Dumbshit Dept.
How not to run a free net service
Dave Winer manages to strike a nerve with me just about every time I hear his name. I first heard about dave 6 years ago when a friend of mine worked for an ISP who counted Dave as one of its customers. My friend told me stories of Dave coming to them, w(h)ining about something and if Dave didn't get his way he would start threatening my friend to lambast him and the ISP in public.
Then I had to endure Dave disrupting a number of sessions at O'Reilly conferences -- he usually chimed in with some self-centered comments about his supposed accomplishments and how no one respected him.
Now now, Dave Winer, the self proclaimed father of blogging, shuts down his blogging service without warning to his users:
"If you want a copy of your weblogs.com-hosted website, post a comment here, include the URL of the site. Sometime after July 1, 2004, I will export all the requested sites, without their membership groups. You can then download them and do with them as you wish. I won't export them before July 1, and this is a one-time offer."
If you're going to host a free service on the net you need to be aware of what you're getting into before you start. You need to respect your users and treat them as your customers, not as sycophants. His handling of this case bugs me in a numer of respects:
- He mentions the high cost of hosting the service as one of the reasons he is shutting it down. Fair enough, that is a valid point. However, you can't tell me that you just woke up and realized that this was going to be expensive. I know for a fact that you've been hosting sites for over 6 years now and that its not cheap. This is not something that crept up on you!
- When it became clear that you were in trouble, why not ask for help? MusicBrainz is user supported because our users care enough to donate to keep the service alive. The same thing could've been done here -- Dave could've appealed for people to chip in money. I bet out of 3000 blogs someone would've even volunteered to help maintain the servers.
- Holding your users hostage and granting them the priviledge to beg for their blog content is downright rude. Unless Dave had some draconian license agreement in place, the content of the blogs is copyrighted by their respective owners.
I deeply understand the pain involved in offering a web based service for use by lots and lots of people (more about that in my next post). But someone who leads such a project should be more graceful and respectful of their users.
Finally, Liz Lawley has a good parting thought on this matter:
Don’t put all your data in someone else’s basket, no matter how much you like or trust the person (or company) holding the basket.
Well put!
Posted by Mayhem at June 17, 2004 12:17 PM
Your post is the first I've read that has the edge of surprise and perhaps contempt that matches my own. I think this is a shocking thing for Dave W. to do, but so far the reaction I've read on the web has been surprisingly polite and decorous.
Dave Winer wants to influence an industry, he wants everyone to adopt RSS and implement it the way he says it should be implemented. He did not help run weblogs.com out of the goodness of his heart, he did it to gain power and have a platform to sell more Radioland product. I've a small business with about the same business model - we give some stuff away for free, not just because we're nice, but also because it helps us. I know how it works. I know how much I'd be hurting myself if I suddenly and arbitrarily stopped giving away stuff for free.
This move by Dave is a rather shocking self-inflicted wound. If nothing else, the enemies of RSS just gained a great weapon, and those of us, like myself, who were hoping to see RSS succeed must admit that this is a setback. It's like belonging to a movement where suddenly the leader of the movement, or at least the most prominent spokesperson for that movement, suddenly drinks Koolaid with arsenic in it.
