It’s pretty clear something happened in July.

We know this much — TechCrunch was dropped from the Suggested User List, right around the time their follower count started heading down. As to why, we can only speculate that it was because they ran a piece that Twitter didn’t like.

7/16/09: Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet.”

People have always questioned whether there was a connection between being on the list and not being too critical of Twitter. At this point, there isn’t much doubt that the connection is there.

Here are the concepts that Dave would like to teach you about:

Sample Size — It is commonly believed that you need to have a large sample size to draw any meaningful conclusions. Dave disagrees. In his world, one data point is sufficient.

Causation — In Dave’s world, post hoc ergo propter hoc isn’t a logical fallacy, but a natural law. TechCrunch was removed from the SUL after that article, therefore that article was the cause of the removal.

Correlation — With the Dave Winer statistics model, you don’t need to consider evidence that you don’t like. Have any of the folks on the SUL written critically of Twitter? Who cares? That doesn’t matter! As long as the data fits with your theory, accept it, otherwise ignore it!

Science just got a whole lot easier.

Am I A Hypocrite?

Sure. Of course. I am a totally f*cked up human being.

Of course, he only admits that because it’s easier than admitting that he doesn’t like the Twitter SUL only because he’s not on it, and that his fervor comes from jealousy and hurt-ego more than any principled stand he’s taking.

That’s pretty clear if you look at his explanation for the difference between Twitter’s SUL and his. I also found it amusing that he calls Twitter the only game in town — this from the guy who ran (is running?) a competing service.

Dave, Dave, Dave. Why not just go ahead and admit to yourself, and everyone else, that the real issue you have with Twitter’s SUL is that you see follower counts as a Twitter scoreboard and you’re pissed that the owners of the game you’re trying to win keep helping your competitors?

Imagine there is another Twitter-like service out there that had a SUL. Imagine that Dave has posted about this service before, and is an active user of it. Can you imagine a situation in which he wouldn’t have included that service’s SUL in one of his rants?

I sure can:

Dave hasn't complained about the FriendFeed SUL because he's on it

First, he proposes a 30 day limit for time spent on the SUL. This is not a difficult suggestion to translate. Prolific Twitter members are a finite resource, so forcing people off of the list every 30 days would hasten Dave’s inevitable placement thereon.

Second, he wants to take away followers from people on the list now. Yes, really. His proposal is to figure out how many followers each of the folks on the SUL would have gotten in 30 days and then take all of the others they gained over that time away.

So if on average, over the last few months, a member of the list would have gotten 100K new followers, but actually received 800K, he or she would lose 700K followers. It’s still a gift of 100K followers, nothing to sneeze at. (And if it’s true, as Tim O’Reilly says, that they don’t matter, then losing some is nothing to complain about.)

I can scarcely put into words how myopic and outlandish this idea is. He seems to believe that “followers”, rather than being actual users — actual people, are just a commodity to buy, sell, or trade. Which of those those 700,000 followers are getting the boot? Are they allowed to re-follow? Are they going to be notified that their follow list is just spontaneously being changed by Twitter for no reason apparent to them? The users can already unfollow if they’re not liking what they’re getting.

If they’re not reading what they’re getting, the only value they hold is to those who put so much stock in their follower count. Makes no sense, really, unless you measure the size of your e-peen by the number of Twitter followers you have, something Dave clearly does.

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.

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.

• There are at least two Twitters, the Friend-Of-Ev Twitter, mostly people who put in little or no effort but have 100K-plus following… about 2 hours ago from web
• …and the old Twitter for people who work to get a sizable following, sometimes for years. It’s like the banking system that collapsed, Ev. about 2 hours ago from web
• There’s a bubble here. Not sure how or when it pops, but with hindsight as a guide — it will pop. about 2 hours ago from web
• One of the lessons of bubbles is that few are willing to say it’s a bubble and people who say it is are thought of as party poopers. about 1 hour ago from web

Winer is, of course, not one of the recommendations. Company founder Evan Williams surely knows enough about Winer’s many emotional flameouts not to expose new users to that junk. (Probable reason for Winer’s fit: Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington are among the recommended people to follow.)

As he goes on and on about the unfairness of this system, keep in mind that when Winer was running UserLand Software, he secretly sold Adam Curry a place in the default subscription list of Radio UserLand’s RSS reader for $5,000. It didn’t come to light until Curry blogged about it — users had no idea the list contained paid links. For him to complain about Twitter’s recommendations is just brazen hypocrisy.

Now, he’s decided to make the ability to steal and re-host other people’s tweets widely available.

If you’re still not sold on the copyright, take a look at this passage from Dave when it was about his content:

The next step is to look at the copyright issues his service raises. They are quite interesting. Scripting News, both in HTML and RSS, has a clear copyright on it. Should I have a say in publications created from my content? I generally don’t mind, but shouldn’t I have to give permission? Suppose a magazine started publishing all my writing. Would I have recourse? I am not a lawyer, but it seems clear that I would. Is Pilgrim somehow immune to copyright law? I’d love to hear the legal theory that allows him to do what he’s doing with my work.

So . . . is Dave “somehow immune to copyright law?”