The TL;DR is: if anyone wants to contact me, make it a public message. If you have a business enquiry, please email me. I’m happy for people to contact me and send me messages, just do it publicly please.

Why?

This is about safety and accountability. Rather than a reaction to any unpleasant messages I’ve received or a reflection of how I feel about anyone in the community, this is a change I’ve been planning to make for a long time. As this little operation gets bigger, this is a step to shore up the foundation of communication in this community. Besides, I’m big on transparency.

Safety

When I wrote my community guidelines last year, it was in response to Rooster Teeth shitting the bed. One of the men was doing a bunch of shady stuff in private. And that’s a common thread in a lot of online drama and scandals: private messages. There’s something about that secrecy and the faux pas of publicising private messages online which emboldens people to say and do some wild shit, and I don’t want any part of it.

In that spirit, my goal here is to make the community safer by taking those private relationships off the table completely. Because I make videos publicly and have a public persona, there’s no good reason for cultivating private relationships through private messages. If there is something so sensitive it can’t be sent to me publicly, unless it’s a business enquiry or a safety concern, it’s probably not appropriate to send it to me anyway.

Accountability

For some business-related projects, communication gets broken between three different platforms. When I’m trying to forensically backtrack and find this or that version of a document, I’m bouncing between accounts and getting lost along the way. Worse still, sometimes I miss messages and leave people hanging. So by consolidating a bunch of these communication channels to my email address, it should be easier for me to keep up and respond in a timely manner (like an adult).

So what’s changing?

For most people, nothing. Overall, I’m reserving private messages for my real life and online friends — personal stuff. There are exceptions for business stuff where they don’t have an email listed anywhere. But for most people, this won’t affect you at all.