Trustpilot fuckin’ sucks, man, especially if you sell mushroom spores or related items like books, or equipment. There’s a few other Trustpilot related bits rumbling in the background, and my issue with them was a little while back, but I wanted to get my thoughts across too because I wrote most of this when they removed me from the platform, then got distracted by other stuff, and now it’s sort of become relevant again! Thank goodness for the predictability of shitty “oh hi we’ll handle that bit for you” companies.

I read his name as A.I. Pacino at first and steam started coming out of my fuckin' ears

So, here’s my Trustpilot story and why I think they are a bunch of assholes (spoiler: it’s because they are):

If you run a website, anyone can just make a Trustpilot page up for you, with no input or consent from you or your business. I didn’t particularly want to engage with the whole thing, because I’m happy with my current setup and it’s just one more piece of bullshit admin that I need to manage, but someone (probably thinking they were doing me a favour) left me a nice review there.

What this means is I then had to register with Trustpilot otherwise I would’ve had no way of interacting with any duff reviews (thankfully they’re pretty rare). Then I realised what the deal was: Trustpilot want you to start paying them money to be able to manage the reviews and use the full suite of tools they’ve got. That’s why they let anyone at all set up a page for you, because then you’ve basically got to pay them to keep on top of things. You can of course use the free version they give you, but obviously they’ve cut most of the useful review management features out because Fuck You Pay Us That’s Why.

That's a nice van, mister. Want us to make sure nothing happens to it?

That doesn’t really sit very well with me, because it is a literal shakedown. Yeah, you might be perfectly happy with your current review hosting provider (or even be doing it yourself), but now you will be using Trustpilot too, and you’ll be paying for it, otherwise you won’t be able to use it properly. Not a lot of choice there, and I bitterly resent that sort of predatory practice. I refused to pay for it, due to this resentment.

I manage the reviews on there, address the poor ones as well as I’m able given the lack of tools, and it all just rolls on for a bit. They keep emailing me about setting up a meeting to explain all THE AMAZING FEATURES I’m missing out on, I keep refusing because I suspect they won’t like mushroom spores very much, despite the cut-and-dried legality of the whole product. Next thing you know, I get a message telling me I’m going to be removed from Trustpilot as Orangutan Trading Co is what they call a “Bad Fit”, because I apparently “sell magic mushrooms”. I have some back-and-forth emails with them, explaining that spores aren’t mushrooms, in the same way that omelettes aren’t chickens, dinosaurs aren’t Tupperware, and jizz isn’t my milkman, but the end result is they say “no, you are selling magic mushrooms”. A five-year old’s version of a reasoned argument – “hey here’s the evidence for you to reconsider your statement”, “no I am right still la-la-la”.

I've been over it a million times, but spore syringes are legal almost everywhere in the world, and most importantly to me they're legal where I live, in the UK. There's only one thing you can do with them that is illegal (which is grow them), and an infinite number of things you can do with them that is completely legal. Hell, there's plenty of countries where even growing them is legal, and infinity minus less than one is still pretty fuckin' close to infinity by my reckoning. I thought I'd just have to explain this politely to Trustpilot and then they'd have a read and go "oh yep sorry for the mistake" because it takes about five seconds of googling to work this out, but nope, it's a double down. It's one of the issues with being a niche industry: there's no/little pre-existing knowledge for people to use. 

Okay, whatever, fuck ya, didn’t want to be there anyway, but what’s this “Bad Fit” thing all about? Blimey:

Orangutan Trading Co: War Criminal

So according to Trustpilot, I am either: involved in fake news (I am not), I promote hatred (nope), I offer illegal products and services (again, nope). Maybe I am involved in prostitution or human trafficking? I am very much not. Hateful abuse images? No thanks. Animal fights, criminal activities, financial scams? Not really my bag either. Finally – AI? I’ve been through this before but fuck AI and fuck anyone who’s using it to try and pretend to be things that they’re not.

And this, this absolute list of slurs, is the only way to have your page removed from Trustpilot. There is no other mechanism to have your page removed from Trustpilot (because otherwise they couldn’t blackmail you into using them). You are either on there, and having to pay and devote time to the platform, or they call you a dog-fighting human-trafficker nonce. I don’t even see how that’s legal – I mean, yeah, kick me off because you don’t like what my product is, but you surely can’t say shit like that about companies without proof? And that is why I can confidently state that I saw Trustpilot kicking an old lady to death in the street the other day, all with erections, and laughing whilst they did it. Perverts.