Oh my god is this the timeline where everyone finally starts to see how shady dubby actually is!? I've not been affiliated with them for YEARS so any experiences I've had may not be the way things are now but know it left a terrible impression when I did leave. I joined when I first started streaming like 2019-2020 and was my first affiliate brand as a small streamer (pre-vtuber). It was where I met a lot of new friends in the space (many who I am still pretty close with) and eventually I got brought on as a discord mod at the time. We had meetings often with the owner about updates, server news, and any concerns with members. Everyone on the mod team was lovely and I had no issues. However Anthony (the owner) rubbed a lot of us the wrong way. Aside from just him being a dick and clearly not caring about the quality of the community he was building he: Would openly admit to not caring about terminology he used in advertisements. Very often (even now) he would use partner/sponsor interchangeably when what he really means is an affiliate program. This led to a LOT of confusion when new members would join (a lot of them minors) under the impression they were to be paid for promoting the product or get a code to run tiktok ads. Both were false but he didn't care and he openly claimed to us mods that it's basically all the same thing (it in fact is not) He also would brush the fact that a lot of minors were joining. Mind you PayPal was the only method for payouts and you need to be 18+ to have an account. He didn't care because discord was 15+ so we were constantly getting new members who were not even old enough to make PayPal accounts and were encouraged to use their parents or gaurdians which is fine I guess??? (Why were we even advertising an energy drink to children?) I wish I still had the photos but there was a point where an illustration was used as a deskmat with no credit to the artist anywhere on the site and the signature was cropped off. Only reason I knew it was stolen was cause I had the full illustration as my desktop wallpaper for like a year before It was even added as a product. (Now its replaced with a generic ass cherry blossom illustration thats probably ai) During my time there me and a hand full of friends wanted to create an org to rep dubby and the founder of the org tried to reach an agreement for sponsorship but declined and said he had no interest. Eventually we got offered a sponsorship with glytch (pre ai takeover) and the requirement to accept that offer was to drop any energy drink competition. Obviously we all were torn because at the time dubby was where all our friends were we spent money on it and shared it with our communities but in the end we all chose to move to glytch. After doing so Anthony decided to spread rumors about all of being traitors and just weird high school behavior. OH then he ended up making an org anyways after we left like it was some sort of attempt to one up us. Now I see ai accusations and honestly I'm not surprised. Dubby is the kind of company to cut corners wherever they can to make profit and stay "trending". Their cup designs are mid and all their flavors taste the same and like chemicals. Long story short there there are better drink companies to work with! Always do your research and ask around, check twitter search for posts like these, and don't just sign up for the sake of signing up. I know being affiliated with something is exciting when you are small but sometimes saying no and waiting a little longer for a different opportunity can do you even better than if you said yes and regretted it later 💚 (don't be like me LOL)