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.