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.

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.

[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.

[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.