Whiners?
After 14 months as a
happy tribeling, I'm increasingly disinclined to spend any time on
Tribe.net.
They rolled out a big new re-design today, and in a thread titled
So, whaddya think?
that begins with
"Good or bad, we want your feedback.", the
CEO responds to a series of (mostly negative) comments with this:
i hear an awful lot of whining about every change we implement and it seems to me you forget that this is offered to you as a free site, you forget to ask yourself whether you have found any value here and if so how you can help make it better. if you dont like something, help make it better.
Uh, hello? Why would we be members of a tribe called
TribeIdeas, offering feedback
as requested, if we didn't want the site to be better? For this we get called "whiners"???
And the "it's a free site" argument carries no weight with me. It
is a free site. But it's a for-profit business. One that relies on its users for after-the-fact beta testing and design/usability feedback. And calls them whiners when they don't like said feedback.
And yeah,
Pincus backpedals later. Without actually apologizing. But jeez. they did user testing. They must've seen at least some of these complaints coming. And if you can't handle tactless feedback, don't ask for it from a buncha random people on your SNS.
Walter works for tribe, so I should make it
extremely clear that these are my opinions, not his. (I sought Walter out as a Tribe-friend in August '03, in fact, because I loved the way he handled himself with wit and grace in the face of often-obnoxious user feedback. The man's amazing.)
So yeah, my man works for the company. And I hold nearly all tribe employees I've met in extremely high esteem.
Still, right now, I'm not so very gruntled.
Posted by Liz at September 28, 2004 06:51 PM