Let me tell you a story. I have called it an internet story, and while it is a story that takes place on the internet, it is really a story about people.
It’s a story about a man who built a tool – a tool for Twitter. Now, if twitter is a bazaar, his tool was a little cafe, where people could hang out and enjoy the best of the atmosphere and the environment without the elbows and the yelling and the smell and the heat.
He established a means of connection in an ocean of strangers. Because he built a tool that allowed people to come together and interact with one another, the people using it did what people everywhere do when they come together to interact – they formed a community.
And then one day, abruptly, decisively and without ceremony, he destroyed it. Took it down; wiped it, archives and all. People showed up… and it wasn’t there. It was gone.
Confusion. Anger. Turmoil.
Why?
What makes the creator of something, – the author – the founder – reject and destroy it?
You can read his answer here.
What he says is remarkable on many levels.
“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.”
…
“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”
I have a great respect for Dean Allen and the revelation at which he arrived. I understand the anger of the people who lost something of value to them. For some people, it was frustrating, because they weren’t acting out of pain.
Is human pain opt out? Can we chose to not perpetrate suffering? Are we wrong to try?
4 Responses to "An Internet Story"
Worth thinking about.
I think the entire thread is worth reading. I first ran across it without any context whatsoever, and it was a worthwhile experience reading it to try and put together what was going on.
It’s also worth reading because while I’ve presented it as a story, and while it is an interesting thread to read, there are real people over there talking.
I haven’t posted on that thread though, because I don’t know any of them
I currently post comments on a fairly regular basis on four blogs.
Two are the blogs of total strangers. Mind you, the totality of their strangeness is reducing- one particularly blogs prolifically.
I was going to respond but I’ll make a post out of it instead. It grew too long.