Dean Responds

Via the comments over at Zeldman.com

Dean Allen said on 7 December 2009 at 7:52 am:

Appreciate your thoughts as ever, Jeffrey.

No fit of pique for me, actually. More like a gradual aha, with a slight wince and sigh at the end. I’ve spent the past year or so reading and writing and doing my level best to chip away at 40 years of belief in the logical fallacy that one’s identity meaning – self-worth, self-image, whatever you want to call it – can accurately be measured in the thoughts of others. Much as you and I may enjoy being encouraged through recognition and praise and dislike being saddened by rejection or indifference (god knows we’re taught to right from the outset by caregivers: good boy, pretty picture, heckuva job Brownie), deriving personal value from these transactions in the absence of a well-formed internal frame of reference through which you can decide on your own what does and doesn’t work, and subsequently accept the opinions of others as feedback, is just plain faulty thinking, of the sort that makes otherwise capable, centred people all loopy and weird.

That I was running a world-wide web site fuelled by millions of meaningless, microscopic indicators of worth became over time distinctly out of whack with everything I’ve been working on. More on that in a minute.

I started Favrd solely to furnish me with something amusing to read while waiting in line at the supermarket, calm in the assurance that in doing so I’d never ever see Pete Cashmore’s stupid douchey face or read his stupid douchey toots. It worked great guns and over time, as momentum grew and more people started perking up to the ad hoc format (lonelysandwich called it ‘Twitter as performance’, which I liked very much) and unwritten, self-shaping rules. I knew people like Merlin and yourself, having wisecracked all over the internet for years, would do well; but the people who showed up out of nowhere – IT guy from Dalhousie University; Central American policy wonk; the Tacoma Massive; a squad of drily hilarious, beautifully melancholic women; that barrel-shaped guy from Apple; hundreds more than I can name – I thought for awhile that this was the start of a sort of new upper-middlebrow art form, like headlines from The Onion without all the lorem ipsum underneath. I laughed a lot.

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’. 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.

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.

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.

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.