what a senseless death
Suicide.
Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
51–60 of 251 posts
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#52The founders of Diaspora were in a really unenviable position. They started off with a wave of national press as well as solid financial support from grassroot users. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that they would not be able to accomplish the goal they originally set out to do. They had failed. Publicly. This can be very devastating psychologically to someone who has always 'succeeded' in life. I'm no…
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Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#53Wow. I never met Ilya in person, but I spoke with him several times via a private mailing list of people doing social network research. This is incredibly unfortunate. In my limited interactions with him he was always incredibly intelligent and willing to help out others.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
If suicide does turn out to be the cause of death, it is worth talking about. I won't say that there's nothing more tragic than suicide, but it is certainly senseless/needless in almost all cases. The more awareness of suicide, the risk factors, and how to not tread into that space, the better.
> The more awareness of suicide Suicide has a strong triggering effect; see "Werther effect". Talking about suicide has to be done carefully to avoid triggering further suicidal behaviour; especially after someone has just completed suicide. I'd agree that more awareness of suicide prevention is very important.
Excellent response. This is surely a worthy topic to discuss yet must done carefully as I'm sure many can relate to this tragedy in some aspect.
http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
I'm not affiliated.
Please use use this service if you are even remotely affected by this discussion in a negative way. I fear this will escalate and push a reader over the edge who doesn't think they have an alternative. They do. If you are one of these, please seek help.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#55I'm reminded of Gene Kan, but I am unsure if the circumstances are similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kan The similarities are that there was considerable press coverage of Diaspora and that they seemed, at least to me, destined to fail mostly just because it was a hard thing to do given their structure. It is a true shame that this individual took the failure personally as it wasn't at all his fault, again i…
> It is a true shame that this individual took the failure personally
Did you know him? Is this just speculation?
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no point to speculating. If they don't want to say just leave it at that.
it's basic human nature to speculate that's why the news of Michael Jackson's death caused Twitter and even Google to crash
Honestly, as someone who interacted with him via email, the cause didn't even cross my mind.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Failure in this context likely means "is not attracting large swathes of Facebook users" though frankly I think that's but one measure of the success of a social networking website.
Well, a social network that is used by only a small fraction of one's friends and potential friends is not very useful.
Not necessarily. If you can make a federated social network that can interoperate with the networks people already use, people can migrate to it incrementally.
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#58The founders of Diaspora were in a really unenviable position. They started off with a wave of national press as well as solid financial support from grassroot users. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that they would not be able to accomplish the goal they originally set out to do. They had failed. Publicly. This can be very devastating psychologically to someone who has always 'succeeded' in life. I'm no…
Very important comment. The biggest risk in doing a startup is not the financial risk per se. It's the psychological risk of knowing you really, really tried -- and still failed. That is the hard part, because everyone goes in with Dilbert/mass media notions of how easy it is to be a CEO or (just as bad) Social Network illusions of how easy it is to grow meteorically while fighting off lawsuits. The truth is that it'…
>>The possibly healthier (?) way of dealing is to convince yourself that it was bad luck, or the other guy cheated
I think it would be healthier to accept that failure is normal and to rather enjoy the road to Ithaca [1]. Life without challenges/failures would be too boring.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_P._Cavafy#Ithaca
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very important comment. The biggest risk in doing a startup is not the financial risk per se. It's the psychological risk of knowing you really, really tried -- and still failed. That is the hard part, because everyone goes in with Dilbert/mass media notions of how easy it is to be a CEO or (just as bad) Social Network illusions of how easy it is to grow meteorically while fighting off lawsuits. The truth is that it'…
>>The possibly healthier (?) way of dealing is to convince yourself that it was bad luck, or the other guy cheated I think it would be healthier to accept that failure is normal and to rather enjoy the road to Ithaca [1]. Life without challenges/failures would be too boring. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_P._Cavafy#Ithaca
it depends on the type of person you are. Sometimes we delude ouselves to protect against the downfall from believing the opposite
Re: Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21
#60So sad. Rest in peace.