I think there are certainly some horrid threads - but it’s also the only place to read valid criticism of people like j monroe and dr J Taylor, and others who encourage donations or payments for content or activism from vulnerable/poor people who believe they’re someone that they’re not.
See also,beauty journos whose early reputations were for integrity but who now promote anyone who’ll cough up and/or make a big chunk of their income from affiliate links.
Most of the posters on these types of threads are former fans of the person in question; the scales have gradually fallen from their eyes, and they’ve googled to see if they’re the only one who thinks something’s fishy. This is because the influencer in question deletes any comments that has even the vaguest whiff of criticism on their instas.
I consider myself pretty objective about this stuff - I’m annoyed but not enraged by grifters for example - and I’d say that the loudest voices in the ‘ban Tattle’ chorus are those who have the most to lose from this kind of perfectly valid - in fact, crucial - critical oversight.
if you make a living from a para social relationship with the public and/or from ‘recommendations’ then your ethics, and the methods you use to build that trust in your audience/marke,are a perfectly valid topic of public discussion. Likewise if you claim expertise, it’s unreasonable to expect those who disagree not to say so.
The two I have in mind have either lied outright about what’s been written about them on the site or very carefully manipulated the truth - for example, saying that their childen have been attacked on the site when in fact they’ve only been mentioned in the context of the influencer being criticised for exploiting those children. Or saying that site users have revealed where they live when they’ve only repeated what the influencer has made public themselves. The worst accusations- that site users have encouraged sexual abuse for example - are just patently and demonstrably untrue, and the great thing about Tattle is that all this is documented in the Wikis.
One immediate side effects of all this is that the people who scream about Tattle outrages end up sending people across to see how bad it is - and those people quite quickly find the receipts for the grifting/manipulation/NPD/fraudulent CVs of the person in question, which is satisfying.