Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Zeldman on Favrd’s Demise

Yayaa said this:

I’m waiting for @TJ to explain what has happened. I feel like he is our savior and needs to explain the Dean FAVRD message because I don’t know who else to turn to?

Well, I have the answer, except I didn’t write it, Zeldman wrote this on his real blog, under the heading “The Stars Look Down”:

It wasn’t the first time and won’t be the last. Like an angry Hebrew God, he creates artful things and then, in mysterious fits of pique dressed in philosopher’s togs, destroys them.

It’s never about not having time. He destroys things that run themselves. It’s not for lack of traction. This was a beloved community.

Sometimes, on the web, communities end because money runs out. Not the case here. Sometimes they end because one company buys another, and that is almost never good for anyone except a couple guys who get rich. Again, not the case here. No money changed hands or ever would have. This was an exchange far below the radar of the boring and deadly venture capitalists who turn farm boys into titans and flatten the earth in their endless quest for the gold that leaks from bubbles before they pop.

Here we had a smallish but passionate international community of fun, bright people who not only amused but, yes, loved each other. Now it’s gone. Just like that, poof.

Alas, stars on Twitter have become mere take-out menus hung on the doors of other restaurants.

Whatever.

Zeldman went on to add in a comment:

Just a note lest I be misunderstood. As Dean Allen’s friend and admirer, I support him in whatever he wishes to do. But as a creator of web content and web communities I am disheartened by this wanton abandonment of a community.

That a community may no longer please its creator is hardly relevant. Once community exists, it is not about the person who created the conditions for its existence; it’s about the people who inhabit the space. If you don’t believe that, you have no business creating anything.

Cutting users off out of necessity is sad. Cutting them off because you no longer enjoy the community is selfish, short-sighted, and narcissistic. Nothing, not even the tremendous respect and affection I bear for the talented Mr Allen, can make me see it any other way.

Emphasis is Jeffrey’s, but I agree with every word he wrote.

Ross said this:

In the end, someone always will remind you that it’s their bat, their ball, and the game is over when they say it is.

When I met Dean in Boston for the Xerox Convention (aka Butthurtpalooza 2009), he said that he had created Favrd so that he would have something to read in the morning and laugh. (He said that his wish was that everyone would read it no more than once a day.)

For nearly as long as Favrd has been around, some have bemoaned it as an exclusive club (I suppose because you have had to sign up) and/or a “circle jerk”. I never particularly saw it that way… until recently, in the past 3 months (more or less) there have been a new group of folks who obsessed over Favrd the way that most of the folks that I know only joked about.

They starred to get starred back; they starred to get noticed; they starred the person rather than the message. (I’m sure Tim Haines has seen plenty of the same thing at Favstar.) Did some of that happen before? I’m sure it did. But this hit an exponential level.

Favrd didn’t run itself. Twitter would change things, and Dean would have to fix Favrd. People would try to game the system. They’d create multiple accounts and star themselves. Then people would get pissy and demand to be taken off Favrd. Sometimes then they’d come back and ask to get back in.

Twitter it making changes behind the scenes which would have eventually required Dean to overhaul the creation of new accounts (for the geeks: OAuth will be mandatory). He would have had to add that or else no one new would have been able to join Favrd. But that was down the road, not today.

I think Zeldman is right: Favrd no longer made Dean happy, so he shuttled it. I’m saddened about it, and I wish he hadn’t done it—but he never had to share it with the rest of us. He could have run it all on his local server and never opened it up to anyone else. He never took a dime from us (and if you think he got rich of the ads on Favrd, I bet it didn’t even cover his time spent developing and maintaining it).

Ross is right, Dean took his ball and went home. He no longer wanted to play the game. New players had become unruly.

It was no longer fun.

That a community may no longer please its creator is hardly relevant. Once community exists, it is not about the person who created the conditions for its existence; it’s about the people who inhabit the space. If you don’t believe that, you have no business creating anything.

I’m guessing Dean would say otherwise.

That’s as much of an explanation as I can give you.