Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Why am I doing this?
Published on February 27, 2006 By Draginol In Blogging

I'm feeling pretty cranky today.  This week.  This month.

Part of it has to do with not having had a single day off since Thanksgiving.  I even worked on Christmas day.  Every day. 7 days a week. 

A few weeks ago I pulled a 111 hour week.  The last week or so I did over 80. I'm tired. Very tired.

Last week I had to temporarily take down JoeUser since the site, which is not a business enterprise, eats up around 30% of the database bandwidth of our critical accounts server. 

I want to stress that we would never just take down JoeUser permanently without letting people get their stuff.  We have a moral obligation to all users who have blogs.  And I don't have any plans to take down the site either.  Your blogs are safe.

But boy am I fed up with it right now.  I'm fed up with dealing with ungrateful whiney people.  I get a half dozen emails a day from people who address me as if I'm their technical support person.  I'm not talking simple, polite questions.  I mean rude, condescending nastiness. "Fuck you" is what is what I want to say sometimes when I get some really nasty person who is ticked off that our "service" being down for a week is simply "unacceptable".   You wouldn't believe some of the crap I get.

And then there's the onsite stuff. Just before the site went down, LW's husband had a post on sexuality in the United States.  I actually agree with his opinion 100% in terms of the subject matter.  But it was one of those ignorant "I'm from another country and Americans are stupid sheep" type posts that really gets on my nerves. I found it incredibly arrogant, even by my standards.  Which I said as much in a comment. For him single out the United States as being sexually obtuse when the US is probably more open minded than 90% of the population of the world is silly IMO.

But what presses my buttons is when I get arrogant, disrespectful and dismissive responses like "Why don't you go back to using JoeUser to peddle your latest game".  That sort of crap just irritates me.  And I express my irritation pretty straight forwardly. I repeat the golden rule of JoeUser: Don't piss off the owner.   I debate people all the time and don't end up wanting to ban those people.  But you start to get personal and I'll make you disappear from the site.  Or more to the point, you treat me with contempt and you're history.

In response, I got the ultimate button pushing -- where the guy who I'm allowing to use my blog site for free starts taking the attitude that I should be treating him better because he's a customer of the company (he bought a game) and treats JoeUser as if it's a business enterprise, which it's not. 

Every once in awhile someone will come on and comment to one of my blogs "The CEO of a company shouldn't do X, Y, Z".  How the hell do they know what a CEO should and shouldn't do?  Last time I checked, the job of a CEO is to please the shareholders.  The shareholder of Stardock is pleased.  You need help on a product, I'll bend over backwards to help you.  But don't go telling me how I should behave on my blog site.  If I want to write an article that talks about my fondness of canibalism, that's my damn business.  If people make buying decisions based on my behavior, then sorry that's asanine. You're not hurting me. The distance between a product purchase decision and me is so far removed that such buying decisions could never be connected.  And besides that, it makes the false assumption that I'm driven by money.  If I was, I would have stopped these crazy hours long ago. I'm already "set" so to speak.  I'm driven by the desire to make cool stuff. JoeUser being an example of doing something that we think is cool. There's no financial motivation behind JU. Never has been.

So LW's husgand is gone now. But with him goes his wife, Little Whip who I actually like.  I don't know what she sees in the creep but I'm sure people wonder the same thing about my wife (i.e. how she puts up with me).  Which does irritate me more since I enjoy her stuff but there's on way I'm putting up with someone like that.  But if keeping him around is a condition of her hanging around, then it's a no brainer. 

And as harsh as this is to say, especially of someone leaving whose stuff I really enjoy, it won't affect JU in the bigger scheme of things.  Time marches on and it's amazing how quickly people start to forget people who were daily parts of an online community. And I don't say that as if it's a good thing. It's a bad thing.  My good friend Jark started an art community called deviantART.  It eventually had multiple owners and eventually those owners teamed up and fired him.  He was once "the heart" of deviantART.  It would be the equivalent of me being removed from JoeUser permanently.  A couple months pass and you'd never know he was part of the site.  NEVER (and I say this with painful first hand experience) mistake popularity in a given community as existing apart from that community.

Getting back to JU and the profit motive thing. People need to understand something: Stardock owns this site. I own Stardock. It's not VC funded. It's not a partnership. There are no stock holders to answer to.  I own it. The job of a CEO of any company is to please the shareholders.  That typically means increasing profits -- which I've done.  But in a privately held company, it can mean anything.  And the only place i really get mushy about are the people who work WITH (not for) WITH me.  I'll take guff from a coworker.  I won't take it from a user of a free site that we provide purely because we think having the site is cool.

You order one of our products and you need help on one of our sites and are reasonable about it, I'll bend over backwards to help you.  At our product sites, the customer isn't just king, they're god.   But JoeUser isn't a product.  Bloggers aren't customers here.  If I bought ice cream from LW's husband, that doesn't give me the right to go up to him at a bar and shit on him about a totally unrelated thing.

What will happen in the near future is what happens over and over.  A bunch of people will post melodramatic "Goodbye" blogs and then march off to oblivion. Of course, they are certain that their popularity here will travel with them. I exiled LW's husband and Furry Canary since he decided to pile on.  We "wankers" do that.   And I may clean house further.  Because, like I said, I'm fed up.  I'm tired of taking shit.

And those people who do go, I wish them well.  I really do.  They aren't likely to get the kind of attention they get here, however.

What JoeUser brings to the table, totally free of charge, is powerful auto-syndication so that people's stuff gets out there and read by lots of people and responded to. No one else does it. Not because it's technically impossible but because it's very expensive to build and run such a site and unlike JoeUser, the other big blog sites are for-profit enterprises and so you won't see the kind of system out there any time soon.  So to users who think I'm a jerk or whatever (and I am a jerk sometimes) feel free to go to Blogger or whatever. 

So hopefully those who are reading this and thinking "Oh man, Brad's really being nasty" it's true, hopefully people can also realize that I'm human too and I get tired and I don't like being treated like a servant, especially when I'm giving something out that's very expensive, for free, year after year.  I don't expect a bunch of thank yous or appreciation.  I just ask that people not treat me as if I'm supposed to be their customer service agent.

 


Comments (Page 2)
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on Feb 28, 2006
I've not been on JU for an awfully long time and it's great to come back and see that it's still being run with integrity. Perhaps not the kind of integrity that some people are going to agree with, but the kind that I respect. Having someone be prepared to stand up and say "My way or the highway" without concern for popularity is, well, bloody refreshing.

I've always had an odd mental picture of JU; You, Brad, sitting back watching the foolish infighting, bickering, and drama like a proud parent watching his kids play games in the backyard. I feel like JU is you opening up a bit of property to us, allowing us to get our opinions, stories, important opinions or trivial information out to a greater audience. And like any property, it is completely within your rights to refuse entry based on your discretion.

Good form, Brad. Thank you, and take a holiday!
on Feb 28, 2006
Personally speaking I have found Joe User a fair and a wonderful place. I think the owners of the site are doing a great job. However we can always choose to ignore the stuff we dont like.
on Feb 28, 2006
I feel you Brad. Been working continuously for the entire month of February thus far. While no far cry from November I still know how you are feeling.

As for the trolls...I, too, feel you there. Completely know what you are going through as I had to deal with these types of things on deviantART (when my daddy allowed me to do so, heh). I really wish you the best of luck with JU and all the fun that it brings along with it.

If you ever need help then holler. Would gladly do what I can.
on Feb 28, 2006
They just can't quit complaining about the free ice cream Brad.

I wouldn't let it get to you man. You provide a quality FREE service here at JU.

Keep on keepin on. And thanks!
on Feb 28, 2006
I'm sorry. Sorry that Simon said what he said, sorry that you had to exile him, sorry that you've been working so much, sorry that you're feeling frazzled.....I'm just sorry that things have been so rough for you of late. If there was anything I could do to help, I would. Actually, if there IS anything I can do to help, please ask me. The only thing I've got going on right now is knitting your little person in the making's baby blanket....so on the rare offchance that I can help in anyway don't be afraid to ask.

Things will get better, trust me. In a couple of months you'll have a new baby and all of this will be but a memory. It's not much help when you're up to your eyeballs in work and problems, but it's something nice to think about....
on Feb 28, 2006
Wow, a lot of venting, all very necessary (at least from appearances) in the original article, and certainly one very tired and over-worked CEO and others at StarDock of course....

It is a shame that people are so abusive and demanding when it comes to JoeUser. StarDock/Brad, and the rest of the folks involved have done a great job with JoeUser and it's a great community, but the users should most certainly not be cursing Brad/StarDock or making other demands when they are no more than guests in the house. People should be respectful to each other, and should be much more polite in their treatment of the nice folks that keep JoeUser here for all of us.

I hope things get better soon for everyone at StarDock. You folks have done a fantastic job in getting GalCiv out there, and certainly have earned some well deserved rest. Turn on the ignore buttons and/or junk mail filters for the cretins that can't behave themselves and are so quick to push the buttons of the folks at StarDock. If you have to, keep using the ban stick and send the idiots off to poison the waters somewhere else. They won't be missed, or at least won't be missed long. They'll figure it out quickly enough.

To the folks that start the streams of goodbyes, they can believe that others will miss them, but in reality they'll barely be noticed as missing. Perhaps the JoeUser servers will enjoy a little extra bandwidth for a while and perhaps the developers can take a little longer in tweaking things to keep things running along just because someone has stoked the fires a bit harder than the servers can stand for a day or two....
on Feb 28, 2006
Sounds like you need to hire a high powered manager to whip some people in to shape.

/end shameless "give me a job" plug.
on Feb 28, 2006
Sounds like you need to hire a high powered manager to whip some people in to shape.

/end shameless "give me a job" plug.


Oi, I already made my bid (see my post further up the thread) - I just did it a little more subtly than you did.

Think there's room for both of us?
on Feb 28, 2006

There's a reason lots of game companies take holidays immediately after release.

That would be OK if we were "just" a game company.  The problem is that a lot of projects (important ones) got put on the burner, so now we are playing catch up.

Sounds like you need to hire a high powered manager to whip some people in to shape.

nah...we have enough managers.  We simply need more staff.  We're low on programmers and web developers. 

 

on Feb 28, 2006
Heh, yeah dharma, you beat me

And looks like I picked the wrong field in project management anyway.
on Feb 28, 2006
Wow. All I can say is thank you for giving me a place where I could finally put my chatterbox lifestyle to good use. I have said it time and time again, ever since I came here I have learned a lot about many things. This has been the best site I have found online and I would hate to see it go bye-bye someday. I am trully thankful for allowing me to express myself for free in a world where money is almost everything.

At first I thought I was part of the cause for this article (not 100% sure if I'm not) because when I came here the day after the release of the game I did not know about the release or the bandwith dilema. Since I found the forums running I never fegured something was wrong, except that there were hardly any replies from the day before and things were very slow on the site. So I went about my business replying to articles and when I wanted to write something about how slow it was, that's when I realized what was going on. I managed to write an article asking where everyone was since the forum side was still up, didn't see any reason why no one was replying. I did ask on one of the articles about how much longer for the slowing down of the site and that's why I thought this article was parcially about me.

Life must go on and you are within your right to do as you please on this site. I appreciate you caring for what we, the freeloaders, think. But still it is your site and you should not have to take crap from anyone when you are not wrong and you don't have to take it even if you are because in the end you are the man.

I hope you are not as thick as Col and will take everyones advice to take a break. While your at it hows about you give Col a vacation as well? Just wondering, we can all dream can we?
on Feb 28, 2006
I have a subscription to Object Desktop, bought a subscription to Wincustomize as well and just purchased Galactic Civilizations 2. I did it because I think Stardock produces some cool products and I believe in supporting them. One thing I don't expect is for Brad to bend over backward when it comes to Joeuser. This is a free site and just the fact that it's up we should be thankful to Brad. If You don't like how he runs the blog then create your own. Spend the money on the bandwidth, write the code and then run it the way you think it should be run. I just hate it when people expect so much from something they were given for free.
on Feb 28, 2006

You can almost picture how Monday went.

The site goes up, people get back on, find the contact info, and start zinging us with emails.  A legal threat here, an outraged "customer" there, a few calls of "corporate shilling" there and then I get a couple emails and a couple people at the office stopping by and saying "Woha, you should see how that Ice Cream guy responded."  I'd forgotten about that thread so went over, saw yet another "I'm a customer, you're a CEO, you should be kissing my ass."

This, AFTER I'd warned him that he was on the verge of disappearing.  It was a no brainer.

The thing about other people leaving is sad.  Definitely.  Bakerstreet and I and others here have been in on-line communities to know how depressing they can be.

Jark founded deviantART.  He was the heart and soul of it for 4 years.  And then one day, he was fired.  Within 3 weeks, you'd never known he had been there. 

Online communities are fickle.  If Stardock got bought out and I was fired and gone from WinCustomize and JU and elsewhere, there'd be an uproar for a few days.  But then...a week or two would pass and people would just continue as if I'd never existed.  It's all transient.

...

Now as for taking a break, I would love to.  And plan to.  When this Spring and Summer comes, I plan to be at home for a lot of it.  But right now, there's just too much to do.  We are hiring people as fast as we can, they have to be interviewed and talked to and such.  The various teams have be assigned as to what to do next.  We are working on getting our biz sofware into retail and that has to be finished up.  There's just too much to do presently.

Most people don't know who I am here.  They obviously don't walk on pins and needles around me and nobody needs to.  In fact, if one looks at the history of people who have gotten banned, it's the people who know who I am in "real life" and make THAT the issue.  That's the fast track to getting exiled.  When someone starts up with the "Brad, you're the CEO and I bought one of your company's products so you should sit there and take whatever abuse I choose to heap on you, pissant." that's when I'm inclined to act.

on Feb 28, 2006

A legal threat here, an outraged "customer" there, a few calls of "corporate shilling" there


Wow! I would never find the time to send stuff like that. If it's not entertaining, I won't write it.



If Stardock got bought out and I was fired and gone from WinCustomize and JU and elsewhere, there'd be an uproar for a few days. But then...a week or two would pass and people would just continue as if I'd never existed. It's all transient.


I am not kidding; I am sure I would leave. I don't like Web forums and blogs as much as I like Usenet and it was always the "social interface" that was my reason to post here. If the social interface changed dramatically, I would go back to Usenet (which has a vastly superior user interface, better thread control, and is less prone to crashes).
on Feb 28, 2006
Well, all I can say is: I'm glad JU is up and running again. My typing fingers were getting itchy there. I love to blog and think JU is great. Missed it---glad it's back!
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