Eye on Winer

Rafe Needleman has posted some linkbait on a CNET site nominating the five most hated people on the Internet. The contenders to the title are Dave Winer, Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Loren Feldman and Owen Thomas, a list he creates by narrowing the criteria to “technology personalities who are active contributors of original content.” From the piece:

Dave Winer He was a big contributor to the inventions of blogging, RSS, and other key Web technologies. But to call him prickly when it comes to his place in the tech firmament is an understatement. Typical story: I wrote a how-to piece on RSS but neglected to mention his contribution, and then Winer posted a blog item in which he equated me to Dan Rather on 60 Minutes during the GM exploding fuel tank story. When I at first contacted him privately in an e-mail, he publicly demanded an apology. Winer’s secret: Be smart, and then be abusive. See also: The Winer Number. Where to find him: Scripting News. Twitter: DaveWiner.

The piece, like Winer’s pitiful blog post this weekend fishing for compliments, is built on a ludicrous premise. Winer isn’t well-known enough to be considered one of the Internet’s most hated people. He’s a middle-aged software developer years beyond his last significant accomplishment who’s sinking into obscurity with piddly little hobby projects like FlickrFan and NewsJunk. His fame exists entirely within a clusterfuck of blogging early adopters and hack journalists. Like Calacanis and Arrington and Robert Scoble, he manages to attention-whore very capably inside his bubble, but it’s a tiny community. Most people even inside the tech world wouldn’t know who the hell he is. Steve Jobs could crap out a celebrity bigger than any of those dopes.

Even if you took at face value every one of Winer’s overstated accomplishments — the inventor of RSS, father of blogging, originator of teabagging, and so forth — how many comparable accomplishments would make someone famous? Are the lead authors of the Atom format famous? The creator of FTP? The developer of JSON?

Winer’s a childish and abusive asshole, and I can’t blame Needleman for seizing the opportunity to point that out. But one of the most hated people on the Internet? Are you fucking kidding me, dude? Chris Crocker and Numa Numa Guy and the 2 Girls with the 1 Cup are famous on the Internet. Plug any of them in alongside “Dave Winer” in Google Trends and tell me again that Winer’s famous enough to be among the net’s most-hated.

Dave believes that the solution to the U.S. financial crisis is printing more money. Excuse my language, but… are you fucking kidding me? Does he believe that he must still have money in his bank account because he hasn’t run out of checks yet? Does he believe that somewhere, a bunch of economists are reading his blog and saying “Holy crap, guys! Why didn’t we think of this??”

Even though I’m not an economist, I’m pretty sure that the US government can print money.

So if we have a $1 trillion deficit this year, that does not imply that someone has to lend us $1 trillion and it does not imply therefore that someone will have to pay someone back that money at some date in the future. If there’s an economist listening who thinks this is not true, please say so and everyone else ignore what I’m about to say.

The most hilarious part about this, though… is this:

He asks people to correct him if he’s wrong, and then he closes the comments. Now, I don’t know if he closed them before he had 1,000 people tell him this is a really idiotic thing to propose or if he did it in anticipation of that, but either way: “not an economist” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

In a post today, Dave suggests that instead of a “TV Star”, we choose a “user” of the health care system. This is stupid for a number of reasons. Listen, Sanjay Gupta is a doctor. He does some work on TV. So what?

But, more to the point, let’s think about the ramifications of this:

If you really want to turn things upside-down for the better, instead of a healthy young doctor, how about an older person who is not a doctor, who has health problems and has been treated by the system, someone who has actual experience being a user of American health care.

Aside from the fact that this seems to be a subtle way of suggesting that HE should be the Surgeon General (heh), goodness, there’s just so much wrong with this idea.

First, and foremost, how do you find a user whose experience is typical? If you don’t, how do you know that the “changes” made are going to be better for anyone? Selecting the right user, even if it was a good idea, would be unfathomably hard. Second, does Dave even know what the OSG does?

Wikipedia is helpful on this point (emphasis supplied):

The Surgeon General functions under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for Health and operationally heads the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the USPHS, a cadre of health professionals who are on call 24 hours a day, and can be dispatched by the Secretary of HHS or the Assistant Secretary for Health in the event of a public health emergency.

. . .

The Surgeon General also has many informal duties, such as educating the American public about health issues and advocating healthy lifestyle choices.

So you want some random layperson to head 6,000 health professionals in an emergency situation? If you thought New Orleans was a clusterfuck, wait until we Aunt Mabel has command of our emergency medical services. As to the “informal” duties, who is going to be the one who educates our surgeon general on these topics?

He has completely lost his damn mind.

Dave solves the Twitter authentication issue, and by “solves” I mean “does absolutely nothing to solve”.

The Twitter authentication problem is two-fold:

1. You cannot grant access to the account to a service without granting them full control of it.
2. Once they have access, there’s no way to revoke it, short of changing your password.

The caveat to any solution is that it needs to be as easy as possible for both the application developers and the users. Dave’s proposed solution addresses neither of these, really.

(more…)

This is classic:

When I heard someone say a customer was stupid, I said if that’s true we’re really fucked.

Here’s how I reasoned…

1. We have to believe our customers are the smartest people, because they were smart enough to choose the best product.

2. If they were stupid, then they chose the wrong product and we’re dead, so you’d better start looking for a new job

The only logical way to proceed is to:

Whoa there, partner. Dave might have set a record for logical fallacy to word ratio. First of all, most people are stupid, so it stands to reason that most of your customers are, too. Here’s the key: stupid people often make good decisions. Even if your product is the most amazing thing ever, just choosing your product does not make them a genius.

After all, if your product is so great, even a moron would see that it was the best, right?

Right.

This might have made a decent motivational speech, but it’s TERRIBLE business. Especially in software.

You can treat people with respect regardless of how intelligent you think they are. When you’re writing software, though, it’s best to assume your user is stupid. This post nicely sums up why most of the stuff Dave writes is horribly cryptic, though:

He expects everyone using it to be a genius. We know, from our past experiences with Dave, that “being a genius” means thinking exactly like him. Makes sense. To use any of the stuff he’s written you basically have to ask yourself: “What would Dave do?”