Gary (an employee of Tribe.net) commented on my last blog post. See below for his comment. See right here for my response.
Gary: "Ultimately, does Tribe have plans to generate revenue by putting together a musical based upon your tribe posts? No."
Really? So Wade Lagrone (Marketing VP) isn't still walking around floating those "best of tribe.net" book ideas? Like getting the best recipes from Recipe Exchange and (my tribe) Healthy Food for Lazy People? Because he sure was.
Gary: "Historically, I think we have a good track record for getting permission from our users when we incorporate quotes or photos in any sort of marketing-related activity."
When Walter (former community manager) worked for tribe he was great about getting permission to use my and others' "tribe success stories" for marketing purposes.
But let's talk about the login page for a second. Those pictures of people that you see when you first visit the tribe.net site (that logged-in users with persistent cookies essentially never see)? Those are definitely marketing. And nobody got asked for explicit permission. I know a large number of people who saw that page after it'd been up for a long time, said "WTF is my face doing on the home page???" and had to go figure out how to get removed.
(It was worse when tribe didn't dynamically change the images -- some people's faces appeared on the home page for WEEKS before they realized and were able to complain.) There's a "don't show me on your home page" list, but no easy way get onto it. Go check for the existence of that list if you want. I'm on it.
Also, comparing tribe's TOU with Craigslist's TOU is completely apples and oranges. My friends don't post their original creative work (including stories, blog entries and posts that they hope to expand into print pieces someday, photos, etc) on sites like Craigslist. They post them in places like SOCIAL NETWORKING sites. Which Tribe, like it or not, still is.
Also, on Craigslist you can delete your content. This is NOT TRUE on Tribe. You can delete some things, arbitrarily, and not others. And since Warren (customer service guy) wrote that Tribe won't honor deletion requests (see below) people are stuck with their words in limbo. Do I think the new TOU being applied to old content would survive a court challenge? I don't. And I've got a copy of the old TOU for anyone who ever wants it. But it's just sad that Tribe is choosing to handle old content this way.
I realize that Tribe's out to make money. Dude, I've been interviewed in numerous print and web magazines about Tribe -- and all but one interview was at Tribe's explicit request. I've been a member since there were fewer than 300 people on the service, and was always happy, back in the day, to help spread the word about a site I really enjoyed, and wanted to support.
I WANTED Tribe to make money. I volunteered to show up at "Moderators' Meetings". I volunteered to help Brian (lead coder) debug the RSS feeds. I volunteered to write scripts that helped Walter (former community manager) do his job. Waaay back in the day (summer 2003), when tribes didn't show the number of new posts, I wrote a spider that would do that (with permission), and made sure the Patti (QA goddess) had a distinct user-agent string so she could easily parse the spider's queries out of her logs.
In other words, I've been a Tribe.net booster for a LONG time. It's not like I walked in, got my panties in a twist, and walked off in a huff. I WANTED Tribe to succeed, to be profitable, and to grow in a way that worked.
But this whole licensing thing (see post below for exactly what I object to) is untenable. Add to that the ham-handed way that Wade has been handling your new sexually-oriented content rules (I don't have a problem with the rules -- now that I've finally got enough information to understand them -- but I do have a problem with how Wade has communicated with us. He's about as socially tone-deaf as a mammal can be. And I work with and manage other programmers, so I know from socially tone-deaf.)
Thanks for the comment. It looks like you guys are busily scanning Technorati and elsewhere for mentions of tribe, and trying to do damage control. And I've seen you work really hard to make things right within the Tribes, Gary.
Still doesn't mean I can live with the new TOU. Or that I want to help support a site that Wade is actively shaping.
Posted by Liz at December 29, 2005 12:09 PM