news to me

[brainwane]

I am on Bluesky and sometimes I go look at denise 's feed there.

I remembered that a few years ago she had noticed that Tumblr had a particular job opening, and had speculated about what a person in that role might want to do with the platform.

https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3libfgunrhc2q

https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3libfqau4rk2q

I had not realized that she had applied for that job, and that she had done so partly because she is "very bored."

This feels like information other people who use Dreamwidth might like to know. I had not previously understood that the chief executive of this platform is bored with her current job, and that provides me with a perspective I'm a little uncomfortable with.

EDITED 17 FEB TO SAY (as I said below in a comment): I screwed up here. Yeah. I’ll write about my screw-up at more length later, but I want to at least note here that yeah, I really didn't go about this in a way that foregrounded "I have concerns but I want to share them in a way that is overall supportive of the site".

Comments

[hydropsyche]

Wow! That does not sound like good news for Dreamwidth at all. I know that Tumblr is federating, which is cool, so I guess I can always move back over there if Dreamwidth disappears.

my perception

[brainwane]

Definitely good to have a backup plan.

But:

The facts I discovered today have not caused me to change my assessment of the risk of DW disappearing in, say, the next 2 years.

Paolucci mentions being bored. New existential risks to Dreamwidth seem like the kind of thing a person might find interesting enough that they would overcome boredom.

I think there are noteworthy existing infrastructure, security, and sustainability risks to this platform, and that those have been in place for some time. We don't have two-factor auth. I'm not sure how much engineering time is available for the site or dedicated to ongoing work, and so it feels unclear to me how quickly they would be able to respond in case of a complex outage or a security vulnerability.

Here is how to export your journal. Right now there is no way to download all of it at once -- it's month-by-month -- or to download comments you have made on others' journals (I filed a GitHub issue about that in January 2020).

guiding principles

[brainwane]

Dreamwidth's guiding principles include:

Community review. We will make our development process and our business decisions as transparent as possible, and look for community feedback at all stages. While we know we can't please everyone all the time, we know that our users are incredibly diverse, and the ways they use the site are just as diverse. We will strive to take your feedback into account as much as we can.

Transparency: We believe that you should know why we make the decisions we make. We will explain our reasoning as much as possible. We will make it easy for you to know as much as you want to about what we're doing. We will always err on the side of providing more information, rather than less, whenever possible. At any point, you should feel comfortable that you understand why we're making the choices we're making.

A thing that bothers me about that is: several parts of the site link to this suggestion form as the preferred way to suggest changes to the site, but no posts from that moderated queue have been published to the suggestions community since 2018.

staffing

[brainwane]

Per the staffing situation I mentioned: the Staff page does not mention this, but the programmer co-founder (Mark) works full-time at a different company.

[jenett]

To put in context, if you read back in her recent feed - she's had some substantial health issues that limit the amount of time sitting up works (especially the last few weeks) again. This obviously can lead to boredom for all sorts of reasons that are not connected to what one does with one's time in better circumstances.

I do not have the brains to find the relevant posts (I believe either in dw_news or dw_biz), but D has talked in the past about how one of the ways they make the DW finances work is that both her job and Mark's for DW are part-time (Mark has another full-time job, and has had for basically the entire project, D's is limited by long-term health issues, and includes the business admin stuff which is necessary but almost entirely invisible to users.)

There are other paid employees, but with specific tasks - partly to make sure there's always a backup for security issues or other urgent needs. (And I think right now also all part time though I might be wrong there.)

And then there's the part about which parts of what could use some time a given person can do: D is not primarily a coder. DW as a project is still fighting a tremendous amount of technical debt, and there is ongoing long-term work about that, but it takes people with a specific set of skills to do some of it. (Especially since some of it involves things that were very specific to LiveJournal or that are no longer in common use.)

Some things, like two factor, I know D's talked (again, one of those two communities) about having both technical issues (figuring out how to integrate with the code) and other factors (what information that would mean DW would need to have about users, whether that information could then be demanded by governments, etc.) that are not just as simple as making the code go.

More importantly, none of that is very new, in terms of structure, from 3 years ago or 5 years ago, or even 8.

[brainwane]

jenett, what proportion of what you have said to me is things you think I did not know already? I respect that you may be trying to provide context for other people who come across this knowing less context. However, I do already know nearly everything you said. And it sounds like you think I am saying: if she is bored, there's coding work she could do. No, I'm not saying that.

There are other paid employees, but with specific tasks - partly to make sure there's always a backup for security issues or other urgent needs. (And I think right now also all part time though I might be wrong there.)

The Staff page does say there is a backup sysadmin on call, yes, and strongly implies he's part-time.

I could say more but I also want to check: are you open to someone criticizing Dreamwidth's business practices, and talking about what the owners could be doing better given their current constraints? If not then of course this line of conversation isn't going to be productive.

For instance: I was indeed already aware that there are long-term health issues that have kept Denise's work availability extremely low for several years, as she has mentioned, for instance, in explaining why the suggestions queue is backlogged. That is a reason I was surprised to see that she had applied for a job that would likely be a full-time job. I could speak further about the boredom stuff and so on, how your reading and mine might differ here, but I only want to do that if you are actually open to me trying to talk in a nuanced way about what strategic decisions Dreamwidth's owners could be making given the difficulties of Denise's availability and (sometimes) boredom.

[jenett]

I was pretty sure you had the context (but didn't know for certain) but did want to give context for other people who might not have it. I should have framed my comments better.

(I am, however, having a not-great time with some of my own chronic stuff, so it absolutely better for me to bow out of this conversation at this point, because I'm not confident I can continue it in a way that's useful. Apologies again for doing badly the first time.)

Wishing you well

[brainwane]

I totally get it and wish you well, with health stuff and more generally.

I also know this whole situation is fraught, given that you and I both know Denise personally. She and I have been friends in the past; I hope we still are, though I know she may be downgrading her opinion of me today.

[synecdochic]

I'll repeat what I said to Sumana privately: I didn't realize that an idle post of "I'm bored and cranky after having been doing the exact same thing for 22 years and getting paid less than minimum wage for it so I applied for a job (that I didn't get) on the off chance of maybe getting to have a retirement eventually" is worth a full post trying to rally people into abandoning the site. Nice.

misunderstanding

[brainwane]

synecdochic has blocked me from being able to reply to her comments. I was going to say:

I believe you have misunderstood what I have said. In particular, what I would like is to *aid in helping the site flourish*; it sounds as though I have not given you that impression. I am also replying to you privately, in case you are open to talking further, in whatever medium.

[ghost_lingering]

While there are certainly aspects of Dreamwidth as a platform & a business that are worth looking at with a critical eye, gotta say: linking to a single comment on a different site where Denise says she is bored & then trying to extrapolate outwards what that means for the sustainability of Dreamwidth feels like an over-reach. At the least, it certainly does not feel like you are trying to "aid in helping the site flourish".

Also: while certainly small businesses are more reliant on individuals & people with insitutional knowledge, I'm uncomfortable with the implication that turnover is an automatic death knell. People leave jobs & find new ones all the time, even owners & company executives.

[brainwane]

I screwed up here. Yeah. I’ll write about my screw-up at more length later, but I want to at least note here that yeah, I really didn't go about this in a way that foregrounded "I have concerns but I want to share them in a way that is overall supportive of the site".

[ghost_lingering]

Glad you're acknowledging the mis-step & will be curious to read your post mortem whenever you post.

[synecdochic]

Allow me to be explicit, since blocking you on Dreamwidth and Bluesky and blocking your number from texting me apparently didn't work:

I do not want or need your advice. I do not remain friends with people who take wild misinterpretations of things I have said and use them to publicly shiv me in the back. I hope airing your over-privileged self-aggrandizing "concerns" were worth burning a friendship for, because you have. Do not attempt to contact me again.