I’m prepared to be told I am!

[Funsize123]

I’m doing a local virtual Christmas fair.
I said no MLM and have spent hours removing people who ignored me and spammed the fair with MLM ‘hun’ messages.

I thought people browsing the virtual Christmas fair would not want to have to see loads of messages from MLM sellers. AIBU to remove them?

Oh bollocks to their income, you aren't a charity.

For what it's worth I have bought some Christmas gifts from friends doing MLM. I still don't want to see a virtual market full of them when it's supposed to be local small businesses.

*ThisIsMeOrIsIt

Funsize123
I had one of the offenders say she was confused as to why her post had been removed as she didn’t know what MLM meant!

This is the sad reality. People just don't realise exactly what it is they're buying in to. They fall for the glitz and glamour and the promise of making loads of money*

I think they fall for the status they think it will confer. The chance to call themselves a business owner or a CEO. The real recruiting agenda of these companies is carefully obscured too. Those people are sucked in and told to ignore the haters (concerned friends and family!). They’re told if it isn’t working they just need to try harder and want it more and this plays on the sunk cost fallacy and they think if they can just buy their next promotion things will surely start going their way. It’s always people who really can’t afford to lose money. The Direct Selling Association’s director has been appearing in the media being very careful to call it “direct selling” and claiming you can make a guaranteed income every month of c.£380 by selling product as there’s ‘no recruiting’ and the MLM is a “self regulating” industry; it’s blatant lies, but it’s not surprising people are fooled if that’s what is being said by someone in the media. If you haven’t got many options and want flexible work it looks really attractive and if you aren’t used to doing research and recognising bias in what you read as well as your own internal bias, then it’s really easy to fall for it and not scrutinise it. Hard to leave MLM too once you’ve pissed everyone off in your social network, pulled in friends who are also losing money and been told by your upline that quitting equals failure, and when you do finally quit all those friends in the MLM you thought you had start isolating you.

Whoops, bold and paragraph fail!

Not unreasonable.

I stopped bothering with fairs when they ended up being 80% MLMs, especially when you'd get four people doing essential oils, handmade soaps, candles/homeware and 'jewellery' all turned out to be the same one, but each had brought along about twenty quid's worth of random shite for the stall whilst the rest of the trestle was taken up with their MLM stuff.

I'd even put 'No MLMs' on the advertising, as that would get me more interested.

Do you allow people to post directly onto your page? The one that I'm watching seems to have a system of people applying to post. Their application gets reviewed and they get a message back with either a time that their post will go live or a rejection. This seems to work well, posts go up in intervals so that potential buyers' newsfeeds aren't overwhelmed with a ton of posts all at the same time. The administrators also put a post up at about 9.30pm saying that they are finished for the day and will be reviewing applications again tomorrow. They also have a note that they are too busy to reply to messages and anyone who has been rejected should read through the requirements rather than contact the administrators.

If you’re organising and running the fair, you don’t actually have to worry about being reasonable, as long as you’re not being discriminatory. You’re welcome to say ‘No MLM’, just as you’d be welcome to say ‘No homemade fudge’, ‘No bobble hats’, ‘No inspirational quotes on a sampler’. If people don’t like it, tough titty.