Should Tumblr care? David Karp tells users who complain to "go away"

And this right here folks is why a startup is so extraordinarily stressful, why PR agencies exist, and why a squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Think about it: that post (and the comments by robyn_b below, an account which was registered 20 minutes ago) goes out of its way to SEO-ify for keywords related to the founder, his company's name, and related variables.

This is the risk you run with every single customer service interaction -- that the guy on the other side won't just be content to take his ball and go home if you can't meet his demands, but will try to foment a mass movement against you to put you out of business.

Good service is unfortunately not a panacea for this problem. Suppose that 99.9% of your customers are satisfied, but you have millions. Then you've got thousands of disgruntled people out there, and bad news travels fastest.

The lesson, ultimately, is that you simply can't respond in a human way to someone attacking your baby. You need call centers and roboscripts and a first layer of customer service, such that if a customer decides to attack you on the internet, a manager can jump in, offer concessions, and make it all better.

Doing it any other way means that you run the risk of a candid response becoming a capital crime.

"A knee-jerk response like this which is immediately defensive clearly shows that Karp has something to hide. Perhaps from this we can ascertain that there is some sort of internal friction with his team – perhaps some dislocation, maybe they’re overworked"

Or maybe it just shows that he's 24 years old and isn't communicating with the benefit of a public relations team watching his every move.

now that the original email has been posted, clearly a defensive response from an overstressed individual, which I can totally identify with; it's easy to get snippy when things are going wrong faster than you can keep up and all you hear is more complaints. but a bad PR move for sure

Mr. England, your post went on for thousands of words psychoanalyzing the guy and his motives ("abruptly...knee-jerk response...defensive...something to hide....care-free and cavalier...", and so on ad nauseum).

Something about the tone set off my metal detectors, as did the comments by robyn_b here, which reminded me of the way people on 4chan work someone's name into a sentence to make sure that it's the number one hit on Google.

Sure enough, looking into this a little more, it actually isn't as surprising. From your site:

http://postdesk.com/hiring/

  PostDesk is looking for fresh new talent in the UK,
  Europe, the USA and Canada. We require web developers who
  are proficient in PHP and MySQL - and ideally those who
  have worked with CMS systems, bulletin board style 
  software or social networking software....In short, the
  start-up will be based around news, discussion and 
  debate. 

Ok, so you run a competing startup in the same space and saw an opportunity to poke a finger in the eye of a rival. Don't you think that merits an up front disclosure in bold font?

Give David a break. First of all, he's a very nice guy. Secondly, he's not running a corner greengrocer, he's running a site that's growing supernaturally fast and which has completely, utterly displaced myspace as the place where high school kids share. Tumblr has five MILLION visitors every single day, almost none of whom pay a dime. You can't run a service like that the same way you run an enterprise software company. You can't have a PR team and a customer service department that makes sure everybody gets a nice reply. When they have outages caused by growing pains (something which nobody here begrudges them), they get metric TONS of angry email from thousands of narcissistic users who can't IMAGINE that ANYONE ELSE is suffering from the same outage. You know what? David Karp doesn't like Tumblr being down any more than you do. David Karp didn't bring Tumblr down to piss you off. Self righteous, whiny blog posts demanding that David Karp is not capable of running Tumblr because he responded to an email in a fashion that you don't find sufficiently grovelling are, frankly, ridiculous, and reflect more poorly on the whiners than on Tumblr or David.