How to make a goblin jealous

Step one: Gather up WoW gold-making ideas from across the blogosphere, drawing heavily from your own blog.
Step two: Attempt to sell this collection for money.
Step zero: Think of this scam before the goblin.

You might remember a little bit of a drama outbreak after Marko attempted to recruit Gevlon for some marketing of his gold-making guide. Marko came away looking like a scamming, petty idiot who brought up pointless arguments to defend himself. Gevlon was entirely unaffected, since he responded in his usual manner: screenshots and being a self-absorbed asshole.

At the time I foolishly thought that Gevlon had refused because there's too much free information or not enough money. This seemed to just be part of his friendly, helpful advice that he puts out now and then. But wait a minute...

If the guide is such a waste, such a scam, then who is affected? Idiots! Morons! The incompetent and lazy people who cannot find the free information. Surely Gevlon is not protecting them. He's never shown any inclination to do so. In fact he's bragged about his own in-game scams.

Clearly there wasn't enough money in it. Right? Let's think of the math on this. In all likelihood Marko would have made the ad for him, even making multiple sizes so it would fit perfectly. This means that the actual time spent is only a few minutes. Even if he only got 10% of the sale and had only a hundred sales ever, that's still $100 for five minutes of work, or about $1200/hour. It's not quite free, since nothing is, but it's in a strong competition with picking up $20 bills that someone dropped on the street.

There must be something more to it...
"I was somewhat pissed by his ridiculous claims."
"to bash him for annoying me"
"They don't work on goblins. They just get pissed"
Gevlon is angry? Anger is not objective and rational! It is social rage, the bringer of hatred, which is supposedly the opposite of love. All it takes is a tick of the metronome to become a flower-waving hippie.

Why so angry?

In the end it's quite simple: Someone else thought of and acted on it first.

On an unrelated note, as I was perusing the drama posts, I found these strange bits.

"On the other hand the risk is high. Most of my readers are not idiots and lot of them don't like me at all, they come here to bitterly argue and troll. They would love to catch me doing something like that."

That sounds suspiciously like caring what other people think or say. Surely an anti-social with comment moderation on is immune to any negative effects from this. So in fact there is zero risk, except for socials.

"It looks funny when you read it, but it does work on social people. They don't want their peers to have bad opinions about them."

Oops.

"They don't work on goblins. They just get pissed, or see an opportunity to increase traffic"

Attention whore?

"That's not something that will lure me to risk my blog's credibility"

Credibility is a lazy mental shortcut used by people who cannot objectively evaluate information.

If by chance you're looking for a gold blogger who isn't a [terrible person], good luck. If you have found one, send a link. The closest I've found is a commenter, the Gnome of Zurich, who has not quite started his own blog. Maybe if I keep poking him he'll get going. Post or I will punt your tiny gnome ass so far, you'll end up far away from the location where I punted you from!