This was all good. People are saying things that seem deeply wrong to me and so it's leading to some good hard thinking about what the root cause could be.

Even you saying that you are rooting for me. That seems wrong to do (although thank you anyway). I categorize that into a missing feeling: why aren't you rooting for each other?

We called it the partner program and then never explained who was in partnership with each other.

The structural reason is that the incentives put authors in competition. I think that is why so many authors like to talk trash about other authors. Those others are stealing their views and money. It's one pie split into more and more slices.

But the one thing we did do structurally to grow the pie has somehow been interpreted as threatening. We pay for referrals. Those are authors who grow the pie for other authors rather than shrink the pie.

So we need more inventives like that and then we all need to get on the same page about what it means to be in partnership with each other.

That's on me to facilitate.