Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Dean Responds

steelopus posted Dean’s response and then added his own:

This response only served to make me more upset.

This specific sentence is what made me realize that this dude was completely out of touch with what his site meant to its users:

“That I was running a world-wide web site fuelled by millions of meaningless, microscopic indicators of worth…”

That shows a complete disconnection from the very real community (the oft-referenced and genuine culture engine, Favrd Crowd, as defined by swamibooba) that existed surrounding his site. That he considers the stars we distributed to be meaningless indicates that he truly has no idea in what manner many of us used Favrd. Here’s a guy who flew across an ocean and spent a night in Boston hanging out with some of the greatest people on Twitter. Yet, even after bearing witness to the incredible friendships and relationships that his site spawned, he felt it appropriate to simply pull the plug because it no longer met his own personal agenda. I just can’t wrap my head around that, and I’m not even someone who used Favrd much.

For me, like countless others, it spawned great connections and was the fuel that fed numerous new friendships that we will tightly hold onto for a long long time. For him, he lost control of something and seemingly couldn’t deal with not having total control, so he did the one thing he could to make himself feel like he was in control again.

I don’t feel like I should (or can) answer this for Dean, but I did want to give you my thoughts on this, because Dean’s response here, along with the one that Fireland posted have made me feel like I have a pretty good “sense” of what Dean’s take on this is.

First of all it’s probably important to note that Dean was not originally planning to attend the Boston meetup, but (if memory serves) did so only after realizing that he could combine the trip with (again, if memory serves) a visit with some family members and/or business friends. Which is to say that he didn’t decide one day to fly across an ocean for a tweetup in the same way that many of us are breathlessly waiting for Rochester, or a larger group for San Francicso. My guess is that Dean would find it amusing to know the miles I have logged on my car to drive somewhere to spend a few hours with people, and then turn around and head home.

That said, I think Dean already had an online network of folks, and Twitter didn’t fill a void he never knew that he had. It was, as he himself said, something he wrote to get amusement out of it.

His decision to shut it down wasn’t about losing control of it. He had built something for people to have fun with, but instead saw that it was turning into something unhealthy, and no longer serving its original purpose.

Again, look at this from Dean:

From the outset, however, some words (THIS and WILL and NOT and SCALE) began gradually piling up on my desk. Long before I began thinking about the damage being done in the use of authoritative judgement as fuel for creativity and wit, I found myself having to work out ways to stave off gaming of the site, in particular dealing with sock puppets and self-starrers and the recent, baffling phenomenon of people finding several hundred things a day to be their ‘favourite’.

Remember awhile ago, when I wrote about the difference between Favrd and Favstar? One of the design decisions that Dean made was that he would fetch that 20 most recent things you had starred. This was the easiest way to do it, but it wasn’t that Dean couldn’t figure out how to get more: it was a realistic limitation on the word “favorite”. That there are people who are starring several hundred things a day is a) why those people like Favstar and b) why Favrd wasn’t showing as many stars, because Favrd wasn’t “letting” them.

And then I took a hard look at the stats: the site was getting a million or so pageviews every month, but from a rather small number of unique IPs. As people reflexively refreshed their personal pages, sometimes thousands of times a day, I began to feel like the manager of a comedy club in which comedians crack a joke, then repeatedly run from table to table to stare each patron in the eye, looking for the love.

I suspect this is the most telling part of his decision making process.

Refreshing personal pages thousands of times each day.

I don’t think he’s being hyperbolic. I think there are some people who literally are spending their entire day obsessed with their star count. Dean saw this as destructive. Other folks here on Tumblr have (on a much smaller scale) talked about their decision to purposefully limit their Favrd-intake because they didn’t like what it was doing to them.

Personally, I blocked the favrdbot several months ago because I found myself waiting for it to show up, and then disappointed when it didn’t (sometimes only due to some type of glitch).

There were some who never made this ‘switch’ and who went strongly in the other direction.

Interestingly enough, to me anyway, it was the strong emotional judgement –concerned embarrassment maybe – I was then making toward people’s ‘neediness’ which got me reading and learning a great deal about the interplay of authority and emotion. It’s a fascinating subject, albeit one on which I find myself reading at kindergarten level. As I began to accept the implausibility of my own judgements of others, I spotted something beneath that seemed much darker and trickier to understand: pain. Every wavelet of pleasure set in motion by a site like Favrd sits on an ocean of emotional hurt (the up-fuckedness I so glibly referred to yesterday). I neither blame nor judge anyone for being motivated by attachment or aversion to this sort of pain – I am as much as anyone – but I knew I could no longer have a hand in serving it up.

Ever seen anyone talk about the “elitism” of Favrd? Authority and emotion. Most of it completely irrational. And I suspect we only saw the tip of that iceberg. Well, I suppose the negative reaction to the party that Sean threw also had a significant amount of this mixed in.

Gosh, this got long. Anyway, please don’t take the shut-down as anything other than a shift in my own priorities, manifested in a desire to stop selling crack.

That last sentence could be Dean’s summary. The rest of it is just explanation.

Steve said:

Yet, even after bearing witness to the incredible friendships and relationships that his site spawned, he felt it appropriate to simply pull the plug because it no longer met his own personal agenda. I just can’t wrap my head around that, and I’m not even someone who used Favrd much.

Steve, I think your second sentence there re-interprets the first. You didn’t use Favrd much (as I haven’t, recently) and didn’t see some of the destructive behavior.

There are a group of folks on Favstar called Favstars. Spend some time reading these folks and you will notice a cadre of people who cannot go a day without talking about stars.

“[Person X] needs one more star to get [this post] up to 50 stars!”

Tim Haines had tried to “balance the playing field” of people with fewer followers by creating a metric which measured an average of “stars per follower.” A group of people started blocking followers who didn’t give out stars to increase their metric.

Did you know that there are some people who will go back and “take back” stars, because Favstar will let them “unstar” posts? Someone wrote words to the effect of: “I guess unstarring is the new ‘I want my stuff back’” i.e. when a couple breaks up.

There’s an entire “generation” (for lack of a better term) of Twitter users whose lives seem to revolve around stars.

Imagine opening a video arcade with the idea that it would be a place for folks to pop in and spend a few minutes enjoying themselves after work or school. It goes well for awhile, but then you notice a group of people who snuck off from work or school and spent all day popping quarters into the games, but who never seem to get any real enjoyment out of the games. Instead they spent all day competing against one another and their previous high scores. Then you find some of them going to all sorts of crazy lengths to get another quarter to play another round, but being completely miserable about the whole thing.

I don’t mean to suggest that you have to find this a good reason to shut it down, all I’m saying is that I think Dean’s stated (and now clarified) reasons for shutting it down are not anything to do with “losing control” of the site or it not fitting his “agenda”.

You might recall the utter angst that someone felt on seeing that I “got Favrd” although he didn’t think I was funny. The response was so out of proportion that it took many people (especially me) by complete surprise. One aspect of the accusations that I thought was strange was that people had starred me to “get noticed” so that I would follow them back and start starring them back. I thought it was bizarre, but having looked back at my Favstar page, I can see several waves of “Favstar-popular” people who would follow me, star nearly everything I said, but who are now no longer following me. Seems odd, doesn’t it? They liked me and everything that I said, but now don’t even follow?

Back in the springtime there were a group of new Twitter folks who were finding their way onto Favrd who were repeatedly following and unfollowing (weekly, sometimes daily) presumably in an attempt to “get noticed.” (I noticed someone on the “Favstars” page last night who was warning someone who was doing that to her to either stop it or be “outed” publicly, so this is apparently now happening to some of the “new” group.) When I asked the person who was doing this why she was doing it (and why she went through and deleted posts, especially “Follow Friday” recommendations, at replies, and posts which didn’t get many stars), she responded with great hostility and told me that I took Twitter way too seriously, and that it was all just fun for her. (I believe the deletion of posts was done to “game” the Followcost website.)

All of which is to say that I have no doubt that Dean saw a whole lot more of this behavior than the rest of us, and he decided he didn’t want to feed it any more.