Rotten Fruit — Fruitlab and the perils of low standards
Note — What follows is the personal opinion formulated from first hand experience of the platform. You may of course have different views or experiences, but I just wanted to share my thoughts on Fruitlab as a whole.
Have you ever wondered what happens when ambition and greed come before careful management and planning? Well for those who have pondered that question look no further than Fruitlab, a small site that promised to repay views with platform currency generated from copious advertising, which could be spent in their on-site shop (itself tied to the somewhat nefarious G2A, a marketplace fuelling piracy and theft). Sometime during the last year or so Fruitlab decided to hop on board the crypto currency bandwagon with plans to convert their “Pips” to ERC-20 tokens in an attempt to truly monetise their platform. However, at the end of 2021 there were problems with the embedded G2A shop (which seems odd given that the G2A integration is still up and running for any interested parties) and with no real explanation of the problem site users were left in stasis. When asked the ever helpful answer was that staff are incredibly busy and everything would be fixed “soon”.
Transparency and communication with an audience is often crucial to establish trust with the platform’s users. Fruitlab has had incredible issues on this front, with volunteer mods messaging users in private to share information, site staff promoting users based on nebulous criteria, offsite “clout” and friendships. It’s an incredibly amateur arrangement, only saved by hordes of teenage users desperate to generate “Pips” that may at some point be useful. Just a quick look at the comments most videos have will quickly reveal the quality of the community. There’s no discussion or commentary, merely gifs, memes or meaningless statements. The worrying thought is that this demographic is incredibly fickle, and with no strong community users lack any real sense of loyalty or identity.
Looking closer into the crypto conversion process their white paper is riddled with inconsistency and mistruth, things that look appealing to outsiders who have no experience of the site, but in reality portray an image that is far from accurate. Tantalising promises of game developer partnerships and competitive games being played daily are blatantly inaccurate. Those individuals who have their names appended to the end of the document should be aware of a possible impact to their credibility because of these mistruths that they are in all likelihood totally unaware of.
Fruitlab has deep rooted problems at this point. It offers content based not upon quality, but upon ease of consumption tied to the ability to generate currency. In what seems like a fundamental management error, a wave of demotions hit partners earlier this week, seemingly prompted by a series of complaints from a partner jealous of people profiting from shorter videos. Unable to comprehend that perhaps shorter content was more popular because that’s what the userbase found easier to consume, user Brandon “Tubbz” seems to have prompted the Fruitlab team to strip some of the more popular clip posters of their status, without any rhyme nor reason.
Whether this is to prevent certain users from accruing more of the finite tokens than the site intended them to earn, or for some other less savoury reasons, there seems to have been no rule as to who was demoted and who remained. Certain remaining Fruitlab partners seem to produce inferior content to those that have lost their status, cementing the fact that the site as a whole has no real standard and is merely a playground in which mediocrity can finally be noticed.
The concept behind Fruitlab is laudable. The reality is not. Mismanaged to the point of breaking Fruitlab has had its five minutes. Aspiring content creators would do well to remember that Youtube offers a far larger pond in which to swim and the only people who profit from these smaller wild west offerings tend to be the site owners themselves. At this moment any Fruitlab users with a large presence on any of the other social platforms would be strongly recommended to consider hitching their wagons to other more reliable stars. Fruitlab is using you to boost its profile in the bid for crypto success…don’t be fooled, fruit might look tempting at first glance but this one hides a rotten core.
