An Experiment in Bloggery

Here’s the latest development in the saga. In his own words:

I tell it like it is and get frustrated when my attempts to be nicey nice fail to get the point across. I haven’t shared the whole story here, and I won’t be, but suffice to say this person failed to get polite hints. He continued to IM repeatedly after being asked to stop.

What a lie! Not once did he tell me to stop IMing him. Additionally, he was never “nicey nice”. He was very rude and made it quite obvious he only cared about himself.

Whenever I IMed him it was for a particular reason, and he always was really rude with me and brushed me off. But I kept at it because I was beta testing his software and I felt it was my duty to try and put as much into it as I could, make it as good as I could with my input. When I submitted a feature request I thought would be a really nice feature (not a major feature, but a nice touch—and it’s the small touches that really matter here). For example, I thought it would be really nice to be able to set a different stylesheet for each subscription. Why? Because when I have a bunch of entries in the same inbox, and I’m going through the new ones, it’s nice to brand each blog with its own stylesheet so I can tell what blog I’m reading an entry from with a glance, and so I can make blog entries look like their original pages. I thought that would be a neat feature, something that hasn’t been done before, and would be a nice bullet point on a feature list. What did he do? He simply closed the report without any explanation as to why he didn’t want to do that. I IMed him asking why, and the reason was simply that he didn’t see the point, thus it wasn’t going to be done. If he personally doesn’t want the feature, he’s not going to add it at somebody else’s request. And what’s more, he was rude with me and when I tried to present my side he made it painfully clear that he really didn’t care what I thought at all. For example, a common response was simply “bye”, at which point he seriously expected me to not send him another message and forget about it. Sure, that’s ok if the discussion is done (although still a bit rude), he would say that while I’m trying to explain my side. This isn’t me arguing and him shutting me up, this is me trying to give my explanation for the first time as to why I think it’s a good feature, and him simply not caring a whit what I thought. And this happened repeatedly. Every feature request I filed was summarily closed. I don’t know why he bothered to allow feature requests as he obviously didn’t care about them. And every single time I contacted him on AIM was about PulpFiction and improving his software.

However, not once did he tell me to stop IMing him. The first time I ever contacted him he warned me:

you’ll learn that i’m pretty damn blunt if you didn’t know it already

Because of that, I thought that was all this was—not an indication that he didn’t care to talk to me at all, but simply a (very rude) indication that he didn’t care to talk about that specific case. Never did he tell me to stop contacting him.

Hear this, Erik. You treat your beta testers like you’re doing them a big favor by letting them test your software. You’ve got it backwards. We’re doing you a favor by testing it for you. It’s not your right to have beta testers, it’s your privilege. You can’t just treat us like this, deleting our accounts with no warning on a whim and ignoring our suggestions and requests with no explanation. We deserve the same basic courtesy that you would expect for yourself.

And stop lying, you stuck-up, egotistical asshole.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2004 at 1:53 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.