kameden Wrote:To all the people asking for refunds: Don't you feel a little bit guilty about doing it? I mean you did use his service and everything.

I'm not normally the kind of person to ask for a refund, especially for that amount of money... but the service itself was (in my opinion) a mess. Broken or out-of-date resource links, a really buggy interface, zero support. Some real game-breaking stuff, too, like bugs that would affect your percentage complete. I would email Khatz once in a while with some of the bugs / busted links I found, but rarely if ever did anything get fixed.

Also, when I originally signed up, it was for 695 days, and then as I was about a third of the way through, it suddenly changed to 995 days, without any sort of explanation why. Looking back now, I can think of reasons why he may have done it, but I'd only be speculating.

So for me at least, I didn't feel bad at all asking for the cash back. I really felt like I had been sold an unfinished product and left hanging in the breeze.

It's a real possibility that he's dead.

Sorry to be blunt, but no one seems to be bringing this up.

mattimus Wrote:It's a real possibility that he's dead.

Sorry to be blunt, but no one seems to be bringing this up.

I think Ken Seeroi said he saw Khatz somewhere in Tokyo recently, and that he was not impoverished.

mattimus Wrote:It's a real possibility that he's dead.

Sorry to be blunt, but no one seems to be bringing this up.

Curiosity killed the Khatz...
At one point, i was wondering if he was put in jail or in some kind of legal trouble.
Basically, a situation that would prevent or discourage him from updating his websites.

But from the comments, he must be ok.
Maybe he even reads this discussion thread.

Themistoclaus Wrote:

kameden Wrote:To all the people asking for refunds: Don't you feel a little bit guilty about doing it? I mean you did use his service and everything.

I'm not normally the kind of person to ask for a refund, especially for that amount of money... but the service itself was (in my opinion) a mess. Broken or out-of-date resource links, a really buggy interface, zero support. Some real game-breaking stuff, too, like bugs that would affect your percentage complete. I would email Khatz once in a while with some of the bugs / busted links I found, but rarely if ever did anything get fixed.

Also, when I originally signed up, it was for 695 days, and then as I was about a third of the way through, it suddenly changed to 995 days, without any sort of explanation why. Looking back now, I can think of reasons why he may have done it, but I'd only be speculating.

So for me at least, I didn't feel bad at all asking for the cash back. I really felt like I had been sold an unfinished product and left hanging in the breeze.

Ok, so you don't feel guilty about asking for a refund after using the service...and Khatz probably doesn't feel particularly guilty about not giving you the refund. I bet he believes he's right, just like you believe you're right.

You believe you faithfully executed every instruction the program gave you, he believes you didn't, and that you're trying to take advantage of his guarantee. Since there's no way to verify who is right, it is entirely up to his judgment whether he should give you the refund or not.

And yes, this was a poorly planned and executed business project. But we're all entitled to having failed business projects. I've seen no evidence that Khatz ever acted in bad faith, I'm sure he did his best to build a good course. It didn't work, the business failed, and that's that. I'm sure he feels bad about his business failing, but there's no reason to throw accusations of fraud around, based on a subjective, legally unenforceable "guarantee".

Stansfield123 Wrote:he believes you didn't, and that you're trying to take advantage of his guarantee.

Khatz didn't say this and he also started paying them back. Payments seem to stop at the same time so that doesn't line up with that stance either.

Stansfield123 Wrote:legally unenforceable "guarantee".

Luckily for him, nobody actually feels enough ill will about it to find out if this is true.

The rate that Khatz was charging was already unethical, as far as I'm concerned. Anyone care to remind me how much Khatz charged for Silverspoon exactly? Then give me an estimate of the amount of labor him and his assistant devoted to each customer on average and we'll figure out his hourly wage.

Stansfield123 Wrote:I bet he believes he's right, just like you believe you're right.

I really don't know how he feels. I also do not expect to see my money again, though I will keep up with the occasional email.

I am not tearing through the streets of Tokyo on some quest to find this fellow and right wrongs; just thought I would contribute to a relevant thread. Chill.

Tzadeck Wrote:The rate that Khatz was charging was already unethical, as far as I'm concerned. Anyone care to remind me how much Khatz charged for Silverspoon exactly? Then give me an estimate of the amount of labor him and his assistant devoted to each customer on average and we'll figure out his hourly wage.

You would also need to know how many customers bought the overpriced service to do this calculation. I'm guessing you could count them on a hand or two, so considering he probably put a few hundred hours into silver spoon, he probably didn't make a killing on the business. Considering that ajatt turned into what amounted to a freemium business model, if you add all the time he spent on the free side, I doubt he made minimum wage.

Agreed though. There's no way in hell I would have spent that kind of money on his service considering how unorganized his free content was. In retrospect, I halfway knew there would be a lot people asking for refunds if for no other reason than the individual learner has to do a whole lot of work, no matter how much money they spend on whatever holy grail method they use.

Tzadeck Wrote:The rate that Khatz was charging was already unethical, as far as I'm concerned. Anyone care to remind me how much Khatz charged for Silverspoon exactly? Then give me an estimate of the amount of labor him and his assistant devoted to each customer on average and we'll figure out his hourly wage.

i don't understand what is relevant about how much he was making. the CEO of Rosetta Stone makes lots of money for a shoddy product, but who cares? he doesn't have a fo shizzle guarantee that wasn't honored. that is the problem, and if Khatz made lots of money with a guarantee he won't honor, that makes it worse.

but if he made lots of money in a perfectly legal way, from a product that takes him little time/energy investment, that just makes him smart. if a product is shoddy then usually customers will stop buying that product, end of story. if you are able to make lots of money from a shoddy, quickly built product, that doesn't then make you unethical. it makes you a successful businessman in a capitalist economy.

ethical questions should be of a legal nature, not Marxist economics. otherwise you might be more interested in learning Korean rather than Japanese lol.

dtcamero Wrote:ethical questions should be of a legal nature, not Marxist economics. otherwise you might be more interested in learning Korean rather than Japanese lol.

Dunno about this. Ethical questions should be of an ethical nature, legal from legal, etc. I believe there's plenty of unethical actions that are perfectly legal in the US.

I like your other points though. There's nothing wrong with making a profit while doing next to nothing. But shoddy product + money back guarantee + no money back is unethical IMHO. Of course getting into the minutia of legality, khatz's intent and eventual outcomes is murky territory.

My opinion is that khatz was well intentioned, but overzealous and made promises that he didn't fully realize was unlikely to make good on. Whether that's ethical, I believe rests on his intent. Whether it's legal rests on a lot of things, but notibly, the wording of his 'fo shizzle guarantee' which, I believe would be laughed out of court. On the consumer's side, I believe anyone who paid money for his service should have known better. Even if khatz's guarantee were legally binding, getting what you're entitled by the law is usually a far from trivial matter. Overall, it sounds like this whole thing turned out about as expected. Hopefully khatz and his customers learned something about the world and themselves from the exercise.

dtcamero Wrote:

kameden Wrote:To all the people asking for refunds: Don't you feel a little bit guilty about doing it? I mean you did use his service and everything.

ya what they purchased wasn't just access to an rss, it was guaranteed fluency after a thousand days. as a business model that is pretty astronomically stupid unless it was a scam from the start

No it's not. He used certain methods and systems to achieve amazing results, and he was confident that they could be replicated in anyone. And he is right. They can. The majority of his products are introduced by stressing that you don't even need them.

The problem with programs like silverspoon though is that a lot of people just don't have the willpower to do everything they need to do. Those programs only work if you do everything it tells you to do.

That and Khatz is a coder but not a designer (the SRS he coded is great but the UI is.. pretty haphazard). The UI for silverspoon probably had oddities and bugs like people mentioned which could have demotivated some.

dtcamero Wrote:which I don't want to believe. I really want to think he thought this would work. anyway if you didn't become 'fluent' (whatever that means)

dtcamero Wrote:i'll add that since he is someone who did self-study to an accomplished level, his parlayance of the word 'fluency' is so slimy that it gives me doubts about his genuineness but whatever.

No. Fluency was defined by him in the posts to avoid that ambiguousness.

dtcamero Wrote:I used a garbage email address to get an ajatt sentence pack for free a few years ago, and until september of this year I had been getting almost daily emails from an ajatt account with his ideosyncratic self-helpy language advice. here's a copy of the last one:
my guess would be that he is still hoping to catch a few fish that haven't yet caught on to his dissappearing act.

Those e-mails are sent out via an automated system.

Themistoclaus Wrote:Also, when I originally signed up, it was for 695 days, and then as I was about a third of the way through, it suddenly changed to 995 days, without any sort of explanation why. Looking back now, I can think of reasons why he may have done it, but I'd only be speculating.

That was when he changed silverspoon to "neutrino" and updated the program.

cracky Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:he believes you didn't, and that you're trying to take advantage of his guarantee.

Khatz didn't say this and he also started paying them back. Payments seem to stop at the same time so that doesn't line up with that stance either.

This. I believe Khatz had every intention to honor refunds, and did. The problem is that he suddenly disappeared one day and stopped. I'm pretty sure what happened that his financial situation suddenly changed (had to pay a large amount of money to something or someone all of a sudden), and then he couldn't continue to process refunds without losing his place.

dtcamero Wrote:if you are able to make lots of money from a shoddy, quickly built product, that doesn't then make you unethical. it makes you a successful businessman in a capitalist economy.

If capitalism means, 'Hey, if you can f*ck someone out of some money, good job!' then I don't want capitalism. Businesses should supply goods or services that provide value to customers. That's the redeeming side of capitalism, so that's what ethical capitalism should be. If you make a lot of money knowing that you're deceiving people, then f you.

I suppose an economist would say that the market corrects itself. If Silverspoon provided bad services or didn't honor refunds, future people wouldn't be interested if it were offered again. That's probably true, but it doesn't help the people who got screwed the first time around.

ryuudou Wrote:

Themistoclaus Wrote:Also, when I originally signed up, it was for 695 days, and then as I was about a third of the way through, it suddenly changed to 995 days, without any sort of explanation why. Looking back now, I can think of reasons why he may have done it, but I'd only be speculating.

That was when he changed silverspoon to "neutrino" and updated the program.

That was a different switch. The move to Neutrino happened to me after I was only a few weeks in. The jump from 695 to 995 was made without any fanfare... I logged into Neutrino one day and my completion percentage had gone from ~40% to ~30%. Don't remember the exact figures.

ryuudou Wrote:That and Khatz is a coder but not a designer (the SRS he coded is great but the UI is.. pretty haphazard). The UI for silverspoon probably had oddities and bugs like people mentioned which could have demotivated some.

Yeah, the design has definitely not hot, but that was easy enough to look past. The issues I mentioned were very much backend (PHP, I assume / MySQL) issues. Surusu was also not immune; for a period of several months, every fifth card wouldn't be counted, so 20% of your reps were wasted. That one eventually got fixed.

dtcamero Wrote:ethical questions should be of a legal nature, not Marxist economics. otherwise you might be more interested in learning Korean rather than Japanese lol.

Asking for businessmen to act with decency and respect towards their customers is not "marxist economics".

mattimus Wrote:It's a real possibility that he's dead.

Sorry to be blunt, but no one seems to be bringing this up.

I don't think he's dead. Based on when refund payments, social media posts, and non-automated AJATT articles stopped, he would have "died" in October 2014.

Here are some reasons why he probably isn't dead:

1) MindFUD.com (which most of us think is Khatz) was created in January 2015.
2) Of all the Jvloggers who know Khatz, none have mentioned him dying. In fact, TkyoSam has said he's doing alright.
3) AJATT's domain was recently renewed. I know it's on auto-renew, but dead people typically don't have working credit cards. (From personal experiences, banks seem to freeze the assets of the deceased and have the family sort things out. I can't imagine his credit card was still active a year later to renew the domain.)

CreepyAF Wrote:

mattimus Wrote:It's a real possibility that he's dead.

Sorry to be blunt, but no one seems to be bringing this up.

I don't think he's dead. Based on when refund payments, social media posts, and non-automated AJATT articles stopped, he would have "died" in October 2014.

Here are some reasons why he probably isn't dead:

1) MindFUD.com (which most of us think is Khatz) was created in January 2015.
2) Of all the Jvloggers who know Khatz, none have mentioned him dying. In fact, TkyoSam has said he's doing alright.
3) AJATT's domain was recently renewed. I know it's on auto-renew, but dead people typically don't have working credit cards. (From personal experiences, banks seem to freeze the assets of the deceased and have the family sort things out. I can't imagine his credit card was still active a year later to renew the domain.)

1) That was 10 months ago, perhaps a last-ditch effort to get a new project going after the October 2014 "happening" (whatever it was)
2) I thought TkyoSam said he hadn't seen Khatz in a long time, I think it was in a youtube comment
3) He may have purchased the site with a Kenyan bank account, and not to insult Kenya, but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have systems in place to respond to these things (especially regarding international incidents).

There are really only two possibilities here:
1) He's dead
2) He walked away from everything

Not having seen any news of him being alive (unless you can point out that TkyoSam said so), knowing he got divorced, and seeing the appearance of a major financial failure from a project he devoted himself to, all in a foreign country, I'm just saying it's not a pretty picture.

I hope he's OK though.

mattimus Wrote:1) That was 10 months ago, perhaps a last-ditch effort to get a new project going after the October 2014 "happening" (whatever it was)
2) I thought TkyoSam said he hadn't seen Khatz in a long time, I think it was in a youtube comment
3) He may have purchased the site with a Kenyan bank account, and not to insult Kenya, but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have systems in place to respond to these things (especially regarding international incidents).

There are really only two possibilities here:
1) He's dead
2) He walked away from everything

Not having seen any news of him being alive (unless you can point out that TkyoSam said so), knowing he got divorced, and seeing the appearance of a major financial failure from a project he devoted himself to, all in a foreign country, I'm just saying it's not a pretty picture.

I hope he's OK though.

This is a compelling angle. I think the way you connect the dots certainly creates a very plausible scenario.

For me, I'm leaning towards thinking no news is good news. I can't imagine that there would be absolutely no trace of his death on the internet. I know this logic isn't bulletproof, but with so little to go on, I think it's reasonable to think this way.

As for Sam, check out this Twitter convo from June of this year. Make of it what you will.

From Twitter:

Vanilla Milk: I'm curious because I'm wondering if Khatz is still alive and why he quit tweeting and updating his site.
Sam: I have a feeling he is going to retire from being an online presence and enjoy his money now
Vanilla Milk: But he's not in trouble right? How long ago was that character video? Are you still seeing him?
Sam: I haven't seen him the last 2 years
Vanilla Milk: Then why are you sure he's okay? I'm afraid he got in trouble with something or got deported.
Sam: lol I've talked to people he is in contact with. Trust me, he's fine

"enjoy his money now"? Okayyy. Maybe the 夜逃げ theory was right...

CreepyAF Wrote:

mattimus Wrote:1) That was 10 months ago, perhaps a last-ditch effort to get a new project going after the October 2014 "happening" (whatever it was)
2) I thought TkyoSam said he hadn't seen Khatz in a long time, I think it was in a youtube comment
3) He may have purchased the site with a Kenyan bank account, and not to insult Kenya, but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have systems in place to respond to these things (especially regarding international incidents).

There are really only two possibilities here:
1) He's dead
2) He walked away from everything

Not having seen any news of him being alive (unless you can point out that TkyoSam said so), knowing he got divorced, and seeing the appearance of a major financial failure from a project he devoted himself to, all in a foreign country, I'm just saying it's not a pretty picture.

I hope he's OK though.

This is a compelling angle. I think the way you connect the dots certainly creates a very plausible scenario.

For me, I'm leaning towards thinking no news is good news. I can't imagine that there would be absolutely no trace of his death on the internet. I know this logic isn't bulletproof, but with so little to go on, I think it's reasonable to think this way.

As for Sam, check out this Twitter convo from June of this year. Make of it what you will.

From Twitter:

Vanilla Milk: I'm curious because I'm wondering if Khatz is still alive and why he quit tweeting and updating his site.
Sam: I have a feeling he is going to retire from being an online presence and enjoy his money now
Vanilla Milk: But he's not in trouble right? How long ago was that character video? Are you still seeing him?
Sam: I haven't seen him the last 2 years
Vanilla Milk: Then why are you sure he's okay? I'm afraid he got in trouble with something or got deported.
Sam: lol I've talked to people he is in contact with. Trust me, he's fine

"I haven't seen him the last 2 years"

So Sam hasn't actually seen him in over 2 years which is what mattimus said.

ryuudou Wrote:So Sam hasn't actually seen him in over 2 years which is what mattimus said.

I have seen Khatz within the last two years. As far as I know he's still fine.

ryuudou Wrote:So Sam hasn't actually seen him in over 2 years which is what mattimus said.

Fair enough. Though he also said he has spoke with people who are in contact with Khatz. Either way, I've found out some more stuff that might be of interest.

For those who are familiar with WordPress, you'll know that WordPress will automatically update the minor releases of the software. For example, version 4.2.8 will automatically update to 4.2.9, but it won't roll over to 4.3.0.

With that in mind, AJATT.com is running 3.9.9. Version 4.0 came out in September 2014.

However, both MindFUD and Pakapa are up to date with versions 4.3.1. (Version 4.3 came out on the 18th of August this year.) This means that a human had to have logged into these sites sometime between mid-August and now.

Obviously there is no way to know if that human was Khatz. From the given evidence, I think we can only conclude that he likely was involved with the setup of these sites. Maintaining is another story. But regardless, it's some FUD for thought.

[Zgarbas]

Creepy, do you ever wonder how much your Japanese would improve if you reallocated your stalking-Khatz time to studying?

Zgarbas Wrote:Creepy, do you ever wonder how much your Japanese would improve if you reallocated your stalking-Khatz time to studying?

haha yeah, good point. Maybe I should take the AJATT philosophy to heart and start creeping him in Japanese. I'd be studying and creeping at the same time xD

[Zgarbas]

Oh dear, what have I done D: