Implementing a new rule.

[Lotus]

There has recently been emerging a new business model in the service team industry which I highly disagree with and believe will be detrimental to the market.

This suggestion is in full reference of this thread starting from post #5. - https://www.mc-market.org/threads/350815/

It was just a little debate between me and Cal on why I disagree to this scheme, but I’ll be paraphrasing some of my points from there to here to emphasise my suggestion.

This new business model which I highly disagree with is an ‘organisation’ owning multiple service ‘teams’ which are all linked together behind the scenes. What I mean by when they are linked together behind the scenes, is that in reality under the false facade that there are multiple ‘teams’, each of them are all run by the same exact singular team.

I don’t believe I should copy and paste my entire post hence I’ll just link it. But all my strongest points against this model can be found here - https://www.mc-market.org/threads/350815/#post-3067851

To reiterate some of the points in that post. Anyone can setup the infrastructure for this multi-service team organisation model. The fact there are already so many teams in circulation is because they are fairly easy to setup. Hypothetically speaking, I can open up 10 ‘teams’ myself and have 10 advertising threads in every section of MCM. But in reality, every single ‘team’ has the same freelancers and managers behind it. They are offering the exact same service with the exact same quality with the same freelancers across multiple ‘teams’. This is abusable and there are no rules to prevent this. The amount of multiple ‘teams’ for more exposure can potentially be limitless. If abused, the whole market will just be flooded.

If you think about it, this is just a very elaborate plan to advertise the same team over and over again. It may even be on grounds to infringe the duplicated threads rule. Yes, the branding may be different for each ‘team’, but they are all connected to one central team. If an ‘organisation’ owns 5 service teams, all 5 of those service teams will offer the same quality with the same freelancers and managers backing it.

Again, this is abusable and can get out of hand if enough people start doing this. I’d like to state that I’m not against service teams itself, but this sort of duplication tactic by hiding under the pretence of an ‘organisation’ for more exposure is just wrong.
We already have an ‘organisation’ called Slashy doing this - https://gyazo.com/f44ed3d8181f3571cc6f23ec40a64999
Now we have Above pulling a similar stunt with Prime and Avast (and they plan to add more). I would not be surprised in the future if more ‘organisations’ pop up where they will abuse this tactic for multiple threads in a section for more exposure.

To conclude, I suggest a rule to regulate such activities. I’m not sure exactly what should be restricted, and it would be great if you guys can suggest some ideas. My own solution would be that users should only be allowed to maintain a single service team (this could also apply to other businesses too possibly) at any given point. This is to prevent multiple rebranded duplicates popping up which will potentially flood the market.

 

[Satan]

Sorry to interrupt.

After nearly 6 months of owning multiple service teams in Slashy, we made a decision to remove them all apart from one. I will tag Dann in this one as he was the one that shed some light on what we were actually doing and it made sense. We had 5 service teams under one name, no real reason why we owned 5 and we were competing with ourselves. After Dann spoke to me I said this to our child teams, "Would you rather have 5 service teams that have bad-medium rated support, lack of management and advertising or would you like 1 service team where we spent all of our resources and make the best team rather than 5 smaller ones." even people that knew they wouldn't be working under Slashy anymore even agreed that 1 team would be better.

Quite a while ago Dectom gave us the idea to split all of the teams up into separate business accounts to stop spam, this was our plan until we decided to remove them all apart from one.

The truth can't really be hidden and I am saying this from past experience as pretty much the reason behind this suggestion was massively impacted by Slashy (Just so you know I own Slashy ). The threads do clog up sections and although it wasn't our intentions, there wasn't much we could do without causing further issues; Hence why we made a joint decision to focus on one service team now and have a lot of people alongside apart from 5 teams with 5x fewer people alongside us.

(Also just to warn people thinking about owning Parent Companies such as Slashy, Above etc... Don't do it if you are just hosting Service Teams, we made that mistake to begin with and paid a heavy price for it, only now are we rectifying our mistakes by opening external companies with Slashy and focusing on one major team.)

I admire you stating the intentions with slashy and telling others not to do this.

 

[Mick]

After spending about 30 minutes reading and re-reading through all of the arguments made on this thread, and then spending 10 minutes thinking about it while I was cleaning, I've come to a decision. I believe that this suggestion thread got off-track and a majority of the responses, although they made compelling arguments, they weren't relevant to the argument made in the original post. Ultimately, whether service teams are bad for consumers or not wasn't the point of this suggestion, and isn't important when making a decision about this in my opinion. The problem proposed was that service teams are splitting up their team into smaller sub-teams with the intention of flooding the sections with their service offers.

If the owners of these teams cannot provide a genuine and valid reason for splitting their service offers up into multiple threads, they must merge the information into the same thread. If you have the same freelancers creating the same products and communicating through the same discord, then I wouldn't consider that to be separate teams, and it should come under one thread.

Regarding the issue of misrepresentation, if a team is owned by another, they must clearly show that on their thread or they will be warned for misrepresentation of self. There should be no situation when someone is unsure of whether you're a part of a larger team or not.

Usually this is the point that I'd move this, but I still think I'd rather get more input on this since there is clearly a lot of opinions and I don't think I've really scratched the surface. In the time I've spent handling this suggestion I could have done a page

Bump.

I'm pretty happy with this response and decision still, and since this is a policy that was made in response to the suggestion I'll move this to accepted.

This was an excellent suggestion and it was great to see such high-quality and well-thought responses.

Accepted, thanks for your input everyone.