If she has not been harmed by now then she won’t be harmed. This is NOT bullying, this is calling out an evil person for what she is and does. I think the people she has hurt have shown great restraint.
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Part of the back story with DHub is that she started out quite legitimately to do a big deal dressage competition website, with cooperation from trainers in Florida where she was currently riding and living. I think a lot of her followers may date from back then.
Things went sideways first with her own trainer and then with virtually everybody in her circle. But DHub kept some of that air of being official and sanctioned, and if a casual reader missed the really nasty bits they might not catch on to what’s happened.
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In a way, you’re answering your own question in this post!
Part of the attention paid to NP involved reactions to behavior that people found repugnant (e.g. bullying, misrepresentation of professional equestrian services). But a large part of the attention he got here comes down to the Streisand effect, or the paradoxical attraction of attention to information or ideas by attempting to censor or supress them. All of NP’s own protests bumped threads and generated interest in the other side of the story (didn’t he even unsuccessfully try to sue CotH? That’s right out of the Streisand playbook). And all of the “cease and desist” posts you and certain others added to those threads made people curious about what could be so outrageous that sensible people like @mvp would call for censorship of opinions … so those threads got more views, more posts, more attention. Regardless of the content of your contribution, adding to the conversation at all is adding to the snowball effect of human attention.
If you think the number of voices raised in opposition to outfits like DH or individuals like NP constitutes bullying as much as the documented actions of these people does, beware that posting to object to these kinds of threads or questioning the motives of those who post on them is more likely to add fuel to the fire than to communicate a “move along, nothing to see here” message. Your mention of NP in this thread has probably inspired some curiosity about him by someone who hadn’t thought of him in months or years or ever, for example.
It’s possible that the “Streisand effect” could also occur with Dressage Hub (and possibly does, when specific objectionable original content of hers is mentioned here). But because the bulk of her content is plagiarized dressage videos in which the wrongdoing is hard to detect, her channel a) likely has a subscriber base of individuals who have no clue that there’s anything salacious about the channel, and b) probably doesn’t retain the attention it might occasionally garner from “Streisand effect” publicity, as its plagiarism is well known and its continuation is not particularly interesting.
I believe that one of the aims of people discussing DH is to make the folks in category (a) aware that they may be unwittingly supporting a bad actor. That’s very different to paying attention to or calling out behavior you believe is wrong, IMO.
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I generally agree I do not like the pile ons in here and do not participate, but x-halt said it very well. When I was harassed by her, the threads in here provided very useful information to get background and help, and I was able to contact SJ and talk to her to and understand how to deal with it.
Paula, I am so sorry you were one of the many people whose content was stolen. Again, maybe now with Facebook’s new rules where they seem to be willing to ban psychopaths, if you report her, they might do something now.
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Yes it’s true that the general climate of opinion on bad actors on Facebook has changed over the past couple years.
As far as people liking FB sites or following websites, i know there’s a whole pile of things I’ve liked or followed over time where either the algorithm or my spotty FB habits mean I miss posts or even rarely see them.
I would have no idea if one of these sites was intermittently toxic. If that was drawn to my attention I might well unlike or unfollow.
On the other hand, IRL Dhub isn’t something I find of interest in conversation because none of my friends are that invested in online life.
But amusingly, our own barn bully/ sociopath has a real hate on for DHub. I hear her going on about Dhub’s latest scandal, more than once. Somehow I just find that really really funny.
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I have no idea what her You Tube numbers are like but on Facebook the amount of engagement on the DH page is shockingly low for the number of followers she has. So either a large percentage of the followers are fake, or a large percentage doesn’t remember that they even followed her and / or are not interested in engaging with the content she posts.
From a social media marketing standpoint the lack of engagement is a huge negative. I would never advertise with her or hire her to do any social media management - the results totally contradict her claims to be an expert in that area.
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Yes this low engsgement was true when I checked her out last year at the height of the last kerfuffle (when she went back home to Alberta).
As I recall most of the FB engagement looked like it was random folks who liked a train wreck, not horse people.
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I am one of those people who unwittingly boosted her utube numbers. I was looking at dressage videos and watched some of hers before I knew of the issues. I never read comments and never saw any of the nasty stuff. ( I guess it’s on Facebook?)
I appreciate knowing the background so I can make informed choices. BTW, I still have to be careful as utube will volunteer her video when the one I was watching finishes…
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Don’t feel bad about it. She has videos, especially from many years ago that are actually pretty informative. I’m also guilty of clicking on suggested videos without looking at who posted them. Thank goodness for the awful intro music though! It tips me off that I need to click away ASAP.
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The Streisand effect, if I have understood this right, doesn’t happen if people don’t have such awful taste in spectacle.
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I also reported posts and those threads (re: Peronace) to the Moderators and made my case for closing those down. I think it’s a mistake in Moderation to allow a favorite form of game to be hunted over and over here.
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If you looked at the posts on those NP threads and assigned a general point of view to their content-- posts like mine would be “I’m posting her to tell you that this thread is bad” and those who are engaging with the content of the thread, I think you will see that you are wrong about my driving much traffic to the thread. I think there are very, very few of posts like mine and a whole bunch of people enjoying the pile on. So you can’t paint me with the same brush as you can all the folks contributing to these virtual dumpster fire.
But it does put people who want “common decency” on the internet in a hard place if, it turns out, registering and objection to some kind of post still seems useful and valuable to the person posting the trash.
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Wow, I am so sorry to hear that! I saw nothing wrong in the video. A horse and rider learning together. Honestly reminds me of the ups and downs I’ve had with my own little athletic half Arab 
I have heard ammy backyard riders slam my own trainer who does wonderful work with youngsters. No one is immune to it. It is so sad to k ow the number of ammies and trainers alike who are terrified to show or leave their own barn in fear of being mocked.
Stuff like this makes me angry. People who don’t have anything productive to do tearing down others via the internet or bad mouth at shows and clinics. Usually those who don’t put enough sweat into their own riding to remember or experience how truly hard dressage really is!!
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I am not a dressage rider, I am no expert in anything, just your average trying to get by ammy h/j rider. But when I watched your video, I thought your horse was GORGEOUS and you are a nice, quiet, sympathetic rider with a lot of feel. That is what my far from expert eye sees. Your horse looks happy, like he is concentrating to get it all right and do his job and wants to please YOU his rider, and that to me speaks volumes of good things about YOU as a rider.
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OMG it’s like Beetlejuice! Somebody mentions NP on here and “poof” he appears. This time commenting on SWs personal Facebook page with cries of “F——— the Chronicle” and claiming to have tons of Robert Dover stories to share with SW. :lol:
SW and NP are like a sociopathic match made in heaven…
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And that is why their names need to be well known.
Talk about bullying… he’s no innocent in that regard.
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Robert Dover has had issues with this guy in the past. I wonder if he is aware of this? I don’t know him and I am not a member of Facebook so I don’t see what happens there, nor do I communicate with people on that medium.
What I have seen online written by Robert Dover, has been the writing of someone who seems to be a nice guy.
Hopefully a friend will give him a “heads up”.
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With the new SafeSport emphasis on bullying, I wonder why USEF cannot ban her from the grounds of any USEF shows - whether she is a member or not.
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The Streisand effect doesn’t always arise from a thirst for spectacle. Sometimes it’s driven by a sense of injustice about the actions that the proposed censorship would cover up or the censorship itself. See Tunisia vs. YouTube and its relevance to civil liberties, or South African anti-lion poaching ads, or UC Davis trying to suppress images of campus police casually pepper spraying students. People are naturally inquisitive and don’t like censorship, whether it comes from a government or a powerful celebrity or a fellow forum poster. Many people here also believe that some of the things NP and DH have done are reprehensible and merit discussion, and that censorship of those discussions is not called for. What you think appeals to someone’s lust for spectacle may actually appeal to their sense of justice. But you don’t have to agree with that to recognize that engaging in debate about the merit/value/justice of these threads keeps attention on the threads themselves.
I have a ton of respect for the CotH mods, largely because they are judicious with intervention and do not accidentally create Streisand effect situations. IME they take quick and decisive action when, and only when, it is necessary. I don’t happen to agree with you that publicly promoted materials (including NP and SW’s blogs, videos, and social media) should be off limits for discussion and it doesn’t sound like the mods do either, as long as discussion stays within the forum guidelines.
Whether you use the finest silken hand fan or a grungy barn aisle box fan, fanning flames is fanning flames. Whether yours is a majority or minority opinion, bumping a thread and proposing censorship of others’ ideas is gonna generate interest in the thread.
As for your traffic argument, do you really think that everyone whose interest you direct to a thread is going to agree with you? I’m not convinced by your method for quantifying thread traffic contributions, but even if you didn’t personally drive the lion’s share of interest in NP you contributed to keeping those threads alive and viewed and posted on. Might as well own your actions.
This phenomenon is not just some horrible moral decay associated with the internet, It’s what drove banned book sales back when books were made of paper, and made Lenny Bruce a popular comedian, and made “parental advisory” stickers a predictor of album success to Tipper Gore’s chagrin, and so on.
One man’s common decency is another man’s autocratic censorship. To paraphrase the old adage about Voltaire, I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend your right to say it (… and I’ll accept accountability for drawing attention to whatever terrible ideas or appalling opinions you may have if I weigh in on them).
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Well said.
The reason why so many people object to NP and SW is because their posts and their behaviour show a complete disregard of common decency. I fail to see how discussing them and warning others them offends someone else’s sense of common decency.
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NP called women in the middle of the night at their homes in other states to threaten them. Similarly SW physically stalks and harasses people in person. These are not just internet bullies, nor are they simply threatening people’s “livelihoods”.
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