Svbtle Funding

Thanks! Here's the thing, though: Dustin is always working on improving Svbtle, and I don't have to think about it. For example, the code formatting on my blog is terrible. I haven't felt the need to fix it. So it keeps looking terrible. The highlighting on Svbtle is great. One day, the 'related posts' feature just appeared: I didn't need to code that up.

> Won't this degrade your personal blog since you only put short, and by your admission, lower quality posts on it?

It may. It depends: if you care about more news-feed personal stuff about me, then you can read that. My blog used to get on HN all the time, and I'd have a hard time building an audience, because a complex, theory-driven post would get a bunch of subscribers, and then the next one would be a "I released a new version of $PROJECT" and people would unsubscribe. Now I can have two audiences in two places.

Also, Svbtle is on my domain, so it's still 'my brand' as much as Svbtle's.

I'm very, very happy with Svbtle so far.

Let's be honest, Dustin, that article was from 2009. It wasn't exactly written in the '80s when you were on a coke binge. I think your attitude in a lot of blog posts reflects quite negatively on who you are as a person, and that's where a lot of the hate for you comes from.

You're presumptuous about our industry in a lot of ways without much to show in terms of accomplishment. Often I've asked, who is Dustin Curtis? Why is he telling me the important things about building a startup? The answers to these questions are thin, vague, or nonexistent. I'm glad you have opinion and I certainly don't resent yours, but I also don't position myself as a commentator on all things Silicon Valley without having actually done anything in Silicon Valley. This isn't a critique of you nearly as much as it is a critique of punditry, I think, since I haven't given it much thought; that said, it's still my reaction to most of your writing.

I don't hate you, as it were, nor do I seek every opportunity to piss on your brand, I just hold a quite-negative opinion and will share it if asked. Again, as I told pg above, I'm also willing to be proven wrong but you've simply made it worse since I developed it.

I genuinely feel bad for you (and I mean that), that you want to accomplish something but you have to deal with this crap when you do. If you're self-aware about why it happens, I can sympathize, as I've made grievous mistakes in my life that cost me some reputation as well. If you aren't, then you should figure out why it's happening.

What I've seen in this thread is that people have reasons for disliking Dustin, some of which directly relate to Svbtle. To the extent that they don't directly relate, though, people are quite explicitly saying they evaluate Svbtle separate from Dustin.

And by far the most common reaction expressed is a lack of understanding any valid business model for the network, which in your op you say is quite understandable.

What I don't see in this thread is any willful misconstruing of the project. Which seems to be the requirement for a "hater".

I'm guessing that pg's comment was at least partially in response to my own below[0], and you've exactly stated my issue with Curtis and the Svbtle network. There's nothing horribly wrong with the general concept behind Svbtle - perhaps it'll work, perhaps not. It's definitely legitimate enough that it's worth a shot.

But the way dcurtis went about it - the way he worded his initial post on Svbtle, his responses to the Svbtle theme being cloned, and so on, were very off-putting, to say the least. Moreover, the fact that he was so fixated on people copying the theme suggests that he was placing value in the wrong things in Svbtle.

To use a newspaper analogy, is it the layout of the NYTimes that gives it prestige and distinguishes it from your average tabloid rag? Is it the font? Is it the type of paper they use, or the size of the paper? No, it's the content, and the people who create it.

By stirring up such an enormous shitstorm over some people copying the Svbtle theme and creating RoR[1] or WP[2] clones, dcurtis gave up his reputation (which is actually important for running something like Svbtle) in a futile attempt to preserve the uniqueness of the Svbtle theme (which isn't all that important). His best hope now is to spread Svbtle outside the tech community, to people who aren't familiar with him, and thus don't have any impression of him at all yet.

0: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027577

1: https://github.com/NateW/obtvse

2: https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle