people with credit cards, you know. They should be thankful -- people go to jail for that.
mdeous
230
Feb 25, 2021
bookmark_border
reswrightAt first I thought it was just some technical hiccup and didn't want to see any manipulation there, even if a little voice in my head kept saying that it's a strangely timed coincidence, but it's now been a few days, and it's starting to be a bit long for a bug (or they need to replace their engineering team)... All this is too crazy to be believable, and still I wouldn't be surprised if it appears to be true.
reswright
3852
Feb 25, 2021
bookmark_border
mdeous"too crazy to be believable"
In the US the phrase in vogue for this is 'gaslighting'. Comes from an old movie. The idea is to audaciously get up to shenanigans and then have such a good innocent act, backed up by handy social leverage, that even when caught red handed, that people start wondering whether they might have been wrong about seeing all the shenanigans. You call them out, they bat their eyes and are like 'uh, are you feeling ok? Because that never happened' and an accomplice goes 'I've known them for X years and never seen anything like that, you must be mistaken/you're just trying to smear them/you're crazy' and together it creates the conditions for you to start second guessing what you just saw. You're meant to go 'They wouldn't really do that.... would they? Maybe I was mistaken somehow' and then start self censoring whenever you see more evidence. Because you don't want people to think you're crazy. It's a play on basic social insecurity.
Unfortunately, though, ghost banning, reply deboosting and delaying are standard forum management tools now and they're actively marketed to companies as a way to 'protect their reputation online' right alongside services where contractors pretend to be community members, but all they do is attack people who have come in and complained for one reason or another. (Go to the Search feature, type in 'troll spam' and then select 'discussions' and start reading if you wanna see many, many, MANY examples of it happening on Drop.)
It's an insidious practice and one you're meant to think, again, that you must have jumped the gun over, that you're being self centered or ridiculous and that the company wouldn't get up to such behavior. Indeed they count on that. Wikipedia puts it, "By partly concealing, or making a user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic or otherwise out-of-favour user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning )
The ghosting, reply deboosting, etc have gotten so common on Twitter that there are now websites dedicated to determining whether someone's been ghosted or deboosted or whatnot, like https://shadowban.eu/.
So does Drop do this stuff? Out of their own mouths, they do: see their own words on this thread: https://drop.com/talk/23016/out-of-control-moderators where they acknowledge working with the tools that perform these actions to moderate users, confirm that people can't tell when they're being used against them, stating that the functionality goes beyond simply hiding posts and that when they want to, they change the wording of your posts and you won't know but everyone else will see the different wording. Nice, huh? Cute as a grave robber's chuckle.
So does Drop do this stuff? Out of their own mouths, they do: see their own words on this thread: https://drop.com/talk/23016/out-of-control-moderators where they acknowledge working with the tools that perform these actions to moderate users, confirm that people can't tell when they're being used against them, stating that the functionality goes beyond simply hiding posts and that when they want to, they change the wording of your posts and you won't know but everyone else will see the different wording. Nice, huh? Cute as a grave robber's chuckle.
(Edited)
mdeous
230
Feb 26, 2021
bookmark_border
reswrightI knew they were moderating content (I mean, who hasn't come across at least one removed/edited comment from RayF ^^), but I didn't know users had no clue they were being moderated, that's ugly. And their "it's because spam" excuse doesn't work, most of the comments I've seen removed/edited are from existing accounts owned by real people, not throwaway spamming accounts, also spammers don't care if they got moderated or not, most of them just run bots without looking back, so even if there was so much real spam it would be useless. I haven't been there as long as a lot of you, but I'm definitely sad to see the route they are taking recently and the double speach they're serving us...
reswright
3852
Feb 27, 2021
bookmark_border
KavikIn online reputation management, which is now a genuine profession and technical discipline in our modern world, the idea used to be that you could astroturf people to counter bad reviews and comments, but now the idea is to ignore the negative results altogether and to flood the zone with good reviews and positive mentions or at least some sort of traffic consistently taking search results precedence over the bad reviews or whatever, so that those positives and neutrals are all hits before the negative result is ever encountered. If you fight the reviews, people see you fighting the review, they learn more about the thing you don't want them to learn about at all. If you generate enough 'noise' content to bury it, on the other hand, most people browsing the site never happen upon it in the first place. Smart, if somewhat small souled.
They used to get positive feedback by loaning knives to you guys for reviews. Now they saturate peoples' feed with things that aren't bad reviews by giving everyone $5 off a purchase if they upload enough pics of stuff they bought. Instead of people encountering conversations like this, their feed is this slow deluge of user pics of the stuff that people post en masse to get that small discount, and within a few days of this thread's start, someone's got to look VERY hard to find it as they browse Drop. It's an effective tactic in many ways and it's admirably cheap and it definitely drowns out many complaints. Of course, it's what you do when you want people not to find your bad press, so seeing it always means there's bad press to be suppressed -- but unless you know online reputation management you won't really know that's as likely a truth as it is.
Thing is, if your community is a bunch of pics of gear, there won't be much learning and development and information sharing going on. But they aren't here to do that, they're apparently here to sell keycaps.
I forget which old baseball manager said that the secret to managing success was to keep the half of your team that hates you from talking to the half who are still undecided. MB Earl Weaver? Anyway I'm thinking of that now and chuckling.
(Edited)
reswright
3852
Feb 28, 2021
bookmark_border
KavikLOL.
The simpler version: rather than debate with the people who are upset with them, they created a system where most negative posts can only easily be found in their system for a few days at most. It drowns out most ongoing conversations, is the downside, but that's also a plus as far as they're concerned.
If you google 'online reputation management' you'll discover a straight up rabbit hole of stuff that may make your blood boil.
Kavik
5531
Feb 28, 2021
bookmark_border
reswrightLol
I understood it, just couldn't focus enough to decide if I needed to respond to anything.
It's a messed up system, definitely.
Luckily though, there are still those who read back through older posts.
I know I still do that when I'm considering a product here. And I do still receive alerts for the occasional upvote on really old comments and reviews when things drop again....so I'm happy to see the burying of negative stuff isn't fool proof. But still annoying that it works to the extent that it does
reswright
3852
Feb 28, 2021
bookmark_border
KavikAh gotcha, say no more.
Well, the system still works if the only people who are ever reminded of these old posts are the ones where were a part of them the first time around. So long as others aren't getting those notices, so long as the old posts never actually trend again, they consider the damage contained.
Related Posts
ulianich
Order is canceled
The order is canceled after payment, I tried to pay with different cards (Lithuanian and Finnish), also with PayPal, but the result is the same, has anyone encountered this?
Nov 20, 2024
mkben
Drop Keyboard Club Questions
Hello everyone! I'm looking to join DKC, but I have a few questions. The first day of November has already passed. Will I still get the coupon for November immediately after signing up today (Nov. 10)? What is the definition of Mechanical Keyboard products? Will the coupon apply to desk mats? I believe it should apply to everything listed under this category? For orders under $79, the coupon will be converted to a percentage discount. Will the percentage discount apply to all mechanical keyboard items in an entire order, or it can only be applied to a single mechanical keyboard item in the order? Thanks in advance!
Nov 11, 2024
OK_Scout_Robert
Mass Drop Camping supplies
Does this community still Mass Drop Camping supplies?
Oct 23, 2024
helpmefr
Cam you increase the brightness of the backlight of the black speech lord of the rings keyboard?
I just got this keyboard and I play in a dark room, the backlight on the keyboard is too low and I want it brighter is it possible to increase this?
Oct 2, 2024
tlgns4507
continue bug!!!!!
When continue appears in the payment window, I cannot proceed to the next step. Why are you doing this? Please fix it quickly
Sep 17, 2024
Tar0
$10 credit email
I just signed up for the $10 coupon but I still haven't received it. When should I expect to recieve the email?
Jul 8, 2024
Trending Posts in Drop Hub
HoffmanMyster
Black Friday Bash 2024
It's that time of year again. We're cozying up for winter (at least here in the northern hemisphere); American Thanksgiving is right around the corner. And that means deals galore. We are kicking off our festivities a little early this year—Black Friday deals will run from November 21st through the 2nd of December. There's bound to be something here for everyone, so be sure to check them out! Black Friday Bash Details: ▪️ Bonus Rewards - Spend $250, get $20 in bonus rewards; spend $500, get $50; spend $750, get $100** (total spend throughout the event, does not need to be a single purchase) ▪️ Full list of deals here! ▪️ Giveaway - We will be hosting a giveaway this year—details coming soon ▪️ Main Bash landing page - Link to be added on Black Friday! Black Friday Coupon Breakdown: In addition to reduced prices, we've also cooked up some coupons for added savings this year! Nov 21st - 22nd ▪️ DCX20 - Save an extra $20 on any DCX Base Kit ▪️ DESKBTGO - Buy two desk mats...
Nov 20, 2024
ulianich
Order is canceled
The order is canceled after payment, I tried to pay with different cards (Lithuanian and Finnish), also with PayPal, but the result is the same, has anyone encountered this?
Nov 20, 2024
jenny56
Web Development in Dallas: A Beginners Guide
Are you living in Dallas and interested in web development? Maybe you want to learn how to code and make your own websites. Or perhaps you're a business owner who wants to build an online presence. Whatever your reason, getting into web development can be fun and fulfilling. This blog will help beginners in Dallas understand the basics of web development, including where to find learning materials, connect with local groups, and explore job options. Getting Started with Web Development 1. Learn the Basics Before you jump into the more complicated parts of web development, it's really important to understand the basics really well. That means getting familiar with three main things: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are like the ABCs of web building. You can learn about them from lots of different places online, like websites that teach you step-by-step, or even interactive platforms where you can practice coding. 2. Choose Your Direction Web development isn't just one thing – it's...
Nov 18, 2024
mkben
Drop Keyboard Club Questions
Hello everyone! I'm looking to join DKC, but I have a few questions. The first day of November has already passed. Will I still get the coupon for November immediately after signing up today (Nov. 10)? What is the definition of Mechanical Keyboard products? Will the coupon apply to desk mats? I believe it should apply to everything listed under this category? For orders under $79, the coupon will be converted to a percentage discount. Will the percentage discount apply to all mechanical keyboard items in an entire order, or it can only be applied to a single mechanical keyboard item in the order? Thanks in advance!
Nov 11, 2024
ointment3d
Drop EDC?
saw some flashlights online. Does Deop have interest in jumping into EDC gear like pocket knives, pry, flash, etc? Thx
Oct 26, 2024
OK_Scout_Robert
Mass Drop Camping supplies
Does this community still Mass Drop Camping supplies?
Oct 23, 2024
jcoffin1981
Work around for firmware/configuration update error "command not recognized"
I spent more than an hour attempting to update my Drop Shift keyboard. I'm not sure what has changed, but I was not able to do it entirely from the Drop website as I had previously done. I have most of the keys configured how I would like, but the default LED function was a very bright, distracting, rainbow wave going across the keyboard. Every time I turned the computer on I had to manually adjust the lights how I liked. Using the online version or the locally installed app, you first have to install the QMK XAP interface. You then have to flash your already configured firmware file, which can be done on the Drop website. If you are logged in your last configuration is saved under your account and you can alter what you like, so you don't have to start from scratch. So, following the instructions I selected the appropriate board, entered bootloader mode, but when attempting to flash the file, I would get an error that the C:/Users/Mike C..... command is not recognized...
Oct 18, 2024
Drop Refurbished
Like-new products you can trustDrop Rewards
Get $5 for every 500 points you earn! Learn more
Drop Keyboard Club
Become a member and expand your keycap collectionFollow Drop