But if we're doing character critique, I wouldn't say he typically whines a lot. He does occasionally come across as bitter and self-indulgent on his blog however.
I have to say that in this example, he either doesn't do a good job of explaining what's so horrible about "the button problem", or it is indeed an instance where walking out on the conference call was probably the kindest thing Mayer could have done. A lot of us would probably have either laughed or yelled at him.
On the other hand, I can see how the intent of making the Blog This! button software-agnostic was ahead of its time. I certainly wish there had been more of that, it would have led to a different set of rules for web apps as they are today. But I guess (or rather: hope) the point where the web globally recognizes the value and spirit of openness is still in the future.
At the risk of putting words in his mouth, I imagine part of his frustration is probably that making it software-dependent was a regression. There was already a budding ecosystem of blog-system-agnostic authoring tools, building off protocols he'd had a significant hand in, and while the protocol as it stood at the time[1] was probably going to require a version 2 at some point, it really wasn't that hard to make things like that very cross-platform. Even now from what I can see, there's a lot of overlap between the various platforms, and with the addition of some ability to upload images and other media into a rich text blog post you could probably catch >99.9% of blog posts made today across all the popular blogging platforms.
I still think the blogging world may yet rise again as the centralization meets the end it always does, but when that happens it will be recapitulating development that has largely already occurred, ten+ years ago. (And if history is any guide, it will be from scratch and with loud acclamations about how innovative it all is.)
But I don't really know. This isn't an normative argument I'm making about what I think should be, it's an observation about history. Centralized email has given way to SMTP, for better and for worse. Centralized document systems gave way to gopher gave way to the web. Centralized newsgroups gave way to distributed forums. Centralized social media will eventually give way to a richer distributed ecosystem. I don't even know exactly how, but it will happen someday. It's just what happens. Eventually, too many people will be gunning for Facebook for them to be the monopoly.
(Probably the best counterexample is IM, which never properly federated. Arguably, this is because IM simply isn't that desirable. It's something people sorta kinda want, but not so much that it's actually monetizable, so possibly it's evidence in favor of the "success produces lots of people gunning for a piece of the pie" being the dominant factor. IM has never had anyone so successful (monetarily) that we had tons of people gunning for that space.)
Like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. All examples of big decentralized systems. Like the gradual consolidation of telecoms?
This is snarky, but only because I'm feeling sassy. Honest question, "Do decentralized systems actually win?" I hear this a lot as an axiom without any real evidence.
I'm sorry, Dave has helped create and develop some good things in the past, but it's time people were honest and not 'afraid' of how they might sound.
Dave Winer is a bitter, angry man. Period. He's always been that way, and it's only gotten worse as he's gotten older. He's spent an entire career attacking, and now that there's a new generation of creators and he's been forgotten, he's stomping his feet because I'm sure he feels as if he's being ignored. And in many ways, he is. No one really wants to deal with an egomaniac.
I actually feel sorry for Dave Winer, but we reap what we sow. And he's definitely reaping at this stage of his career.
On that note, why don't you post this with your real account then? I'm using my real name, Danilo sure is using his, and we're talking (trash) about a real person who, by the way, also has an HN account to his name. You, however, created in2d for the sole purpose of making this inflammatory comment.
What's new at least in my experience is that the jerks are getting some pushback.
I doubt if any of these people know me. I'm working hard on a startup now, with good results.
I don't know who they're describing here, but it ain't me! ;-)
FWIW I think the best thing about the existence of blogs is learning from others' successes and mistakes. The stories of the successes sometimes come off as self-indulgent, the stories of the mistakes sometimes come across as bitter. Such is life.
And you know what? Some day I might be fortunate enough to be in the position to negotiate myself the title of "Grand Poo-Bah of Integrating All The Things" at the acquiring company, and I'll remember your article and negotiate for a nicer parking spot instead. Cheers!
EDIT: s/come/sometimes come/g
Whether I agree with you on particular issues or not, I think your willingness to engage with the community is exemplary - I really wish more influential people would do that.
Both posts I voted down, and I hope others do also. HN is better than this. I'm sorry you had to read that crap. I wish you the best at your next startup!
The point of the article is about not trusting anything an acquiring company says, because they will say anything in order to get the deal. The other stuff was just some colour.
First, if Winer wants to get link-baity by piggybacking someone in the news, let's give some scrutiny to the relevance of that case. This is pretty silly-sounding stuff and I'm inclined to come down pretty firmly on Mayer's side by his account.
My job is to be willing to be persuaded – not to be a pushover to any opinion. It's the author's job to persuade – and to decide when name dropping is more trouble than it's worth.
The other reason: I'm not going to clap when someone makes an entirely self-evident point for the sole purpose of attaching their name to someone newsworthy.
To be fair, the blog post in question spends the first half of its content avoiding the point completely in order to make some stupid personal attack. When the author misses his own point, it can be hard for readers not to do the same.
Worth noting, of course, that some part of Tumblr's growth has come precisely from their equivalent of a BlogThis! button - it just took a few more years.
The linked article isn't just saying "Yahoo may change the terms of their deal" (and pray they don't alter it further), which everyone knows they can and almost certainly will. It's saying "I, Dave Winer, will draw from my own personal experience, including my interaction with one of the participants of this deal, to speak with authority on this".
Like bringing up a character witness in a defense trial, such supporting arguments legitimately open up the speaker themselves to critique.
I honestly don't understand the problem with that. He has experience, with this type of situation, and with the people involved, and he's using that to back up the more general point (which you agreed with). Why is he not entitled to some authority here?
It just seems like a lot of the commenters have much more of a grudge against Dave Winer the person (I don't follow him that closely) than the actual content of his argument.
Winer has fielded a number of seemingly bitter and aggrieved posts lately (about ageism, not getting his due rewards, etc) and it is impossible to read newer entries without that cloud however over them..
There is no "you should question this because his name is Foo", rather "you should question this because he is acting Fooish, which incidentally sounds similar to his name."
Immature, but not an ad hominem.
That's backwards: ad hominem attacks are considered bad precisely because they're not relevant to the argument. Note that the GP's argument is exactly the opposite: that the attacks aren't ad hominem because they are material in this case.
If you're saying that the original line wasn't meant as support of their argument and therefore doesn't qualify for examination for materiality, I'm finding that hard to swallow too, e.g. "You're wrong, and also incidentally--totally as aside, seriously--you're an idiot."
If I say "You are a doo-doo head, and you are wrong because of X, Y, and Z", then (assuming X, Y, and Z are sound of course) I have not committed a logical fallacy (though I have immaturely insulted you). The insult was not a part of the argument presented. If I say "You are a doo-doo, and therefore wrong.", then I am guilty of fallacious reasoning.
Things don't have to be fallacies for them to be out of line. We can criticize "You're wrong, and also incidentally--totally as aside, seriously--you're an idiot." without mislabeling it as fallacious.
I was smart along with a few others. The rest of the employees rolled the dice and lost. They discontinued the entire line of products and canned any of the employees who came over with the acquisition. Within a year, there were no traces of our startup, just a few new products using our technology.
I'm still bitter about it. . .
I mean, consider the bright side, you could've gone into politics with a last name like "Weiner"...
My apologies, I was simply trying to inject a bit of wit into the discussion :(.
I also note on your blog (which 10 years ago you probably would have used the BlogThis! button on your Google Toolbar to write) you feature prominently a technology pioneered by Dave Winer.
"This is how you squander your capital"
Suggesting that today they don't. Why? Perhaps because trivialities like a button on the Google toolbar were made to occupy the time of someone whose hourly value would eventually be measured in four or more figures.
So while I get what you're saying – honest, public eye-rolling about the petulance of this writing may one day come at some cost to me – the situations aren't remotely the same. That said, I hold the greatest respect for people who can offer valid criticism, no matter how colorful, and I welcome it from anyone, regardless of my perceptions of their "contributions." I suspect that anyone who wouldn't share those values would be doing me a favor by not working with me anyway.
I suspect we share the same contempt for the tech "press," feckless and craven as they are, but the headline story for this post is about someone kind of wasting someone else's time and that's not an interesting perspective at all, except as a cautionary tale.
I'll share a personal example. I've not been a fan of your approach to RSS in the past. I was especially frustrated when developing a parser and having a fragmented landscape because of RSS 2.0, and other developers lack of understanding that your blog didn't represent a standards body. However, I never publicly complained about it because I understand why it happened, so I just shut my mouth and get back to making my parser work. At the time, even now, publicly complaining about your contributions would be incredibly disrespectful to your body of work.
The only way I would ever be in any position of criticism is if I had a similar body of work to compare. I didn't then, and I sure don't now, so I just respectfully keep my mouth shut and work on what I can contribute.
Pretending to not understand the importance of blogthis! in a world where Yahoo just bought Tumblr, or where the subscribe to rss buttons mostly work to allow the user to choose an rss feed reader of their own choice, or where Microsoft was told to make sure users could pick their favorite email apps, firewall apps, etc.?
This danilo is how you squander your capital.
As economist Michael Jensen pointed out
Integrity as “what it takes for a person to be whole and complete....And an individual is whole and complete when their word is whole and complete, and their word is whole and complete when they honour their word."
And this law seems work just gravity for all human-beings (not just Google executive).
Out-of-integrity behavior has been pervasive, both on an organizational and an individual basis, and that attributed to the unworkabilities in the world.
More about Integrity a positive phenomenal can be read here:
As a meta comment, Winer is a unfortunate last name for this gentleman given the overall tone and timbre of what he has to say. Google giving preferential treatment to Blogger content, by giving special SERP positioning, distinctive formatting, or other embellishment, would have been worth making a fuss about. That would have been a big deal.
But this is a little button on a toolbar that many Google users never even used. And it's only for creating content, which is a side-show to Google's main purpose, which is finding content.
This is how you squander your capital.