DEV Community

Discussion on: How open-source will Tumblr become?

Collapse
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II • Edited

Yeah. That was a huge "understand your community" gaff.

Reminds me of when I was working for Digex "back in the day". At the time, as a smaller hosting-provider, a significant percentage of their hosting-customers were porn sites. These were sites that pretty much "just ran". You occasionally had to reboot the boxes, but deep troubleshooting wasn't generally necessary. More importantly, these sites' owners paid their bills on time every time. Reliable income-stream. Then, Digex got new leadership tasked with growing the company. That leadership wanted to chase the business of the companies that eventually became the dot-com bust. Part of that was getting rid of all that "disreputable" adult site-hosting. In exchange, we got high-maintenance customers who demanded root ...and demanded credits for being offline when they used that privileged access to utterly bork their systems. Went from lots of generic builds to lots of special snowflakes. Ultimately, went to lots of consistently-paying customers to customers that ran up tens of thousands of dollar bills per month ...that frequently never paid (even though sales had already booked that billing and paid out commissions, bonuses, etc). Yes, a (very ugly) day of reckoning came, all because they didn't understand what they had or what they were chasing.

Thread Thread
 
tammalee profile image
Tammy Lee

HUGE misunderstanding of the community.

This is very interesting! I used to do work for a porn website and they were also very quick to pay their bills. Hasn't it been said that porn has driven innovation on the web and with cell phones? XD

Thread Thread
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Yeah: they also tend to be a lot more security-conscious: if you're going to pick up driveby malware, it's more likely to be from your neighborhood church's web site than a porn website.

There's lots of money in porn. If you're operating a site, you tend to avoid things that will interrupt access (like failing to pay bills on time) - since doing so will interrupt your income - and avoid things that will antagonize your users (since potential users have a lot of choices on where they can scratch their itch).