An Open Letter to Kevin
\nby cricketjeff on June 4, 2011.\u00a0 \u00a9 Jeff Green, All rights reserved
\nWe here are a community, a community that only exists because of the site that
\nyou built, it is your child. But like your child it has grown, partly through
\nyour efforts but also through the efforts of others and also because
\ncommunities either grow or die.
\nI too have children, some of them large and metaphorical, websites like and
\nunlike this one and others, four others, of the flesh and blood variety. For
\nboth sorts of children I am further down the road than you, the oldest of my
\ninternet children is older than the web the youngest of my real children is
\ntwenty one. I still love them all, see them all regularly and I hope have some
\ninfluence in their lives, but I do not, I never have, own any of them. When you
\ngive life to something you have done just that, you have given it life, a free
\ngift, a wonderful gift but a gift not a loan. Your children owe you nothing, my
\nchildren owe me nothing. What they grow into will be partly my doing, but
\nmostly it will be theirs and I must respect that.
\nWith this upgrade I think you have forgotten that. Your beta testing was
\npatchy, rushed and incomplete. The beta site was never “in use” just a mock up
\nfor us to admire and comment on. Now you have converted it into a live site
\nimpacting deeply on the lives and emotions of dozens of others. Many of them
\nhaving no interest at all in the technicalities and minutiae of the web, or of
\ncomputers. For many the only reason they use the Internet is to read and to
\nwrite poetry, for many those actions have become an integral and necessary part
\nof their days. We see and talk to our friends here, and our enemies! This new
\nsite has interrupted that, and as such it has hurt people.
\nNow you ask for patience and for those who cannot live with it to take a day
\noff and come back. Maybe you are asking the wrong people for patience. Perhaps
\nyou should have shown the patience before embarking on major, possibly life
\nthreatening surgery on your child, a child that is no longer a toddler
\nincapable of looking to its own future, but a vibrant strong adolescent with
\nviews of its own.
\nMany things we had been given have been taken away, hidden or changed. You ask
\nus to trust that it will be better, but better is not a simple linear concept,
\nbetter for some almost always means worse for others. I love my time here at AP
\nand I am very grateful to you for creating the site, but gratitude is not a
\ndebt, I pay for my time here, and for several other people’s time and I like to
\nget what I pay for.
\nPlease think carefully, then think again, before you do things that cannot be
\nundone.
\n\u00a0
\nSincerely
\n\u00a0
\nJeff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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