
Should Tumblr care? David Karp tells users who complain to "go away" - samengland
http://postdesk.com/debates/should-tumblr-care/
======
JohnMaloney
One very important point that William fails to mention about his email to us -
he spent the time to track down every Tumblr employees email and sent it to
the entire team. It was way over-the-top, and yes, discouraging to the team.

The idea that David Karp, who I've work closely for eight years over two
startups, is arrogant and doesn't care about the community, is completely off
base. And anyone who knows David will agree. He's a exceptional guy and huge
talent.

"Go away" was reactionary, and there was probably a better way to message, but
David was defending our team who are working incredibly hard to rectify the
performance issues/challenges.

And we as a company are taking extraordinary measures to rectify them. We care
immensely.

Mr. England - calling out the age of an employee, help me understand why that
was necessary and honorable? Seriously.

Lastly, our Creative Community team focusing on Fashion Week is clearly a very
different group then our Engineering/Ops team focusing on performance and
infrastructure.

~~~
rationalbeaver
"One very important point that William fails to mention about his email to us
- he spent the time to track down every Tumblr employees email and sent it to
the entire team. It was way over-the-top, and yes, discouraging to the team."

Assuming that is true, your comment deserves more attention. It changes the
situation significantly.

~~~
catshirt
Surely. After having read this response I pivoted (had to) my reaction. The
original post clearly intends to have the reader believe "go away" is a poor
off-the-cuff defense to "your site is down". Which especially given the down
time is a bad defense. That said, at this point I'm much more likely to
believe "go away" is a valid defense to harassment.

~~~
wtildesley
Please explain how emailing (some) of tumblr's staff to express my
disappointment with the level of service can be classed as harassment?

~~~
space-monkey
It's not _legally_ harassment, but it's definitely not calm, rational,
productive communication either.

------
spolsky
Give David a break. First of all, he's a very nice guy. Secondly, he's not
running a corner greengrocer, he's running a site that's growing
supernaturally fast and which has completely, utterly displaced myspace as the
place where high school kids share. Tumblr has five MILLION visitors every
single day, almost none of whom pay a dime. You can't run a service like that
the same way you run an enterprise software company. You can't have a PR team
and a customer service department that makes sure everybody gets a nice reply.
When they have outages caused by growing pains (something which nobody here
begrudges them), they get metric TONS of angry email from thousands of
narcissistic users who can't IMAGINE that ANYONE ELSE is suffering from the
same outage. You know what? David Karp doesn't like Tumblr being down any more
than you do. David Karp didn't bring Tumblr down to piss you off. Self
righteous, whiny blog posts demanding that David Karp is not capable of
running Tumblr because he responded to an email in a fashion that you don't
find sufficiently grovelling are, frankly, ridiculous, and reflect more poorly
on the whiners than on Tumblr or David.

~~~
rriepe
I heard from an article that I read recently that he wasn't, in fact, a nice
guy.

Maybe you had different experiences with him, but now most people who have
read about him just think he's some 24-year-old punk trying to be Steve Jobs.
That's just how this stuff works.

Startup, LLC and HugeCorp, Inc. alike can't afford bad PR like this. It was an
incredibly stupid move on David's part and he should patch this up as quickly
as possible.

~~~
spolsky
I'm pretty sure that Tumblr can certainly afford bad PR like this. Show me an
example of a company that was, actually, hurt by something like this. One
example, please. Every high school kid in New York uses Tumblr every minute of
every day. None of them even know who David is, and those that do, revere him.

~~~
rriepe
And Steve Jobs could kick a puppy as his next "one more thing." It doesn't
mean shareholders would be happy about it.

"We can afford it" is a terrible response to bad PR. He needs to act quickly
and make this right. Apologize. Give the guy a free account or something.
Everything is (mostly) better.

I'm convinced that half of a PR person's work is convincing others to get over
themselves.

~~~
masklinn
> It doesn't mean shareholders would be happy about it.

Actually, shareholders would probably be ecstatic.

~~~
pyre
... And Apple forums would be rife with explanations about how kicking is a
better way to interface with puppies than petting them.

------
ramanujan
And this right here folks is why a startup is so extraordinarily stressful,
why PR agencies exist, and why a squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Think about it: that post (and the comments by robyn_b below, an account which
was registered 20 minutes ago) goes out of its way to SEO-ify for keywords
related to the founder, his company's name, and related variables.

This is the risk you run with every single customer service interaction --
that the guy on the other side won't just be content to take his ball and go
home if you can't meet his demands, but will try to foment a mass movement
against you to put you out of business.

Good service is unfortunately not a panacea for this problem. Suppose that
99.9% of your customers are satisfied, but you have millions. Then you've got
thousands of disgruntled people out there, and bad news travels fastest.

The lesson, ultimately, is that you simply can't respond in a human way to
someone attacking your baby. You need call centers and roboscripts and a first
layer of customer service, such that if a customer decides to attack you on
the internet, a manager can jump in, offer concessions, and make it all
better.

Doing it any other way means that you run the risk of a candid response
becoming a capital crime.

~~~
samengland
I'm the author of the article and I can honestly say that "SEO for keywords
related to the founder, his company's name, and related variables" is not what
we're trying to do. The article is simply speculation about what having a
founder with this kind of attitude might mean - and it's also speculation as
to the direction Tumblr is heading in under the leadership of David Karp. I
just found it quite interesting. On a personal level I also found it
disgusting how they treated William, a dedicated user of Tumblr who has never
had a bad thing to say about the service until now - so I thought I'd speak
out about it.

~~~
ramanujan
Mr. England, your post went on for thousands of words psychoanalyzing the guy
and his motives ("abruptly...knee-jerk response...defensive...something to
hide....care-free and cavalier...", and so on ad nauseum).

Something about the tone set off my metal detectors, as did the comments by
robyn_b here, which reminded me of the way people on 4chan work someone's name
into a sentence to make sure that it's the number one hit on Google.

Sure enough, looking into this a little more, it actually isn't as surprising.
From your site:

<http://postdesk.com/hiring/>

    
    
      PostDesk is looking for fresh new talent in the UK,
      Europe, the USA and Canada. We require web developers who
      are proficient in PHP and MySQL - and ideally those who
      have worked with CMS systems, bulletin board style 
      software or social networking software....In short, the
      start-up will be based around news, discussion and 
      debate. 
    

Ok, so you run a competing startup in the same space and saw an opportunity to
poke a finger in the eye of a rival. Don't you think that merits an up front
disclosure in bold font?

~~~
clojurerocks
Sorry but are joking? I read the piece and everything the author said is spot
on. It sounds exactly like the ceo has a great deal of insecurities and
frankly shouldnt be in the ceo position. Why? Because im sorry but you cant
treat users like that. You just cant. Its simply unprofessional. Especially
when its not isolated. Tumblr has been having problems for months and they
seem to simply not have any interest in fixing it but seem to be more interest
in how rich they are.

They need to get off their high horses and fix the problems NOW! If they dont
people will simply stop using their service. Especially if that service
develops a reputation as having an asshole for a ceo. Especially at the
startup stage.

Sadly it seems in this country that arrogance and egomania are being mistaken
for talent. When tech founders are assholes people laud them instead of
putting them in their place. Its really annoying and i see it here all of the
time on HN.

~~~
rhizome
_They need to get off their high horses and fix the problems NOW! If they dont
people will simply stop using their service._

Is that so? How many people will stop using Tumblr based on the outcome of
this controversy? How many permanently stopped using Twitter during (what I
call) The Blaine Transition?

 _Especially if that service develops a reputation as having an asshole for a
ceo._

Oh, this is good. Name one time this has happened in the entire history of
business. I have a feeling you're indulging in pointed opinions to make the
case that site quality affects retention and conversion. OK, but that's not a
newsflash. What makes Tumblr different, such that they need to "fix the
problems NOW!"? I'm sure they're not just sitting back drinking lattes while
they watch the support queue grow.

Taking your tone, one might read between the lines to interpret your attitude
as just competitive sour grapes between Clojure and Scala. How fair is that?

------
ekidd
Without the original e-mail sent to Tumblr, it's hard to judge the
appropriateness of Karp's response. Under most circumstances, it's rude to
tell your customers to go away. But if a rare customer behaves
abusively—particularly towards your employees or other customers—it may be the
correct decision to politely decline their business.

Of course, if _lots_ of your customers are behaving abusively, you've got
bigger problems, either with the service you provide, or with the customers
you've chosen to serve.

~~~
samengland
Just got in touch with William to ask if I could post up the original e-mail
in its entirety - and he said that was fine. I've added the original email to
the bottom of the article. <http://postdesk.com/debates/should-tumblr-care/>

~~~
ekidd
[Edit: Substantially rewritten in light of #2, below.]

Thank you. It looks like Postdesk started a public controversy while leaving
out two critical pieces of information:

1) William's actual e-mail, which expresses his disappointment in a reasonably
polite fashion. Normally, this sort of e-mail should merit a polite response
and a refund.

2) The allegation that William send the email to the entire engineering team
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152203>). This changes the context of
Karp's remarks significantly, because it means that Karp had to weigh two
things: The feelings of a disappointed customer, and the morale of his
already-stressed engineers.

In this case, I actually sympathize a bit with Karp. He needs to take care of
his customers, but he also needs to take care of his people. That puts his
remark "...we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to
discourage our entire team..." in a rather different light. That's not an easy
situation to resolve well.

I wish that Postdesk had provided more facts (and less editorial comment) in
the original article.

~~~
clojurerocks
Im sorry but this doesnt hold water when tumblr has 40 million in vc funding.
If they were bootstrapped then yes maybe. But if his team is stressed out
maybe they could start hiring people. Instead they are causing situations like
this to happen.

Also im sorry but i dont care how stressed out you are. As a ceo you have a
responsibility to treat your customers with respect. Especially since what the
customer was asking was so simply and basic and straightforward. Its not like
the emailer sent a nasty mean email calling everybody names and asking them
why the service isnt working in harsh ways and being disrespectful.

He sent a very polite email to the people working there. Theres absolutely
nothing wrong with that at all. Its part of doing business and doing customer
service.

The response frankly was absolutely ridiculous. At the very least the response
could have been more polite and simply said we apologize and are working on
it.

~~~
ekidd
Given Tumblr's explosive popularity, there's no way that they _aren't_ a giant
ball of stress right now. It's certainly nice to have $40 million, but that's
of little use in the short term: As Fred Brooks famously pointed out, adding
more programmers to a late project makes it later.

So the people who understand Tumblr's systems are almost certainly working
nights and weekends and going slowly insane. And there's no relief for them:
If Tumblr hires more staff, their current engineers will still have to deal
with all the crises _and_ train the new people.

It's the CEO's job to deal with disappointed and angry customers. But it's
also the CEO's job to deal with programmers who are working 70 hour weeks and
who are just about ready to snap and move to a commune. Startups can be full
of bad craziness.

In a perfect world, customers would talk to the CEO and the customer support
team, and not try to directly contact the engineering team. That's not to say
that Tumblr handled this especially well. But again, it's not an easy
situation.

------
inovica
I know that Steve Jobs has sent some very short responses before, however this
from Karp shows immaturity more than anything. There are times when most of us
will receive an email from a client and want to immediately tell them where to
go, but the old saying to "sleep on it" really is good advice. I have
sometimes waited a day before properly responding to some people and it was
the best thing to do in every case. I hope that Karp realises his mistake and
makes a public apology. At least this way he would look mature enough to admit
his mistakes

Edit: I was about to start a personal blog on Tumblr, and I will not be now
due to this article.

~~~
spolsky
Oh please, get over yourself. David started a company when he was 20....
obvious proof that he's extremely mature for his age, not immature. Let me
know when you're running a successful website that zoomed to the top 50 in a
couple of years and which serves 5 million people every single day before your
24th birthday. Picking on him for one email instead of his very impressive
life's work, and self-righteously proclaiming that you will be boycotting
Tumblr because he sent one curt email, is, I'm sorry to say, kinda pathetic.

~~~
forensic
It's nice that you're defending your crony.

But that's all it comes across as.

All the reasons you give for excusing Karp could also be used to excuse the
"whiner" who sent the email. Does he not have his business to run? Is he not
under pressure?

~~~
clojurerocks
Couldnt agree more. I find it embarrassing for tumblr that all of the people
involved with the company seem more interested in covering their own asses
then dealing with the problems. Not a company personally i would ever want to
be associated with.

------
markessien
This is one of the problems with cloud platforms. You know how people proudly
announce on twitter that they "fired" a customer? What happens if a cloud
platform you are using and depends on decide to "fire" you because you're a
complainer or a heavy user?

If you're a cloud app user, you can't even complain loudly. If you are enemies
with your host, they can just decide to kick you off. Even if they resolve it,
you'll always have a bad feeling knowing that the person running your
infrastructure doesn't "like you".

Software you could buy, once you have it, you own it. Nobody can kick you off.

~~~
Psyonic
Right but this is always a problem running on someone else's platform. To fix
it you have to host everything yourself all the way down to the utilities
level, where regulations don't really allow them to play favorites.

------
latch
It'd be better to just send a canned response. This is going to get picked up
here and there and not only highlight that they aren't very nice, but also
that they are having stability problems.

People are comparing this to a Jobs response? No way, this is a Tony Hayward
territory (and by that, I'm not comparing the oil spill to tumblr's
downtime!!)

------
T_S_
"He's young". "He's actually a nice guy".

These are the kinds of statements that should only carry weight when you have
a _personal_ relationship. A relationship with a company/website/app is no
more or less than the sum of your interactions with them. I have a "good"
relationship with Apple and Amex. A "bad" one with AT&T etc., based on
transactions, not personal relations.

The unusual aspect is that the CEO was involved in customer service. It looks
like a case of kicking the dog. That happens when people (nice or not) are
under extreme pressure. What's up?

------
pclark
How do you write 1800 words about this, wow.

------
far33d
CEO's should all have 2 hour holds on their email that leaves the office. Whe
actively fighting fires, it's easy to say something stupid.

~~~
jaredstenquist
CEO's who aren't responsible enough to use email and represent their team
appropriately are easily replaced with a board vote.

------
kellysutton
Self-entitlement is at an all-time high on the Internet.

------
awakeasleep
Inferring that tumble must have something to hide, assuming bad faith on
karp's part because of this email? You might consider how a post like this
reflects on the author, especially in the context of a young man struggling to
provide a global service which appears to be consuming all facets of his life.

I hope you don't judge yourself so harshly, blog author. And put your byline
on the site more prominently.

------
dools
"A knee-jerk response like this which is immediately defensive clearly shows
that Karp has something to hide. Perhaps from this we can ascertain that there
is some sort of internal friction with his team – perhaps some dislocation,
maybe they’re overworked"

Or maybe it just shows that he's 24 years old and isn't communicating with the
benefit of a public relations team watching his every move.

------
pauljonas
As a Tumblr lover (and user #752 on the service), this article is petty,
poorly argued and the resultant fanfare unmerited.

I have engaged in many email interactions with the Tumblr staff and outside of
a few questionable missives, encountered nothing but gracious and welcoming
responses. Unlike other cloud services like Google, which is merely
interfacing with a Python script HTTP request.

That said, Tumblr is straining to keep pace with growth, and the service is
sporting cracks and leaks that it do not appear to be getting resolved…

* …the well known cited issues about availability, service outages are still experienced on a daily basis, even if it is just for a few moments. Confounding that the Dashboard might be available but accessing your site page via browser URL generates an error. Or when publishing from the queue, an error is generated even though the article is published -- it just is not removed from the queue, so you have manually delete it from the queue after publishing (reckon there is no DB transaction on the set of CRUD operations).

* …regarding the queue, it is a great feature if it is functional, but since last fall, it is not really functional. It sort of works now, mostly as a holding bucket for me -- I realize in the eyes of Tumblr Support, it works, outside of some outages (which have been measured in days length, not hours), but it is just not reliable enough to depend on. Also, in the wake of the refresh, the UI was badly butchered -- relying on AJAX drag and drop that makes it impossible to move items to the top or bottom of queue, plus some other befuddling choices that make me question whether the developers making the modifications ever actually use this feature.

* …the rich text editor continues to deteriorate (you have the option of editing in rich text, raw html or markdown), there is a glitch now that if you click on the "Edit HTML source" button, it just "hangs" on a blank window. But even when working, it inserts all sorts of extraneous HTML entities and spans. Have switched back to the Markdown editor, but it's an incomplete implementation.

* …the schizophrenic UI nature of accessing Tumblrs via the dashboard or the site pages -- there are sets of operations that you can do on the dashboard (reply) that cannot be performed from the site page.

* …the API access (for creating/updating/dashboard requests) is insecure and really has not been enhanced or upgraded in years.

* …there is a Mac app (no Windows or Linux) to export your Tumblr, but it has failed to export every time I've attempted.

Going to stop there, as I don't wish to bang on Tumblr -- I know they're
working hard to address the performance issues. I just hope that it is not a
rabbit v. tortoise race.

~~~
pclark
All of these are (as far as I can tell) _easy to solve_ and I ponder almost
every day why they are not.

------
app
<http://www.davidslog.com/2941069729/200m-page-views-per-week>

Looks like the downtime isn't slowing them down much.

~~~
robyn_b
Whilst it might not slow them down much at the moment due to the viral nature
of the site, nor did the lack of innovation and arguably bad leadership at
MySpace. I think what the article is trying to say that under the leadership
of David Karp it will probably end up going that way - and I agree. In fact
although it's different in many ways, look at Chatroulette even - perfect
example of what happens when you do nothing with the traffic and don't care
about the users who visit the site.

------
zizee
We host our company blog on tumblr via a subdomain. So far the experience has
been "ok", and considering we haven't paid a cent, I can't really complain
about value for money.

My biggest problems with Tumblr's outage is this: It would be nice if their
"sorry, we're down" page gave some indication that it is Tumblr that is having
trouble with their service.

At the moment, if Tumblr goes down, visitors would have no idea that the "we"
in "we're having issues" is not us, but in fact Tumblr.

And what really bites about it is that people understand if you have an outage
when trying to serve up millions of pages. But when you have a company blog
that has only small traffic, people don't have the same understanding. If your
company blog is down, you just look an incompetent who has configured his
server badly. And that irks me to no end.

------
rudiger
> "one would have to ask why the team behind a company which has received in
> excess of $40 million venture capital funding is required to spend 'their
> nights and weekends working feverishly'."

Really? I'm sure if any of us received $40 million in VC funding for our
startup, we'd work our butts off too.

What people don't understand is that Tumblr technologically is pretty simple;
sure they'll have the requisite growing pains, but it's more important that
they maintain a high-quality culture. That's why I don't question Tumblr
paying twenty fashion bloggers to go to New York fashion week. Technical
issues wouldn't exist without Tumblr's vibrant, active community. They'd just
be another blogging site.

------
huertanix
From what I understand, Tumblr is an extremely small company. Your local
Denny's has more people on payroll. NYC is running out of top-notch developers
(thus why Bloomberg goes out of his way to tell people from other cities to
move to his). Finding and hiring people who fit your company and managing them
is a time-consuming process if you want to do it right. Nothing about what
they're doing or will have to do is easy. Ultimately, they need to find people
who have experience with scaling massive apps, which means headhunting at
Google and Facebook. Not saying they shouldn't fix the problem, but I can
understand the frustration their team is experiencing.

------
wtildesley
William checking in here - the recipient of the e-mail from Mr Karp. So I'm
sitting here just waiting for my blog to be deleted...

~~~
prestia
If this is William, what relationship do you have with PostDesk? It seems
peculiar to take an exchange like this and forward it to a total unknown
rather than one of the larger sites. I'm not saying I don't believe this
happened, but I'm rather skeptical by nature.

~~~
wtildesley
I'm a friend of the owner.

~~~
aristotlenova
So what you're saying is that this entire article is a hit piece that has
nothing that remotely resembles objectivity or that has made any effort to
actually tell both sides of the story. Fascinating.

Don't you love it when bloggers use their magic publish button to settle petty
personal issues? Awesome. Thanks for wasting 15 minutes of my day.

~~~
clojurerocks
Im sorry but ive read a couple of youre comments and you say the same thing
over and over again. Not dealing with the problems he mentions but simply
attacking him personally. Which just makes his case look stronger and tumblr
look more like a bunch of immature idiots.

~~~
huertanix
They're not a "bunch," they're like, a dozen. A dozen people trying to make a
site work for several millions of people at once. That's no short order for
such a small team.

~~~
iPadDeveloper
Running the company on VC cash? Sounds unsustainable. Also isn't Tumbler just
like Twitter?

~~~
huertanix
1\. Partially, they sell premium themes and some small virtual goods, I don't
imagine they pull in much from those sales, though.

2\. No.

------
stevelosh
No exporting feature? Every single page can be slurped as JSON by appending
/api/read/json to the end of the URL.

And as the response says, there are _plenty_ of other sites that will import
Tumblr blogs without a hitch.

Please go away so Tumblr can spend more time/resources fixing problems for the
rest of us.

~~~
pauljonas
Does it work on a Tumblr with more than a few dozen pages?

No, even writing my own, have encountered errors on selected pages where the
service simply "errored out" once it reached a certain page.

What other sites?

I have tried Posterous and it failed to import.

Sorry, there needs to be a one-click solution where you request an export (and
even if you have to be emailed when it is completed) and a file is generated
with your content to download to your computer, be it XML, JSON, or in static
HTML.

~~~
nakkiel
Well. Guess what? I heard the Tumblr staff is very helpful. Drop them a mail
and make sure to include a reference to this thread. Also, specify you want a
dump of your data.

I'm sure you'll receive a database dump shortly.

I totally second the founder's missive and this is mine.

Seriously, you probably know how Twitter helps saving lives and is so much
better than traditional news and whatnot. Well, during the riots in Thailand
last year it was down a good 20% for reading and a good 50% for posting. Do
you think anybody cares in Twitter? Ever tried to mail them?

As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.

Which reminds me of a customer who's asked us to scrap real-time stock data
from a free source using demo accounts and then complained because there were
downtimes. My answer? Call Reuters and get a quotation.

EDIT: I'd like to state that I always encouraged that customer to get an
appropriate account with an appropriate license. This was a 'do it or drop the
project' matter (and I wish we had firmer positions in such cases).

------
PaulHoule
I can't understand why there aren't more complaints that "tumblr"="spam".
Whenever I see a page on tumblr, it's always one sentence and a link to
something else. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I never see any
content of value on tumblr.

------
pclark
I have never met David, nor do I know anyone from Tumblr. I've just been a
fan. Some people may remember me defending Tumblr when it came up versus the
Posterous importing saga.

I've used Tumblr for years. I remember when they launched. I remember when
they raised their first round of funding.

I honestly believe that Tumblr has simply grown _too fast_ to scale their
operations in a manner that Tumblr is happy with. I think that Tumblr is
similar to MySpace in that they constantly think about scaling their service,
rather than customer acquisition (ala Posterous.)

These guys are good guys, and are simply caught off guard. Lets not pick on
them for making mistakes.

They run a web company - like many of us - hell, if I had 1% of Tumblrs
success I'd be arrogant as hell _and Tumblr are not_.

They are human. David Karp is probably one of the most underrated web
entrepreneurs around right now, picking his brains is equal to picking
Facebook or Etsy in terms of consumer entrepreneurial advice, IMHO.

------
samengland
Coincidence or not? This has just been posted on TC 50 minutes ago.
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/karp-tumblr-quarter-
billion...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/karp-tumblr-quarter-billion-
impressions-week)

~~~
pclark
Coincidence, sorry author of the article hating on Tumblr.

------
jamesgagan
I have been building a site similar to tumblr and posterous. It's called
<http://www.wijoda.com> \- anyone unhappy with tumblr might want to give it a
try. I'd love some feedback!

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Build a fool-proof import from Tumblr and you might be able to get some users.

~~~
jamesgagan
that's a great idea.

------
kmfrk
Clearly, we can extrapolate this one e-mail to show a startup in tatters and a
founder in steep mental decline.

 _Or maybe the guy was having a bad day, having to deal with an absurd surge
in traffic for months that they have yet to deal with._

Jeez.

------
messel
This is one of those defining moments for a startup, where they turn the
corner and come out on the other side stronger, or collapse based on a lack of
user trust and system problems. Time will tell.

------
83457
Just saw the full email from Williams. Looks like he was threatening to leave
Tumblr if issues aren't addressed in near future.

Have things really been that bad to leave their platform?

------
bmccormack
Does PostDesk Debates only host one "debate" at a time? I find it odd that an
article with such a pejorative tone is the only content on their site.

~~~
kmfrk
This looks like the first article. Go figure. :)

------
usedtolurk
Gee people - this is so petty and doesn't do anyone any favours. Surely there
are more important things for us to discuss?

------
vondur
Sounds like he's (Carp) a young kid who is in over his head now with the
growth that they have experienced.

------
krosaen
now that the original email has been posted, clearly a defensive response from
an overstressed individual, which I can totally identify with; it's easy to
get snippy when things are going wrong faster than you can keep up and all you
hear is more complaints. but a bad PR move for sure

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dbreunig
If you think Tumblr's competitors are Posterous and Wordpress, you're missing
the point.

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risotto
Companies reserve the right to fire customers. I respect this attitude.

~~~
starpilot
Companies do reserve the right to provide poor customer service. That may not
be in their best interest though.

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sharescribe
Sounds like Google's customer service approach.

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JacobAldridge
Not really - Williams actually _received_ a response!

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clojurerocks
Sometimes no response is better then this kind of repsponse which was
completely unprofessional as well as disrespectful.

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prestia
Remember: Tumblr may not have an export feature, but Posterous has a great
import feature.

~~~
pauljonas
No.

Posterous has choked every time I've attempted a Tumblr to Posterous import.
From outright failure (which could be simply that Tumblr API was inaccessible)
to even upon "success" notification, seeing that it only brought in ~300 posts
from a total of 20K posts. Perhaps 20K posts is too burdensome a task, but
~300 is a paltry amount.

