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

postdesk.com

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

#71

Post by kapitti »

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…

> You can't have a PR team and a customer service department that makes sure everybody gets a nice reply.

Do you really need a PR/CS team to ensure people get a nice reply? Shouldn't that just be something that a /very nice guy/ would accomplish naturally?

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

#72

Post by aristotlenova »

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…

John, I agree with you 100%. If a user somehow hunted down the emails of every developer on my team and sent off an email to them complaining and whining about stuff, I would be very put off by it and that would be WAY over the top. I think Mr. Karp however should not be the one responding to William and whoever should be responding should have some training on how to deal with really idiotic users in a calm and rational way.

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

#73

Post by msy »

spolsky wrote: post #37
rriepe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard from an article that I read recently that he wasn't, in fact, a nice guy. Maybe you had different experiences with him, but now most people who have read about him just think he's some 24-year-old punk trying to be Steve Jobs. That's just how this stuff works. Startup, LLC and HugeCorp, Inc. alike can't afford bad PR like this. It was an incredibly stupid move on David's part and he should patch this up as qu…

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.

Google Ratners jewellery

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

#74

Post by Maxious »

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…

Does nobody remember LiveJournal? The site with the community that was willing to look past growing pains and security exploits to communicate on their own terms? The "straight forward blogging platform" that created a need for memcached amongst other scaling tools? Read the history of LJ's architecture from 1 server to hundreds: http://www.danga.com/words/2007_06_usenix/usenix.pdf

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

#75

Post by forensic »

spolsky wrote: post #33
inovica wrote: post #6

I know that Steve Jobs has sent some very short responses before, however this from Karp shows immaturity more than anything. There are times when most of us will receive an email from a client and want to immediately tell them where to go, but the old saying to "sleep on it" really is good advice. I have sometimes waited a day before properly responding to some people and it was the best thing to do in every case. I…

Oh please, get over yourself. David started a company when he was 20.... obvious proof that he's extremely mature for his age, not immature. Let me know when you're running a successful website that zoomed to the top 50 in a couple of years and which serves 5 million people every single day before your 24th birthday. Picking on him for one email instead of his very impressive life's work, and self-righteously proclai…

It's nice that you're defending your crony.

But that's all it comes across as.

All the reasons you give for excusing Karp could also be used to excuse the "whiner" who sent the email. Does he not have his business to run? Is he not under pressure?

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

#76

Post by aristotlenova »

wtildesley wrote: post #45
prestia wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is William, what relationship do you have with PostDesk? It seems peculiar to take an exchange like this and forward it to a total unknown rather than one of the larger sites. I'm not saying I don't believe this happened, but I'm rather skeptical by nature.

I'm a friend of the owner.

So what you're saying is that this entire article is a hit piece that has nothing that remotely resembles objectivity or that has made any effort to actually tell both sides of the story. Fascinating.

Don't you love it when bloggers use their magic publish button to settle petty personal issues? Awesome. Thanks for wasting 15 minutes of my day.

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

#77

Post by ekidd »

samengland wrote: post #17
ekidd wrote: post #13

Without the original e-mail sent to Tumblr, it's hard to judge the appropriateness of Karp's response. Under most circumstances, it's rude to tell your customers to go away. But if a rare customer behaves abusively—particularly towards your employees or other customers—it may be the correct decision to politely decline their business. Of course, if lots of your customers are behaving abusively, you've got bigger prob…

Just got in touch with William to ask if I could post up the original e-mail in its entirety - and he said that was fine. I've added the original email to the bottom of the article. http://postdesk.com/debates/should-tumblr-care/

[Edit: Substantially rewritten in light of #2, below.]

Thank you. It looks like Postdesk started a public controversy while leaving out two critical pieces of information:

1) William's actual e-mail, which expresses his disappointment in a reasonably polite fashion. Normally, this sort of e-mail should merit a polite response and a refund.

2) The allegation that William send the email to the entire engineering team (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152203). This changes the context of Karp's remarks significantly, because it means that Karp had to weigh two things: The feelings of a disappointed customer, and the morale of his already-stressed engineers.

In this case, I actually sympathize a bit with Karp. He needs to take care of his customers, but he also needs to take care of his people. That puts his remark "...we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to discourage our entire team..." in a rather different light. That's not an easy situation to resolve well.

I wish that Postdesk had provided more facts (and less editorial comment) in the original article.

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

#78

Post by pauljonas »

stevelosh wrote: post #68

No exporting feature? Every single page can be slurped as JSON by appending /api/read/json to the end of the URL. And as the response says, there are plenty of other sites that will import Tumblr blogs without a hitch. Please go away so Tumblr can spend more time/resources fixing problems for the rest of us.

Does it work on a Tumblr with more than a few dozen pages?

No, even writing my own, have encountered errors on selected pages where the service simply "errored out" once it reached a certain page.

What other sites?

I have tried Posterous and it failed to import.

Sorry, there needs to be a one-click solution where you request an export (and even if you have to be emailed when it is completed) and a file is generated with your content to download to your computer, be it XML, JSON, or in static HTML.

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

#79

Post by rokhayakebe »

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…

Why give him a break? He is a public CEO. If he does well the internet will talk about it. If he does otherwise, well, he can expect the internet to talk about it too.

Nobody gives a care if David is the coolest thing on his/your block. There is not one valid reason to tell a customer to "Please go away". You should just take the bullet, apologize for not meeting their expectation and maybe offer your point of view. If the customer is being rude, you have the right to not answer.

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

#80

Post by clojurerocks »

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…

What do yo mean Myspace and Twitter didnt have these issues? One of the reasons Facebook gained prominents is that in 2005 or so Myspace was down CONSTANTLY. I mean it was never up. They blamed it on coldfusion at the time and eventually moved the site over to Asp.net. Twitter also barely worked because the whole web services architecture was only taking shape so it was designed like an old cms.

Putting that aside this persons response was unprofessional to say the least. He needs to publicly apologize to all of his users and start hiring people who can fix the site. To tell people to fuck off is immature and absolutely ridiculous. Especially when you have so much VC money at your disposal. When Twitter first got funding they spend alot of it on engineering. They went from being on just a few servers which was one of the reasons it was down all of the time. To hundreds of servers to deal with the load. It seems like this guy now thinks he can keep the money to himself and not spend anything expect on pr. Reminds of Friendster actually.

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