Image via CrunchBaseFollowing is my personal experience on Helium ( http://www.helium.com/ ) Your experience can and will vary.A long while back (several years ago) I joined a variety of places where you supposedly write things to make money (sort of freelancing). At the time, I thought Helium was interesting as it has a mutual rating community. Multiple people write articles about a single topic, then you are randomly asked to rate the articles (which is better of the two given).
So I wrote a few.
Then I realized the raters are all bigots.
They don't actually rate the articles based on quality. They just rate that they "like".
I wrote an article on "abandoneware". Legally, there is no such thing. Morally there is no such thing either. There is no such thing as "squatter's rights" to intellectual property. The #1 article claims "unsupported software" is considered "abandoneware". Others actually claimed a moral right to abandoneware as long as no harm can be proven. As predicted, my article ended at the bottom of the heap, even though I believe it is the most technically accurate of the 6 articles on that topic. That was in 2007.
So I abandoned the place.
In 2010, I was busted a scam called TVI Express, and I found a lot of writers were singing praises about TVI Express on Helium. So I gathered up all the facts I got, put in proper citations to actual news articles, and explained it's a scam, by citing all the inconsistencies, all the lies the distributors told, compared the structures to all the laws, and so on, and declared it a scam. (I'll reproduce the article below)
The article was rejected for "LOW QUALITY" that does not meet Helium's standards.
WTF?!
At least the #1 article is a "scam busting" one from Shawn Cornett of ExpertMLMReview. #2 and others are singing praises of TVI Express, and that's just bull****.
So there you go: I think Helium is a community of bigots, based on my experience. Its raters are not rating for quality. Of course, I may be bigoted as well. That's why this is a RANT.
