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.