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i am "wasting my time with affiliate marketing" because i want to understand this stuff and possibly make it better. and zynga is far from a fraud. it's the mo

i am "wasting my time with affiliate marketing" because i want to understand this stuff and possibly make it better. and zynga is far from a fraud. it's the most successful social gaming company on the web, it has innovated on the virtual goods model and proven that you can build a very large business with that model. i don't like to go to big splashy conferences and that's what i blogged about. i do like to go to niche conferences where i can meet real people and entrepreneurs. i'd like to understand why you think the investments we make don't make the web better.

thafman 17y ago
Fred, as someone who felt your wrath earlier today all I can say is that we (the loosely dev/hacker community) feel that Zynga, playfish,et al. peed in the pool by having bad offers in the first place and made it much harder for the rest of us. We also placed lots of stock in you personally as the older, wiser voice on the Web, and then the shitstorm broke out over "scamville" and you were nowhere to be found on this subject. It hurt to see someone we looked up too as a "grown-up who gets it" not say what you were clearly thinking.
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  - fredwilson 17y ago
    zynga is not a scam and never was. that's the point. i kept my mouth shut because it was shitstorm and there was no way you could have a rational discussion during it
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- fredwilson 17y ago
  i think you need to understand the limitations of what i can say when our companies get in the news. i can't talk about stuff twitter is doing without clearing it with them first. i can't talk about stuff zynga is doing without clearing it with them first. i can't talk about stuff that etsy is doing without clearing it with them first. etc, etc. and my wrath is not at you, it's at all the misinformation out there, spread by blogs who did not work and just repeated the misinformation about zynga
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- fredwilson 17y ago
  b) i'm not an investor in bit.ly. i've written that i think link shorteners are bad for the web a) disqus is not a feature. its a social network for commenting and the blog owner owns their data in partnership with disqus. if they want to turn off disqus and put their comments somewhere else, they can do that easily. c) virtual goods are an elegant form of freemium that allows game developers to offer their games for free and still get paid by power users d) can you provide some examples of our companies rewarding bad behavior? e) zynga has raised almost a million dollars for poor students in Haiti with its sweet seeds offer. etsy allows people to make a living making things. mongoDB is a free datastore for web developers. i could go on and on. i think our thirty portfolio companies are doing so many good things for the web. i take this stuff seriously. i could ignore this comment but i won't because this is important to me.
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thafman 17y ago

Fred, as someone who felt your wrath earlier today all I can say is that we (the loosely dev/hacker community) feel that Zynga, playfish,et al. peed in the pool by having bad offers in the first place and made it much harder for the rest of us. We also placed lots of stock in you personally as the older, wiser voice on the Web, and then the shitstorm broke out over "scamville" and you were nowhere to be found on this subject. It hurt to see someone we looked up too as a "grown-up who gets it" not say what you were clearly thinking.

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- fredwilson 17y ago
  zynga is not a scam and never was. that's the point. i kept my mouth shut because it was shitstorm and there was no way you could have a rational discussion during it
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fredwilson 17y ago
i think you need to understand the limitations of what i can say when our companies get in the news. i can't talk about stuff twitter is doing without clearing it with them first. i can't talk about stuff zynga is doing without clearing it with them first. i can't talk about stuff that etsy is doing without clearing it with them first. etc, etc. and my wrath is not at you, it's at all the misinformation out there, spread by blogs who did not work and just repeated the misinformation about zynga

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fredwilson 17y ago
b) i'm not an investor in bit.ly. i've written that i think link shorteners are bad for the web a) disqus is not a feature. its a social network for commenting and the blog owner owns their data in partnership with disqus. if they want to turn off disqus and put their comments somewhere else, they can do that easily. c) virtual goods are an elegant form of freemium that allows game developers to offer their games for free and still get paid by power users d) can you provide some examples of our companies rewarding bad behavior? e) zynga has raised almost a million dollars for poor students in Haiti with its sweet seeds offer. etsy allows people to make a living making things. mongoDB is a free datastore for web developers. i could go on and on. i think our thirty portfolio companies are doing so many good things for the web. i take this stuff seriously. i could ignore this comment but i won't because this is important to me.
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