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

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

#111

Post by fakelvis »

clojurerocks wrote: post #101
spolsky wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bubbie, you don't know what you're talking about. Do you really think that Tumblr isn't aware of it's flaws? Are you seriously claiming that David is denying that they had a few outages? Very, very few mass services grew as quickly as Tumblr without a lot of outages. Ebay had them, Yahoo had them, Twitter had them. The idea that David is sitting in a room like Mubarak, denying the flaws and refusing to work on them,…

As someone who uses stackoverflow almost daily im absolutely astonished at how disrespectful and frankly clueless your response is. Ive been following architecture for a long time and remember when the companies you mention had scaling issues. I dont remember them lashing out at their customers and telling them to fuck off assholes! Also when ebay and yahoo started having scaling issues THERE WERE NO CASE STUDIES IN…

Everything you said, plus scaling can sometimes be "cheap, and fun": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853196

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

#112

Post by T_S_ »

"He's young". "He's actually a nice guy".

These are the kinds of statements that should only carry weight when you have a personal relationship. A relationship with a company/website/app is no more or less than the sum of your interactions with them. I have a "good" relationship with Apple and Amex. A "bad" one with AT&T etc., based on transactions, not personal relations.

The unusual aspect is that the CEO was involved in customer service. It looks like a case of kicking the dog. That happens when people (nice or not) are under extreme pressure. What's up?

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

#113

Post by rhizome »

robyn_b wrote: post #19
theDoug wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience as someone who has paid to appear in Tumblr's Directory a half-dozen times, all downtime has been pro-rated/refunded. Customer support has always been prompt and kind.

Remember though that his query wasn't just about the downtime per se, it was about the overall level of service. Intermittent technical issues with features like backup and queuing but to name a few. Anyway - David's response might have been prompt but it certainly wasn't kind was it...

David's response might have been prompt but it certainly wasn't kind was it...

I know I probably feel differently when I'm on the other side of this fence, but as the saying goes, you have to earn respect.

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

robyn_b wrote: post #19
theDoug wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience as someone who has paid to appear in Tumblr's Directory a half-dozen times, all downtime has been pro-rated/refunded. Customer support has always been prompt and kind.

Remember though that his query wasn't just about the downtime per se, it was about the overall level of service. Intermittent technical issues with features like backup and queuing but to name a few. Anyway - David's response might have been prompt but it certainly wasn't kind was it...

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by [deleted] »

robyn_b wrote: post #19
theDoug wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience as someone who has paid to appear in Tumblr's Directory a half-dozen times, all downtime has been pro-rated/refunded. Customer support has always been prompt and kind.

Remember though that his query wasn't just about the downtime per se, it was about the overall level of service. Intermittent technical issues with features like backup and queuing but to name a few. Anyway - David's response might have been prompt but it certainly wasn't kind was it...

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by gte910h »

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…

He didn't say he was immature, but that the response is. Big difference there. One's a judgement of a person, the other of an action that person took and likely regrets by now. Saying so would show maturity.

Surely you've said or done things in your adult life that were sort of juvenile. You've surely regretted some of them afterwards.

I know I'd have chose to not use your products if you'd told someone to go away when I was making a platform decision to use them or not. (Your writings positively influenced buying decisions for city desk, when it was set up against competing products at the time that were functionally quite similar).

Especially for someone at 24, expending effort to exude maturity opens doors for your company, and helps to defuse criticism of youthful inability (as has plagued Mark Zuckerberg over and over).

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

#117

Post by SoftwareMaven »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #79
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.…

There are definitely times when you should tell a customer to go away. Any time a customer is seriously diverting you from where you need to be as a business, you have a potential time to say "find somebody else."

However, this customer was complaining about the core business, not some diversion. Even if he was diverting, there are far more appropriate ways to say good-bye.

It sounds to me like David heard once "don't keep customers who aren't profitable" but never internalized what that really means.

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

#118

Post by samengland »

GVRV wrote: post #59
AdamN wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@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.

USV is an investor in StackOverflow and Tumblr.

That explains a lot

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

#119

Post by SoftwareMaven »

jamesgagan wrote: post #100

I have been building a site similar to tumblr and posterous. It's called http://www.wijoda.com - anyone unhappy with tumblr might want to give it a try. I'd love some feedback!

Build a fool-proof import from Tumblr and you might be able to get some users.

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

#120

Post by kmfrk »

samengland wrote: post #29
ramanujan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We're not in the same space. PostDesk, as you should be able to see is a site where editorial/opinion pieces such as the one you've just read are posted. Unfortunately you're trying to uncover a conspiracy which isn't there - though I'll gladly answer any further questions you might have...

You should, amongst other things, definitely write a disclaimer that describes your friendship with William, as he reveals[1].

It might as well be a hit piece as plain sloppy, speculative writing - if Karp had a nickel for every (unanswered) question mark in that article, he'd secure himself another $40 million.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152210:

    > prestia:
    > 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.
    >
    > wtildesley:
    > I'm a friend of the owner.
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