Bikes + dumb stuff

Go cancel your Outside+ subscription.

TLDR if you see the image to the left open a ticket with Outside here, wait a few days, and don’t forget to check your spam filter, that is where my response landed. Only took me like 3 pages of reading to find that. Here’s why:

Alvin Holbrook blatantly plagiarized from James Huang recently and that was my reminder. It only took Outside a handful of days after being called out publicly to remotely come close to acting like responsible adults. I truly hope competing creators like the fine folks at Escape Collective, Bicycle Pubes, Just Riding Along, the blog at Restrap, Surly’s Blog, The Slow Ride, The Radavist, and Bicycle Quarterly (which are just a few examples) seize market share from that type of slimy behavior. Go give them some doll hairs instead. Buy a bidon, a stem cap, a subscription, a drawing, a one time donation.

And if they accidentally plagiarized because AI wrote their story… exceptionally dumb. Already a dumb situation, but paying someone to accidentally rip off people they forced out is more dumb. Regardless, it is a bunch of dumb dumbs lowering the quality of their publication and offerings and you get to pay for that privilege… unless you don’t!

For more waxing on about plagiarism and this specific incident I think Wes Siler writes on it well.

Writing a policy is only as good as the steps taken to actually follow the policy. If leadership writes it as a way to simply shift blame to a worker vs. taking responsibility as an org then it’s meaningless fluff (emotionally, not legally tho).

Pay the impacted, pay the workers doing their job, and take it out of leadership’s pockets that didn’t effectively build an org and practices that force them to follow the policies they hold dear and use to scapegoat responsibility. Stakeholders should want this but we all know the end result. Shit flows downhill. Earning trust back is doing the right thing and setting up not sexy business practices. If listening to leadership’s own half baked regurgitation of their worker’s day to day is a game of telephone where they botch key detail(s) or fundamental understanding that would be laughable if it wasn’t based on a) their own org and b) someone’s career… then you need to re-evaluate leadership.

But back to my experience: Via Apple Subscription? nope. Trailforks? nope. Gaia? still a nope. This is O+… wtf mate where is it?! Relational DBs and a proper UX isn't that hard at this scale. Figure it out, pheasants. Fuckin embarrassing! (Sticks fer Jared Keeso Jacob Tierney) Meanwhile their own property, trailforks, does it right! (see left image) After three days I get a message from athletereg that my membership has been canceled. Cool cool. I didn’t think I'd ever used that, let alone knew it existed as a place to check, nor is it mentioned as a place to check in their FAQs.

I canceled my Climbing mag subscription shortly after Rock & Ice went away. That had good writing, high quality photos, and was a delight to read. Climbing mag just brought me less joy. After this latest example a pattern of lower and lower quality I've decided the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze and their brand is simply tarnished. Maybe they’ll polish the turd or break up the org in the ebb and flow of things but as biz gets more and more centralized I’m too pessimistic to see that happening. Best I can hope is their competition just does better. If you’ve got the resourced to do so one should want that… and they don’t seem to want that.

I dunno, I'm not an Englisher but that wasn’t so fuckin hard to write something original. Kick rocks O+.