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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"

#141

Post by ekidd »

clojurerocks wrote: post #90
ekidd wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 (…

Im sorry but this doesnt hold water when tumblr has 40 million in vc funding. If they were bootstrapped then yes maybe. But if his team is stressed out maybe they could start hiring people. Instead they are causing situations like this to happen. Also im sorry but i dont care how stressed out you are. As a ceo you have a responsibility to treat your customers with respect. Especially since what the customer was askin…

Given Tumblr's explosive popularity, there's no way that they aren't a giant ball of stress right now. It's certainly nice to have $40 million, but that's of little use in the short term: As Fred Brooks famously pointed out, adding more programmers to a late project makes it later.

So the people who understand Tumblr's systems are almost certainly working nights and weekends and going slowly insane. And there's no relief for them: If Tumblr hires more staff, their current engineers will still have to deal with all the crises and train the new people.

It's the CEO's job to deal with disappointed and angry customers. But it's also the CEO's job to deal with programmers who are working 70 hour weeks and who are just about ready to snap and move to a commune. Startups can be full of bad craziness.

In a perfect world, customers would talk to the CEO and the customer support team, and not try to directly contact the engineering team. That's not to say that Tumblr handled this especially well. But again, it's not an easy situation.

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

#142

Post by jamesgagan »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #119
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.

that's a great idea.

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

#143

Post by zizee »

We host our company blog on tumblr via a subdomain. So far the experience has been "ok", and considering we haven't paid a cent, I can't really complain about value for money.

My biggest problems with Tumblr's outage is this: It would be nice if their "sorry, we're down" page gave some indication that it is Tumblr that is having trouble with their service.

At the moment, if Tumblr goes down, visitors would have no idea that the "we" in "we're having issues" is not us, but in fact Tumblr.

And what really bites about it is that people understand if you have an outage when trying to serve up millions of pages. But when you have a company blog that has only small traffic, people don't have the same understanding. If your company blog is down, you just look an incompetent who has configured his server badly. And that irks me to no end.

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

#144

Post by space-monkey »

wtildesley wrote: post #140
catshirt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely. After having read this response I pivoted (had to) my reaction. The original post clearly intends to have the reader believe "go away" is a poor off-the-cuff defense to "your site is down". Which especially given the down time is a bad defense. That said, at this point I'm much more likely to believe "go away" is a valid defense to harassment.

Please explain how emailing (some) of tumblr's staff to express my disappointment with the level of service can be classed as harassment?

It's not legally harassment, but it's definitely not calm, rational, productive communication either.

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

#145

Post by kmfrk »

samengland wrote: post #130
seanalltogether wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“…we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to discourage our entire team” Something about that response tells me this wasn't the first email sent by this user.

Surprisingly - it wasn't, and we're still not sure how William was in fact discouraging their entire team...

I'm getting cross-eyed from the double negatives, so just to clarify, William hadn't sent any mail prior to the one quoted?

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

#147

Post by iPadDeveloper »

huertanix wrote: post #110
clojurerocks wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im sorry but ive read a couple of youre comments and you say the same thing over and over again. Not dealing with the problems he mentions but simply attacking him personally. Which just makes his case look stronger and tumblr look more like a bunch of immature idiots.

They're not a "bunch," they're like, a dozen. A dozen people trying to make a site work for several millions of people at once. That's no short order for such a small team.

Running the company on VC cash? Sounds unsustainable. Also isn't Tumbler just like Twitter?

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

#148

Post by rhizome »

wtildesley wrote: post #139
rhizome wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did insult them (or at least paint himself into a luser corner) by saying they had no export functionality.

How exactly did I insult them? And please point to anywhere on tumblr's website where I can export my content? Even Facebook, one of the most closed eco-systems on the web lets users download their own content.

I'm no Tumblr expert, but in five minutes of searching I see Tumblr -> Wordpress utils, RSS, and the Tumblr API. That's three methods.

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

#149

Post by dools »

jonpaul wrote: post #124
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…

If you guys cared immensely, you would respond to my support requests. If you wanted to monetize, maybe you would setup a premium offering. I know that I would gladly pay $50/month to ensure that my blog doesn't have the downtime that it's had in the last few months. I've stated this many times before.

I'll give you a blog for $50 a month if you want :) decalcms.com

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

#150

Post by wtildesley »

rhizome wrote: post #148
wtildesley wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly did I insult them? And please point to anywhere on tumblr's website where I can export my content? Even Facebook, one of the most closed eco-systems on the web lets users download their own content.

I'm no Tumblr expert, but in five minutes of searching I see Tumblr -> Wordpress utils, RSS, and the Tumblr API. That's three methods.

Yes, for a Unix sysadmin I'm sure exporting your content via Tumblr's API, RSS feed or for that matter a Wordpress utility is a breeze but I'm not sure the same is true for your average tumblr user. Having said all that I think you're ignoring what I said for the sake of an argument.
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