Just feeling like sharing my communication with feedspot

After I got my RSS set up, I decided to put it in various feed collectors, since I got the impression that people search those to find interesting stuff. That's how I came across feedspot, and they had an art feed, so I signed up.

This is the email exchange that followed.

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Hi Noah S,

Thanks for submitting Noah S Art to FeedSpot.

Took a look at art-noah-s.eu, your colorful indie web home for your art, gallery, prints, the webcomic Tales from Animal Valley, and your personal writing. Is a strong fit for our Art Blogs list. https://bloggers.feedspot.com/art_blogs/

Art lovers browse this list to find blogs worth following, and a featured spot puts yours in front of them with FeedSpot's DA 70+ endorsement.

Three plan options if you'd like to get featured:

Business ($19/mo): Listed with verified badge, website link, and social links
Business Plus ($29/mo): Higher position on the list, plus a custom CTA button
Business Pro ($99/mo): Top position on the list for maximum visibility, plus a featured spot in related newsletters sent to subscribers

All plans are monthly. Cancel anytime.

Get started here to secure your spot on the Art Blogs list.

Happy to answer any questions.

Before I signed up, it hadn't said anything about having to pay to show up in the feed. Besides, the description of my website is how I described it in my submission. This didn't read like a human who had actually looked at it, it read like an AI that was programmed to rephrase what I had written.

I ignore it. This was 4 days ago.

Then today, this showed up in my inbox.

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Hi Noah S,

Just following up on featuring Noah S Art on our Top Art Blogs list.

Art lovers actively browse this list. A featured spot puts Noah S Art directly in front of that audience, with a DA 70+ third-party endorsement.

The Pro plan gets you the top featured position on the list. Get started here.

I was already in a bad mood when I saw this. They had gotten my email under false pretenses, and now they kept messaging me asking for money. If they had been upfront from the start, I never would've signed up.

So I responded with this.

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Hello

I'm confused by this. Before I signed up, nowhere did you say anything about having to pay. After I signed up and gave you this email, I was shown a screen asking me to pay. I closed the tab and moved on. And now you keep emailing me asking for money.

If you had read my writings on my website as you claimed to, you would see that I'm trying to move away from the commercial web. What part of that sounded like I would want to pay for a top spot? And if I was to buy the top spot, it wouldn't really be a top spot. It'd be a competition for who has the biggest wallet while you'd get all the money from making people pay to compete with each other instead of working together to build something better. Those websites I link to in my right sidebar? None of them have paid me anything. I link to them because I like them. And I mistakenly thought that your feed was somewhere for people to go to find things that they'd like instead of yet another "pay to be seen".

It is clear that we lack a common goal here. I'd suggest that you start telling people that your feed is a "pay for a spot" before they sign up, to reduce confusion in the future.

All the best
Noah S

I'm so tired of the commercialization of everything.