11 ms·

Should Tumblr care? David Karp tells users who complain to "go away"

125 points by samengland 16y ago

pclark 16y ago
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.
usedtolurk 16y ago
Gee people - this is so petty and doesn't do anyone any favours. Surely there are more important things for us to discuss?
messel 16y ago
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.
sharescribe 16y ago
Sounds like Google's customer service approach.
- JacobAldridge 16y ago
  Not really - Williams actually received a response!
  - clojurerocks 16y ago
    Sometimes no response is better then this kind of repsponse which was completely unprofessional as well as disrespectful.
- wladimir 16y ago
  With the difference that they are not yet big enough to not care about their customers.
far33d 16y ago
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.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- robyn_b 16y ago
  I'm not sure Karp is actively fighting fires though... It doesn't look like he's doing much to anyway. If he's not careful those fires will destroy all he has anyway. Besides, he could have retracted what he said but he didn't - if you read the article he reiterated his point in a second e-mail a day later.
- jaredstenquist 16y ago
  CEO's who aren't responsible enough to use email and represent their team appropriately are easily replaced with a board vote.
- clojurerocks 16y ago
  Completely agree. This type of stuff happens ALL OF THE TIME in business. Sure sometimes you want to react like this but you realize its not in the best interest of your customer or the company. Even if the customer is wrong or right all of it gets lost in noise. He should have taken a time out chilled out and then responded. Instead it was reactionary and ridiculous. Regardless of whether he was right or wrong in this situation.
app 16y ago
http://www.davidslog.com/2941069729/200m-page-views-per-week http://www.davidslog.com/2941069729/200m-page-views-per-week Looks like the downtime isn't slowing them down much.
- robyn_b 16y ago
  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.
inovica 16y ago
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.
- robyn_b 16y ago
  I couldn't agree more - but Karp is just turning out to be really arrogant. It's a great shame as Tumblr has potential to be an amazing service if only those behind it admitted it's flaws and tried to work on them instead of denying they exist.
  - spolsky 16y ago
    Bubbie, you don't know what you're talking about. Do you really think that Tumblr isn't aware of it's flaws? Are you seriously claiming that David is denying that they had a few outages? Very, very few mass services grew as quickly as Tumblr without a lot of outages. Ebay had them, Yahoo had them, Twitter had them. The idea that David is sitting in a room like Mubarak, denying the flaws and refusing to work on them, is so utterly preposterous that I don't even know where to begin, but I'll say this: I know David, and it's not true, and he's working on the flaws, and he's working on them night and day, and he's utterly the least arrogant person I've ever met, and genuinely nice, too.
    - clojurerocks 16y ago
      As someone who uses stackoverflow almost daily im absolutely astonished at how disrespectful and frankly clueless your response is. Ive been following architecture for a long time and remember when the companies you mention had scaling issues. I dont remember them lashing out at their customers and telling them to fuck off assholes! Also when ebay and yahoo started having scaling issues THERE WERE NO CASE STUDIES IN SCALING. They had to figure it out all on their own so people gave them slack. Now there are upteen startups that have dealt with 100 times the traffic that tumblr is dealing with. And many of them without 40 million dollars in fudning. Plus theres something called the cloud. Its becoming obvious that egomania is becoming epidemic int eh world of tech startups. Which is just sad. Also while the emailer was asking about scaling problems which have been going on for far too long at tumblr from what ive read, the issue here isnt with that its with the ridiculous response that the ceo sent.
foljs 16y ago
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 perhaps even some personal insecurity on his part. Overanalyzing much? 1) It's a response from a 24 year old that build a web business. Considering the manners and attitude of 20-somethings in general, the surprising thing is these kind of responses don't appear more often. Building a web service people use, even a successful one at that, doesn't automatically makes you a savvy businessperson with excellent people skills. 2) Tumblr is down a lot lately (yep, understatement). It is obvious that everyone in the company is burning the midnight oil to fix this, the team is stressed and they work in panic mode. It is also evident that it is not a simple problem (for their skills/resources at least), else they would have fixed it already. So, it's understandable where the defensive tone of mr. Karps response comes from.
ekidd 16y ago
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.
- theDoug 16y ago
  In my experience as someone who has paid to appear in Tumblr's Directory a half-dozen times, all downtime has been pro-rated/refunded. Customer support has always been prompt and kind.
  - robyn_b 16y ago
    Remember though that his query wasn't just about the downtime per se, it was about the overall level of service. Intermittent technical issues with features like backup and queuing but to name a few. Anyway - David's response might have been prompt but it certainly wasn't kind was it...
    - rhizome 16y ago
      David's response might have been prompt but it certainly wasn't kind was it... I know I probably feel differently when I'm on the other side of this fence, but as the saying goes, you have to earn respect.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
- samengland 16y ago
  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/ http://postdesk.com/debates/should-tumblr-care/
latch 16y ago
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!!)
pclark 16y ago
How do you write 1800 words about this, wow.
awakeasleep 16y ago
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.
ramanujan 16y ago
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.
- petercooper 16y ago
  such that if a customer decides to attack you on the internet, a manager can jump in, offer concessions, and make it all better. You can still 'jump in' and try to 'make it all better' as a solo founder or a larger startup without call centers and 'roboscripts.' The updates to the linked article show that this didn't occur in the short-term here, despite the publicity.
- samengland 16y ago
  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.
rudiger 16y ago
> "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.
dools 16y ago
"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.
krosaen 16y ago
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
kellysutton 16y ago
Self-entitlement is at an all-time high on the Internet.
spolsky 16y ago
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.
- danielpunkass 16y ago
  Joel, David has a great problem: he's extremely successful and facing the scrutiny of people who think he should be more perfect than he is. The answer to this problem is never to tell people to "go away." The job is challenging, as you know. You work your ass off, for years. Finally you get something out there, and if you're lucky, people love it. That's where the modesty has to kick in. Big time. When you're even a little bit successful, you learn that customers are not bar chums who you punch in the shoulder and laugh when they say something that offends you. You adopt an unusually elevated posture. "Yes, I see what you mean. I probably could have handled that better." I know you're good at this Joel, so don't hold your friend to a lower standard.
- MortenK 16y ago
  There's a big difference between "sufficiently grovelling" and "go away".
- samengland 16y ago
  MySpace didn't have these issues though - nor did Twitter (to this extent). It's also a relatively straight forward blogging platform though - it's not particularly hard to figure out how to allocate resources despite exponential growth. The fact is - responding to issues in such a manner might not affect the outlook of Tumblr immediately - but the fact that he does respond to emails like this might be a representation of his overall attitude towards running the site - one which might contribute to the ultimate downfall of the service.
prestia 16y ago
Remember: Tumblr may not have an export feature, but Posterous has a great import feature.
- pauljonas 16y ago
  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.
- huertanix 16y ago
  Its called RSS.
wtildesley 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    I'm a friend of the owner.
    - aristotlenova 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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 16y ago
        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.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
JohnMaloney 16y ago
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 16y ago
  "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.
  - JohnMaloney 16y ago
    Yes it does - and William can confirm this was the case
    - JamieEi 16y ago
      Meh, it means that the guy sending the email is a bit loony. It doesn't excuse responding in kind. Karp and Tumblr are a big deal. They should set a higher standard for themselves.
      - Wolf_Larsen 16y ago
        Its not about standards. If this guy was at your doorstep whining like that, what would you do? I would get irritated and lash out also. Its about implementing strategy for that. "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." - Ramanujan http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151989 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151989
markessien 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
dbreunig 16y ago
If you think Tumblr's competitors are Posterous and Wordpress, you're missing the point.
kmfrk 16y ago
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.
pauljonas 16y ago
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.
- 16y ago
stevelosh 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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).
vondur 16y ago
Sounds like he's (Carp) a young kid who is in over his head now with the growth that they have experienced.
bmccormack 16y ago
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 16y ago
  This looks like the first article. Go figure. :)
risotto 16y ago
Companies reserve the right to fire customers. I respect this attitude.
- starpilot 16y ago
  Companies do reserve the right to provide poor customer service. That may not be in their best interest though.
83457 16y ago
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?
huertanix 16y ago
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.
jamesgagan 16y ago
I have been building a site similar to tumblr and posterous. It's called http://www.wijoda.com http://www.wijoda.com - anyone unhappy with tumblr might want to give it a try. I'd love some feedback!
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  Build a fool-proof import from Tumblr and you might be able to get some users.
  - jamesgagan 16y ago
    that's a great idea.
PaulHoule 16y ago
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.
T_S_ 16y ago
"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?
samengland 16y ago
Coincidence or not? This has just been posted on TC 50 minutes ago. http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/karp-tumblr-quarter-billion-impressions-week http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/karp-tumblr-quarter-billion...
- pclark 16y ago
  Coincidence, sorry author of the article hating on Tumblr.
zizee 16y ago
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.

125 points by samengland 16y ago

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.

usedtolurk 16y ago

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

messel 16y ago

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.

sharescribe 16y ago

Sounds like Google's customer service approach.

JacobAldridge 16y ago
Not really - Williams actually received a response!
- clojurerocks 16y ago
  Sometimes no response is better then this kind of repsponse which was completely unprofessional as well as disrespectful.
wladimir 16y ago
With the difference that they are not yet big enough to not care about their customers.

far33d 16y ago

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.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
robyn_b 16y ago
I'm not sure Karp is actively fighting fires though... It doesn't look like he's doing much to anyway. If he's not careful those fires will destroy all he has anyway. Besides, he could have retracted what he said but he didn't - if you read the article he reiterated his point in a second e-mail a day later.
jaredstenquist 16y ago
CEO's who aren't responsible enough to use email and represent their team appropriately are easily replaced with a board vote.
clojurerocks 16y ago
Completely agree. This type of stuff happens ALL OF THE TIME in business. Sure sometimes you want to react like this but you realize its not in the best interest of your customer or the company. Even if the customer is wrong or right all of it gets lost in noise. He should have taken a time out chilled out and then responded. Instead it was reactionary and ridiculous. Regardless of whether he was right or wrong in this situation.

app 16y ago

http://www.davidslog.com/2941069729/200m-page-views-per-week http://www.davidslog.com/2941069729/200m-page-views-per-week Looks like the downtime isn't slowing them down much.

robyn_b 16y ago
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.

inovica 16y ago

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.

robyn_b 16y ago
I couldn't agree more - but Karp is just turning out to be really arrogant. It's a great shame as Tumblr has potential to be an amazing service if only those behind it admitted it's flaws and tried to work on them instead of denying they exist.
- spolsky 16y ago
  Bubbie, you don't know what you're talking about. Do you really think that Tumblr isn't aware of it's flaws? Are you seriously claiming that David is denying that they had a few outages? Very, very few mass services grew as quickly as Tumblr without a lot of outages. Ebay had them, Yahoo had them, Twitter had them. The idea that David is sitting in a room like Mubarak, denying the flaws and refusing to work on them, is so utterly preposterous that I don't even know where to begin, but I'll say this: I know David, and it's not true, and he's working on the flaws, and he's working on them night and day, and he's utterly the least arrogant person I've ever met, and genuinely nice, too.
  - clojurerocks 16y ago
    As someone who uses stackoverflow almost daily im absolutely astonished at how disrespectful and frankly clueless your response is. Ive been following architecture for a long time and remember when the companies you mention had scaling issues. I dont remember them lashing out at their customers and telling them to fuck off assholes! Also when ebay and yahoo started having scaling issues THERE WERE NO CASE STUDIES IN SCALING. They had to figure it out all on their own so people gave them slack. Now there are upteen startups that have dealt with 100 times the traffic that tumblr is dealing with. And many of them without 40 million dollars in fudning. Plus theres something called the cloud. Its becoming obvious that egomania is becoming epidemic int eh world of tech startups. Which is just sad. Also while the emailer was asking about scaling problems which have been going on for far too long at tumblr from what ive read, the issue here isnt with that its with the ridiculous response that the ceo sent.

foljs 16y ago

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 perhaps even some personal insecurity on his part. Overanalyzing much? 1) It's a response from a 24 year old that build a web business. Considering the manners and attitude of 20-somethings in general, the surprising thing is these kind of responses don't appear more often. Building a web service people use, even a successful one at that, doesn't automatically makes you a savvy businessperson with excellent people skills. 2) Tumblr is down a lot lately (yep, understatement). It is obvious that everyone in the company is burning the midnight oil to fix this, the team is stressed and they work in panic mode. It is also evident that it is not a simple problem (for their skills/resources at least), else they would have fixed it already. So, it's understandable where the defensive tone of mr. Karps response comes from.

ekidd 16y ago

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.

theDoug 16y ago
In my experience as someone who has paid to appear in Tumblr's Directory a half-dozen times, all downtime has been pro-rated/refunded. Customer support has always been prompt and kind.
- robyn_b 16y ago
  Remember though that his query wasn't just about the downtime per se, it was about the overall level of service. Intermittent technical issues with features like backup and queuing but to name a few. Anyway - David's response might have been prompt but it certainly wasn't kind was it...
  - rhizome 16y ago
    David's response might have been prompt but it certainly wasn't kind was it... I know I probably feel differently when I'm on the other side of this fence, but as the saying goes, you have to earn respect.
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samengland 16y ago
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/ http://postdesk.com/debates/should-tumblr-care/

latch 16y ago

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!!)

pclark 16y ago

How do you write 1800 words about this, wow.

awakeasleep 16y ago

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.

ramanujan 16y ago

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.

petercooper 16y ago
such that if a customer decides to attack you on the internet, a manager can jump in, offer concessions, and make it all better. You can still 'jump in' and try to 'make it all better' as a solo founder or a larger startup without call centers and 'roboscripts.' The updates to the linked article show that this didn't occur in the short-term here, despite the publicity.
samengland 16y ago
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.

rudiger 16y ago

> "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.

dools 16y ago

"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.

krosaen 16y ago

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

kellysutton 16y ago

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

spolsky 16y ago

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.

danielpunkass 16y ago
Joel, David has a great problem: he's extremely successful and facing the scrutiny of people who think he should be more perfect than he is. The answer to this problem is never to tell people to "go away." The job is challenging, as you know. You work your ass off, for years. Finally you get something out there, and if you're lucky, people love it. That's where the modesty has to kick in. Big time. When you're even a little bit successful, you learn that customers are not bar chums who you punch in the shoulder and laugh when they say something that offends you. You adopt an unusually elevated posture. "Yes, I see what you mean. I probably could have handled that better." I know you're good at this Joel, so don't hold your friend to a lower standard.
MortenK 16y ago
There's a big difference between "sufficiently grovelling" and "go away".
samengland 16y ago
MySpace didn't have these issues though - nor did Twitter (to this extent). It's also a relatively straight forward blogging platform though - it's not particularly hard to figure out how to allocate resources despite exponential growth. The fact is - responding to issues in such a manner might not affect the outlook of Tumblr immediately - but the fact that he does respond to emails like this might be a representation of his overall attitude towards running the site - one which might contribute to the ultimate downfall of the service.

prestia 16y ago

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

pauljonas 16y ago
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.
huertanix 16y ago
Its called RSS.

wtildesley 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  I'm a friend of the owner.
  - aristotlenova 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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.

deleted 16y ago

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JohnMaloney 16y ago

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 16y ago
"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.
- JohnMaloney 16y ago
  Yes it does - and William can confirm this was the case
  - JamieEi 16y ago
    Meh, it means that the guy sending the email is a bit loony. It doesn't excuse responding in kind. Karp and Tumblr are a big deal. They should set a higher standard for themselves.
    - Wolf_Larsen 16y ago
      Its not about standards. If this guy was at your doorstep whining like that, what would you do? I would get irritated and lash out also. Its about implementing strategy for that. "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." - Ramanujan http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151989 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151989

markessien 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.

dbreunig 16y ago

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

kmfrk 16y ago

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.

pauljonas 16y ago

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.

16y ago

stevelosh 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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).

vondur 16y ago

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

bmccormack 16y ago

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 16y ago
This looks like the first article. Go figure. :)

risotto 16y ago

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

starpilot 16y ago
Companies do reserve the right to provide poor customer service. That may not be in their best interest though.

83457 16y ago

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?

huertanix 16y ago

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.

jamesgagan 16y ago

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

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
Build a fool-proof import from Tumblr and you might be able to get some users.
- jamesgagan 16y ago
  that's a great idea.

PaulHoule 16y ago

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.

T_S_ 16y ago

"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?

samengland 16y ago

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

pclark 16y ago
Coincidence, sorry author of the article hating on Tumblr.

zizee 16y ago

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.