From the list of tribes I wanted deleted: Large, active tribes stayed. Small slow tribes (and the tribes that I'd emptied out myself beforehand) went away.
And then Warren (customer service) just happens to post this today, without mentioning specifics.
Which, going back to my TOU rantings, means that you can't put your creative content in a tribe with a moderator you trust to delete on demand. Because Tribe.net may choose not to honor the moderator's wishes.
Huh.
By the way, here's the response I got from Tribe.net's customer service before I posted last night.
Hi Liz,
Thanks for writing in, and I am sorry for the delayed response. We are removing your specified tribes, as well as your account, and I will be able to confirm the removal of all in the morning. Some of the tribes are taking a long time to delete, due to the large quantity of posts contained therein. Thanks for your patience.
But no follow-up after the "we're deleting now" message, just a lack of action -- without comment (although tribe employees have gone into some tribes and requested that people elect a new moderator... so it appears to have been intentional).
If I would've known, I would've cleared the tribes myself. Taking my ball and going home, as it were, was the strongest statement I could make, given the constraints of the current system. Turns out there are new, undocumented constraints.
Ah well. Ultimately I can't wish all of Tribe ill, since I still think really highly of quite a few people there. So they'll do what they do.
Abby had a cool end-of-year thing on her blog today. I'm stealing it. I don't have as many months filled as she does, since I spent half the year traveling. Still, it's fun to grab a little snapshot from each month like this.
2005 for me: I did take the round-the-world trip I was planning in January; I did stop smoking (although I may well have a cig in a bar on New Year's eve or something); I still want THE FUTURE to show up already; J and his family are still in my thoughts, if not my life; my own family (and W's family) have become more central in my life, especially as folks get older and illness happens; Katrina fucked me up but good; I'm still adjusting to the changes of the past few years; and I still really like the stuff I like.
The snapshots, Abby-style:
2006 looks like this so far: Working for a guy who wants a million little mobile apps (Tribe woulda been a great test platform for the first one too. Feh.) Publishing more how-to geek articles for Corporate America. Travel to Vancouver, NYC, and New Zealand. Pitching a couple books (one travel, at least one tech) and crossing my fingers. Figuring out how the fsck to keep up with the mortgage and the property taxes while not giving up the freelance life. Loving Walter. Staying in touch with friends on purpose, and not just when they show up on the same SNS at the same time. Keeping the weight off that I lost while traveling, and hopefully getting fitter still.
Sounds good to me.
Seems like only yesterday that I was a big tribe booster. I even wrote some tools to help them along in the very beginning. There were some rough spots, like when I got my identity swiped, or the former CEO called us a bunch of whiners.
Actually, looking back, I seem to have considered leaving tribe way more often than I remember.
And now, I have left. Just got email that they're deleting my account and most of my tribes as I type (a few will be left alive but unmoderated).
Why delete my tribes too, instead of just leaving? I talked this over with friends and thought about it a lot before making the decision. It comes down to this: If I'm fundamentally opposed to the new direction Tribe.net has taken, I need to not support the company. Which means not providing content for their advertisers, or places for users to be active. Most of my tribes were dead or slow. A few were quite active.
I have no doubt the active ones will be replaced soon enough. And probably some people will be upset to have their posts and their playgrounds gone. It's happened to me enough times over the years, certainly. But that's how the system was constructed. I can delete your words from "my" space, but I can't delete my own from "your" space. It's problematic. Especially in light of the TOU licensing stuff I've rattled on about in the last many posts.
And... it's not my problem any more. I'm gone.
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.
From tribe.net's new Terms of Use:
5. Content
We do not claim ownership of the content you post or otherwise provide to the Service. However, you hereby grant, and agree to grant as an effect of posting or otherwise providing content, the following license: to the public, a license for personal non-commercial use; and to Tribe, a perpetual license to use, copy, distribute, display, perform, and modify any and all content that you post on the Service. This license cannot be withdrawn except that any content deleted from the Tribe site will terminate the Tribe license. Your use of the service is in consideration for this license, we will not otherwise pay you for your content. You represent and warrant that you have not granted and will not grant any rights inconsistent with this license.
Then Warren (customer service guy for tribe) says here:
"As we've stated in a few other threads here and there, we are not going to be removing any content you may have posted prior to this point, or any other point. "
That's clear enough. Time to keep my promise.
Still doesn't cut it.
This guy's post in the TribeIdeas tribe sums up my objections pretty clearly. And no, I don't think I'm going to try to license my undeletable posts for publication. But someone certainly might. No other site I go near has terms this restrictive.
Thanks for the comment, Wade. But the TOU is still untenable.
From http://sanfrancisco.tribe.net/template/pub%2CTerms.vm
"We do not claim ownership of the content you post or otherwise provide to the Service. However, you hereby grant, and agree to grant as an effect of posting or otherwise providing content, to the public for non-commercial purposes and to Tribe, a perpetual license to use, copy, distribute, display, perform, and modify any and all content that you post on the Service. This license cannot be withdrawn. Your use of the service is in consideration for this license, we will not otherwise pay you for your content. You represent and warrant that you have not granted and will not grant any rights inconsistent with this license."
The official spin is "well, we worded it that way, but we don't really mean it.
Bullshit. I always said I'd unsubscribe if they pulled a stunt like this. A revised TOU is supposed to appear soon. We'll see if I'm about to be forced to stick to my word.
This bites.