Dave: just stop. you’ll do and say anything to get what you want. even lie. even delete previous messages and reverse your opinion.

http://eyeonwiner.org/archives/2008/dave-winer-is-loren-feldmans-puppet

http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/davefeldman.png

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/13/the-rules-apply-to-everyone/

you have no integrity. you have no core ethics. it’s just all about you all the time.

This latest blowup began when Winer questioned Arrington’s integrity because TechCrunch is one of the suggested users recommended on Twitter. Winer sent a direct message to TechCrunch writer MG Siegler telling him to “stop fucking with RSS” because of an article arguing that RSS is dead. (Note that the article was by Steve Gillmor, not Siegler — Winer is a fucking genius.)

As you can see, Arrington is using Eye on Winer as a resource to document Winer’s hypocrisy. We compliment him on his good taste. They were best bros going back to the early days of TechCrunch — Arrington once served as his lawyer — but Arrington seems to have figured out why so many people in tech will never work with Winer.

If you know anyone else who hasn’t learned this lesson, send them to us.

Twitter is a big deal now. Calacanis used to be #1, now he’s a nobody. For a guy like him the difference is huge. And the resentment real.

About 21 hours ago from web

Winer keeps going on and on and on about Twitter’s suggested users list, which gave some celebs and tech A-listers many hundreds of thousands of followers compared to his 20,000. But as he bitches and moans about how follower counts like his used to make you a big deal, he completely ignores the fact that most of the people who read him on Twitter have followers in the hundreds or lower. He was perfectly happy with the inequalities of the system while he was on top. Now he’s Che Fucking Guevara.

Show of hands: Does anyone else other than Winer give a shit about the suggested users list or Twitter follow counts? Thanks to Twitter, we have learned that a 50-something obscure software developer wakes up every single day and gets his Depends in a bunch because Ashton Kutcher and Oprah and P. Diddy have more followers than he does. It’s a sad but hilarious spectacle to watch him go ape over any system that quantifies popularity and puts him at the top — as long as he stays there — and go all jilted lover when he falls off it.

Earth to Dave: You are not famous. You are Internet famous, which only means anything when something is new. When the rest of the world shows up, as they have on Twitter, the genuinely famous show up and that’s the end of your celebrity. On Twitter now your Internet fame is worthless. Ashton Kutcher craps out bigger celebrities than you each morning.

The Gotterdammerung-of-mainstream-media argument has a weak and a strong formulation. …

The strong version is most associated with Dave Winer, a grumpy California software programmer best known for helping to develop the Web-feed format RSS and for his blog, Scripting News. Winer has written, and not without glee, “Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists. … Everyone is now a journalist.”

If media companies can’t earn money, and everyone is a journalist, it follows that “amateurs” (Shirky) and “sources” (Winer) will be part of a “decentralized” media (Winer), whose stories will be distributed by “excitable 14-year-olds” (Shirky).

This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. True, the journalists who write about these matters for mainstream media often know as little; I didn’t understand much until I became the publisher of Technology Review as well as its editor in chief. But Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection. Thus, they are to be read skeptically. Their prescriptions would be more convincing if they were less polemical and better informed by some knowledge of what publishers sell.

Winer’s been treated like an informed media expert for years, but his entire professional experience in journalism consists of writing commentary for Wired for one year back in the ’90s.

Pontin goes on to say on Twitter, when criticized over the piece, that “These people are, I think, insane. Filled with hostility, completely impractical, and, in the final analysis, dishonest.” Winer doesn’t know journalism, but at least one journalist knows him pretty well.

One more thing — it’s pretty obvious Arrington attacked me as a response to a piece I wrote the day before about Twitter giving flow to various friends, like TechCrunch. I went out of my way to say TC didn’t do anything wrong. Didn’t want to make it personal, cause it wasn’t. And then Mike comes back with this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Problem is, Arrington’s piece makes explicitly clear why Dave was being singled out, and it wasn’t because he called out TC. It was, in essence, the same reason that we called him out a few weeks ago.

What’s great is watching Dave try to explain that Curry’s feed was appropriate and should’ve been included anyway. He calls the $10,000 payment a “gratuity”. One of two things is true: he thought Curry’s feed belonged there but let a friend pay him $10k for it anyway or he had no intention of including Curry until he got the payola. He can’t have it both ways. He’s either a jerk of unimaginable proportions or he’s lying through his teeth. Not that those two things are mutually exclusive.

Dave’s “apology” is also incredibly weak on its face. After spending weeks bitching and moaning about not being included on Twitter’s suggested users list (what, does anyone actually believe this is about some deeper issue?) and making all sorts of insinuations about Twitter and the folks who got suggested user list spots he glosses over a much more egregious and ethically bankrupt action of his own with “I apologize for that.”

I’m not sure that Arrington’s comment about Winer’s lack of credibility is quite accurate though, as it seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon. Dave hasn’t had any for quite some time — it’s a side-effect of having no integrity, actually, something I imagine is just a product of his up-bringing.

In his most recent post Winer makes the following claim:

Financially, things are looking terrible at AP — as at other news organizations. There’s a general downward trend in the economics of news, and that’s amplified by the downturn in the economy. If we could see AP’s balance sheet, we might conceive of something desperate ourselves…

In the comments, an astute reader notes:

You can read the AP’s balance sheet, Dave, and it’s not at all in bad shape as you claim.

link

In fact, revenues were up and the AP is in the black, despite it being a non-profit and only needing to break even. AP makes money selling content, not something many people can claim.

Dave’s response seems worth an EoW blog post, IMHO.

So what was Dave’s response?

Then there must be something else they saw that made them freak.

The strong reaction was observable. The reason for it, not so clear.

Which is basically his way of saying “I’m still right, even if my facts are wrong.”

Thanks for the email!

The tr.im API method trim_url and trim_simple together have a set rate limit of 48 new URLs per day, up to 10 per hour, per IP address. This is intentionally set on the low side to prevent any overwhelming malicious insertion of data into our database. trim_destination has the highest rate limit set to the same number of URLs we create per day, so that you can more efficiently determine the destinaion URL for all or any tr.im URLs. For all other methods other than these two, there is a limit of 1,500 requests per day, up to 120 per hour, per IP address.

When you hammer an API like this you degrade services for everyone else. This fact seems to be lost on Winer, even though Comcast shut his home Internet connection down for his laughably excessive bandwidth use and he’s blogged about how Twitter’s performance is being harmed by API abusers.

This thread, which was pointed out by a commenter on the last post is as perfect an example as there is.

A commenter by the name of Allan Donald read Dave’s post on rebooting journalism and pointed out a small caveat that Dave seems to be over-looking. He did it deferentially and respectfully.

The really interesting, actually valuable work newspapers (rarely, in their end times) did was to uncover the sources who didn’t want to talk, and to drill out the information that didn’t want to be free.

These people are never going to have blogs, or their blogs are only going to present a spun version of their truth. Who is going to force them to speak? The decentralised weight of thousands of bloggers?

And, of course, he’s right. Information that wants to get out will find a way to do so. It’s uncovering the “secret” information that makes reporters so useful. Dave, of course, doesn’t agree:

Did reporters really force their sources to speak? What form did this forcing take? Examples? Did they extort them in some way? What’s the source of this power?

This is a pretty classic Dave technique. Ask a lot of questions hoping that even one of the answers will be unacceptable. Problem is, Allan’s answers were pretty spot-on. At this point, Dave has an opportunity to interface with someone who clearly knows what he’s talking about and maybe refine some of the suck out of his idea. If you take him at his word, he likes to do this. Instead, we get this: “I don’t see why the power you’re talking about is limited to newspapers.”

Of course, Allan didn’t say that it was. In fact, he said the opposite: “There’s nothing inherent in printing on paper that means a online publication can’t one day replicate this authority+attention trick.”

Allan continued to press his point, but Dave had had enough:

Right. But blogs weren’t started “tomorrow” — that’s the whole point of the piece you’re commenting on.

No one that I know is “seeking to replace” newspapers. Your whole point of view is very weird, it’s as if you’re inventing something or someone to disagree with, and stating positions of no one that I know (I don’t think they actually exist) and then proving them wrong.

I think this thread is over. Thanks.

None of the points Dave made in that last comment are actually relevant. One of the main arguments I took away from Allan’s comments was that nobody seeking to replace newspapers is the problem — because right now bloggers don’t perform the same role that reporters do (or should). Allan’s point of view is “very weird” to Dave because it was something he hadn’t considered, but his blog is a perfect example of it.

If Dave were a reporter his local newspaper and wrote a long piece about the poor service of a local BMW Dealership, my guess is that he’d have gotten a hell of a lot stronger reaction than he did in his blog post on the same topic. Or think about all of the times Dave has told someone at a business “I’m a blogger” (which I still get a chuckle out of picturing) — really powerful stuff, right? No. Why not? For all the reasons Allan mentions.

It’s been said before, and its true: Dave knows of no problems for which he is not the solution.

Of course

I said the sources would take over the news. Not enough reporters covering the courtroom? The judge will report, as will the jurors, the attorneys, the plaintiff, the defendent. It will be messier, I would have said had I had the time to complete the thought, but more truth will come out.

New York Times, same day:

Last week, a building products company asked an Arkansas court to overturn a $12.6 million judgment, claiming that a juror used Twitter to send updates during the civil trial. And on Monday, defense lawyers in the federal corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania state senator, Vincent J. Fumo, demanded before the verdict that the judge declare a mistrial because a juror posted updates on the case on Twitter and Facebook. The juror had even told his readers that a “big announcement” was coming on Monday.

Winer waited all that time to get a chance to speak, and yet he couldn’t come up with a worse example if he tried. Judges and attorneys are legally prohibited from writing accounts of an ongoing trial on their blogs or Twitter. They would risk mistrials and professional sanction. Jurors risk mistrials as well by covering themselves. Even after the fact, participants in a trial have to be careful about what they say because it could become grounds for appeal. There are many other examples where professional rules, confidentiality requirements or non-disclosure agreements would prevent citizens from reporting their own news. There’s no way in hell the public will get court news from the participants. And that’s Winer’s example of why we don’t need newspapers? The journalists in the crowd must have loved his naivete.

I wasn’t on that list. I poured a lot of effort into Radio, and while I wasn’t in the top tier of bloggers I was solidly second-tier. Former MTV veejay Adam Curry was on the list, and in July 2003 he revealed why — he secretly paid Winer $10,000:

Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I’ve been delighted with my purchase and although I haven’t checked recently, I’m pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. …

The $10k didn’t ‘just’ give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I’ve built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.

So when Winer was in the same position as Twitter, his software included a paid placement, something he never disclosed to his users.

To be perfectly clear: I have no issue with Dave having sold default subscriptions. I have no issue with Twitter’s user list. But for Dave to proclaim “that’s not how the internet works” with regards to the latter after having engaged, to his great benefit, in the former is particularly blatant.

At the very least, Dave should be saying “I know I’ve done this before, but I shouldn’t have. It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.” That would at least bring these two issues into alignment. Otherwise all we have is a situation where random third parties are (supposedly) benefiting from the “evil” actors behavior while the villains gain nothing. That’s an interesting contrast to the other story, where the bad guy made $10k.

I sent Dave an email asking for an explanation, but as he’s ignoring the same questions in the comments of his posts, I suspect nothing will come of it. Or he’ll offer to trade an answer to my question for my identity, effectively deflecting the question because, as anyone who knows Dave can tell you, he doesn’t take criticism or questioning of any sort well at all.

had hoped to lead a discussion at this year’s OSCON about porting Frontier to Linux . . . it runs on Mac and Windows, but I really want it to run on Linux — so I proposed a session at OSCON to discuss this and see if I couldn’t recruit people to work on this. Unfortunately, yesterday I got the rejection email. I kind of expected it, because O’Reilly doesn’t seem to like me these days, or whatever — I don’t know

Basically he wanted a conference to give him a session to try to recruit people to port a niche, sparsely-used, archaic novelty application to Linux. As though there aren’t enough of those. Shocking when such a panel wasn’t immediately instituted. I’m sure it’s because O’Reilly hates Dave.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that nobody would show up to such a session.