snowdarkred

• my pinboard account
• the great migration spreadsheet, which lets you track down people who have different user names on different sites (i don't have that problem, obviously)
• the suggestion doc (basically, people are talking directly to the guy who runs pinboard and offering suggestions)
• the /report podcast about it
• an angry tech artcile about it

Watching the news about Delicious leak and the subsequent backlash – and the backlash to the backlash, and the backlash to that – the only conclusion I can come to is that Yahoo is run by idiots.

The number of bookmarks being saved per hour? Down. The number of new users? Down. The number of people switching to other, admittedly poorer services? Way up. All because Yahoo can't do PR for shit. True, Delicious isn't exactly a straight up profit house, but it does, or did, have consumer loyalty. Think of how many fandom people have been using it for years? How many times it's handed to fandom-newbies as the holy grail of fic indexing? How many people thank what ever deity they believe in that it exists because it makes life easier?

Yahoo leaked the “sunset” news – or, someone else leaked it, and then some higher up on twitter threatened to fire them in a tweet, which also isn't the best way to handle things, 'cause dude, it's not going to endear you to the public – and then refused to comment about except for some serious bullshit statement that said absolutely nothing, while simultaneously suggesting the worst. And then they were surprised at the backlash from millions of users who use Delicious for everything from work to fandom. They released a statement that blamed the media for distributing false information, when it was their own ineptitude that was leading people to draw their own conclusions. And then they just sort of handwaved it by implying that, well, no one was using Delicious anyway, so what did it matter?

Do you know how long it took Wikipedia to update the Delicious article to say that Delicious was shutting down? Like, two hours.

I love my Delicious account. It's my baby. I spent two weeks going through and standardizing my tagging system, and making sure that everything has a clear label. When my computer crashed a few months back, I lost everything that had been saved – my pictures, about half of my fics, and a whole lot of other stuff that was important to me. But what wasn't lost?

My fic bookmarks. My articles. My fashion links. My research – the same research that I used to figure out what the hell is up with my sexuality, or lack thereof. All of these things may not be things, they may not be physical, they may just be data, but they're important. I've been in fandom for years. I love it. It's what I grew up with, it's what help me discover who I am, it's what got me to start writing and never stop. And Delicious is important to fandom. It's another way for us to share in the epic love fest that is free-form fandom – the rush of excitement, the surge of pleasure in discovering new things, the ease of access to things that we're interested in.

And Yahoo threatened that. Whether the site shuts down Delicious, sells it, or whatever, I know I won't be able to trust them again. I can't. They obviously can't even manage themselves – how can I expect them to manage a simple website?


PS. I would love it if LiveJournal bought Delicious. I think it would be a good fit, though I'm not sure how that would work.
PPS. My trip to see my family didn't work out -- I couldn't go because of weather stuff. :( I've been using the past few days to panic over Delicious and read lots of Glee fic. I just need a chance to turn my brain off, you know? I feel like I'm always on on on, and I just need to power down and relax. Which I can't really do, because my boss is an idiot who doesn't know how to write a simple schedule, and that when I say, I can't work on Christmas Eve, it means I can't work on Christmas Eve. He also has the hots for my step-sister, but I don't want to think about that because it's icky and he's a creeper.