Re: Dean.
So, in the comment thread of the Zeldman blog post I linked the other day, Dean Allen took a moment to expand on why he shut down Favrd:
I started Favrd solely to furnish me with something amusing to read while waiting in line at the supermarket, calm in the assurance that in doing so I’d never ever see Pete Cashmore’s stupid douchey face or read his stupid douchey toots. It worked great guns and over time, as momentum grew and more people started perking up to the ad hoc format (lonelysandwich called it ‘Twitter as performance’, which I liked very much) and unwritten, self-shaping rules. …
Long before I began thinking about the damage being done in the use of authoritative judgement as fuel for creativity and wit, I found myself having to work out ways to stave off gaming of the site, in particular dealing with sock puppets and self-starrers and the recent, baffling phenomenon of people finding several hundred things a day to be their ‘favourite’. And then I took a hard look at the stats: the site was getting a million or so pageviews every month, but from a rather small number of unique IPs. As people reflexively refreshed their personal pages, sometimes thousands of times a day, I began to feel like the manager of a comedy club in which comedians crack a joke, then repeatedly run from table to table to stare each patron in the eye, looking for the love.
Earlier in the same thread, we also hear from Nick Douglas (formerly of Valleywag) who manages to be surprisingly even-handed (for the internet, anyway) in criticising Dean while also acknowledging that running an online community can be brutal:
No one argues that Dean had a legal obligation to keep the site running. The argument is that his decision to shut down the site without consulting any of the people who used and enjoyed it was selfish and, given the relative ease of other options for offloading it, betrayed a (possibly temporary) carelessness for the feelings and desires of users that presumably made him run the site for so long. I feel justified in pegging him with a social imperative, and saying that he deserves to lose friends if he deletes the site. …
While I don’t like Dean’s decision, I’m sure it was result of email after email, or tweet after tweet or whatever, from frustrated users demanding he change the site to suit their needs. How quickly we all felt entitled to a Favrd that drove our personal favorite users to the top. Loads of us publicly asked for a faves-per-follower ranking because, while we love the much-followed, much-faved Sween, Hotdogsladies, and Abigvictory, we didn’t have much use for a daily list of their tweets. Some of us were civil, but demanding. Others were worse. Still more were whiners. And the worst of it probably came to Dean’s private inboxes. That’s pretty frustrating to a guy who set up a fun toy back when about a hundred people, tops, were using Twitter to be witty at other people using Twitter to be witty.
The takeaway, if any, is that there’s a gray area somewhere between creating something purely for personal joy and feeling completely beholden to an audience you don’t recognize or very much like (as Dean does), and being able to step back and look at a creation objectively, flaws and all. Objectively, Favrd was a trifle, but some good people loved it, and would’ve adopted it if Dean had just asked for their help. Clearly, he didn’t see any value in it beyond it being “something amusing to read” for himself, and couldn’t look at it through anyone’s eyes but his own.
This, I feel, is just a slightly more articulate version of why we can’t have nice things on the internet. It’s not just that there are douchebags, but that people in online spaces just don’t show consideration for one another. Healthy communities need community spirit, not fits of pique resulting in an over-loquacious takedown page. We don’t need more people like Dean Allen. We need more people better than him.
Speaking of which, if you’re one of the sad clowns whose worlds got a little bit smaller when Favrd shut down, you need to read Zeldman’s follow-up post:
DEAR FOLKS WHO COMPARE USING FAVRD TO HAVING A PROBLEM WITH DRUGS AND ALCOHOL, PLEASE STOP.
