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

Post by idlewords » Fri, Jan 28, 2011, 3:59 PM UTC

ramanujan wrote: post #28

samengland wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the author of the article and I can honestly say that "SEO for keywords related to the founder, his company's name, and related variables" is not what we're trying to do. The article is simply speculation about what having a founder with this kind of attitude might mean - and it's also speculation as to the direction Tumblr is heading in under the leadership of David Karp. I just found it quite interesting. On a…

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…

Post by JohnMaloney » Fri, Jan 28, 2011, 4:04 PM UTC

rationalbeaver wrote: post #52

JohnMaloney wrote: post #41

One very important point that William fails to mention about his email to us - he spent the time to track down every Tumblr employees email and sent it to the entire team. It was way over-the-top, and yes, discouraging to the team. The idea that David Karp, who I've work closely for eight years over two startups, is arrogant and doesn't care about the community, is completely off base. And anyone who knows David will…

"One very important point that William fails to mention about his email to us - he spent the time to track down every Tumblr employees email and sent it to the entire team. It was way over-the-top, and yes, discouraging to the team." Assuming that is true, your comment deserves more attention. It changes the situation significantly.

Post by steveklabnik » Fri, Jan 28, 2011, 4:06 PM UTC

samengland wrote: post #34

spolsky wrote: post #30

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 comp…

MySpace didn't have these issues though - nor did Twitter (to this extent). It's also a relatively straight forward blogging platform though - it's not particularly hard to figure out how to allocate resources despite exponential growth. The fact is - responding to issues in such a manner might not affect the outlook of Tumblr immediately - but the fact that he does respond to emails like this might be a representati…

Post by kmfrk » Fri, Jan 28, 2011, 4:09 PM UTC

Post by GVRV » Fri, Jan 28, 2011, 4:11 PM UTC

AdamN wrote: post #49

spolsky wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that Tumblr can certainly afford bad PR like this. Show me an example of a company that was, actually, hurt by something like this. One example, please. Every high school kid in New York uses Tumblr every minute of every day. None of them even know who David is, and those that do, revere him.

@spolsky Why are you so invested in this? If a CEO has nothing good to say, he needs to say nothing. That's his fiduciary responsibility and I'm sure the board has the same opinion.