Svbtle Funding
blog.svbtle.com
blog.svbtle.com
One of the reasons Svbtle is hard to understand is that it's a work in progress. At its current fairly fuzzy resolution, it's what I'd guess a traditional magazine evolves into when it hits the Internet: a loose confederation of lightly edited writers with their own individual reputations. Beyond that few of the details are figured out. But costs are low and traffic is growing steeply, so although in most cases I'd be nagging founders to figure out more details, in this case I've advised Dustin to let this grow and see what it turns into.
I encourage neutral observers to do the same: let's see what this turns into. And as for the haters, it's fine with me if you want to keep hating. Though this was not a deliberate strategy by Dustin (he is actually confused and hurt by all the hate), being controversial is actually a good thing for a publication.
While Dustin's brand own brand spills over into Svbtle's, I think the network's prospects can be sufficiently differentiated from Dustin's brand.
Seems to me that the network is becoming large enough where the "tech blog" echo chamber opinion (about one individual) is inconsequential to Svbtle's fate
It reminds me of pg's response to the Airbnb case.
- http://www.pehub.com/114113/what-not-to-do-in-a-crisis-%E2%8...
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/how-the-hell-is-this-my-fau...
I'm slow to adopt new words, but I think "hater" is a useful addition to the language, and not simply a pejorative version of "critic." The difference is that a critic is what you're called as a byproduct of being critical in a particular instance, whereas being a hater is an ongoing state of mind. So for example it is reasonable to say "he was sometimes a critic of the administration's policy" but not to say "he was sometimes a hater of the administration's policy."
"Hater" is not a pejorative version of "critic" so much as a negative version of "fan." In fact the distinctive thing about a hater is how uncritical his responses are.
edit: despite saying that, i am indeed a curious follower of dustin curtis, which i learned during recent discussions, he was fiercely and mostly wrongly criticized. (namely, i have personal positive impression in my limbic system for him).
What I've seen in this thread is that people have reasons for disliking Dustin, some of which directly relate to Svbtle. To the extent that they don't directly relate, though, people are quite explicitly saying they evaluate Svbtle separate from Dustin.
And by far the most common reaction expressed is a lack of understanding any valid business model for the network, which in your op you say is quite understandable.
What I don't see in this thread is any willful misconstruing of the project. Which seems to be the requirement for a "hater".
The way you can tell something is amiss is the volume of commenters who seem worried about e.g. how Dustin is going to make money. If most startups issued such a bland funding announcement, it would sink beneath the surface of HN with barely a ripple of comment.
I worry that moderating this community has jaded you. (That's concern trolling.) It's a valid question, and one I'd ask of any blogazine that received funding; do you stick ads on it? Charge a subscription fee? Sell user data?
boggles
Svbtle is a strange puzzle.
If this is some kind of genius nerd underdog sympathy marketing ploy, I've never seen it done better.
=========================
Wake up early. Show up. Learn how to think. Be genuine, but appear nice. Use envy for motivation instead of destruction. Do what you say you’re going to do. Ensure balance in every area of your life. Confront repressed thoughts immediately. Surround yourself with people who are better than you (but remember the thing about envy). Work out every day. Be good at what you do. Make money doing what you love. Have good friends. Never settle.
--
Now, as far as I can tell, every aspect of that post is good advice. It's evident that Dustin's advice was derived from experience, because some his points are counter-intuitive-but-true (which tend to only be learned as a byproduct of screwing up). The advice seems to match my own experience as well, so it seems possible it may be broadly true and (and therefore broadly useful).
I don't know what demon you see in him, but you're wrong.
Now, at this point, it seems only fair that we contrast Dustin's writing against someone else's writing. Let's use your writing, in fact.
So here's a piece you wrote, entitled "New Year - No Fun Allowed".
=========================
My resolution is to blog every day. Whoops, already missed that one. Make it every week, I guess.
Also, to finally launch the enormous white whale of a ship that I’ve been working on in Kerbal Space Program (which is what has kept me from here for so long). It will set all sorts of records, visit all the planets… I just need to have the damn thing not explode. I’m getting closer now; got as far as 20km, and the most recent launch was spoiled by pure bad luck (a piece I’d blown off the top of my rocket fell down back onto it).
You might think stuff like buying a flat or finding a job should be higher on the list than achieving something in a computer game. And you’d be right. But damned if it doesn’t feel like the other way around.
--
Eh... I was going to say some more stuff, but it appears you may be going through a rough period in your life.
This is something of a tangent, but: if you happen to want to talk with someone about what's on your mind nowadays, or if you just need someone to talk to, then please feel free to toss me an email. I'm happy to listen (if you want that) or to do whatever else I can.
Life can be rough, but don't let it break you, even if it seems hard not to.
That seems implausible given his age and job history. I don't see how he can possibly have tried e.g. settling enough to be able to assert one should never do it.
The whole tone is one of condescension, of the enlightened master speaking down to his acolytes. I'd accept it coming from e.g. that guy who built a windmill out of scrap metal, or Helen Keller, or even Mark Zuckerberg. Someone who's overcome adversity and/or achieved something useful - or perhaps even just someone old enough to have a bit of life experience. From a bay-area upper-class white male who has never had to struggle, who so far as I can tell has never done a day's real work in his life? No; I'd accept domain-specific advice on design or writing (which he seems to have a genuine talent for), but I refuse to believe he knows better than me how to live - and that's how he's phrased it, not as suggestions or things that worked for him, but as instructions and universal truths.
>Eh... I was going to say some more stuff, but it appears you may be going through a rough period in your life.
Hah, a reader. No, don't worry, I guess it sounded bad out of context. No Fun Allowed is the blog title, not because I don't have fun but because I spend most of the posts taking silly things way too seriously. My present employers have chosen a somewhat inconvenient time to make 2/3 of their developers redundant, which in the worst case might set my life plans back a few years, but life is good; thanks for the sympathy, but I'm doing ok, at least for the moment.
How could you possibly know a thing like that?
The things you've said in this thread are so much worse than anything you accuse Dustin of saying. I wonder the contrast doesn't strike you.
Is it that I think I'm better than Dustin? That's a tougher one; I'm hardly any less privileged; I think I'm less condescending. Being proud of one's humility is a trap, but that doesn't mean one should never call others out on their arrogance.
Is it the hate? I'd like to be more constructive, but I think there's still value in being honest. There is a risk of a negative impact here, but the worst obvious case is that I upset one person and have no other effect.
A world class designer with a funded, successful blog network or an unemployed LARPer. Not sure it's as tough as you think.
So earlier, I posted how I would like to know more about their business plan, because well, it seems hard to understand how they plan to make money. Now I have to worry my comments will be seen as critical and I will be lumped in as a "hater".
Because that's the behavior at other sites. "Hater" allows and encourages polarization.
(Also, I am not sure if on the spectrum hater is related to fan so much as it is related to fanboy.)
I think a lot of people dislike Dustin Curtis not because they're jealous of his notoriety, but rather because of his attitude -- or at least the personality he projects on the internet.
" A person that simply cannot be happy for another person's success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person.
Hating, the result of being a hater, is not exactly jealousy. The hater doesnt really want to be the person he or she hates, rather the hater wants to knock somelse down a notch."
I visit Hacker News because, while not perfect, it does the best job of any internet forum I know of minimizing that kind of cheap attack. It worries me to see the person who created that forum publicly setting a bad example like this. You're basically saying, “ur all just haters, forget u guyz!!1” even if, superficially, the words you use seem smarter and more reasonable. And beyond being an unconvincing argument, I don't think it reflects well on you to be stooping so low (and flat-out insulting so many people) to defend your investment.
shrug
Very true. I am sure Dustin has a vision which obviously we don't fully see yet. Still, it seems a bit absurd for a blog to raise. But hey, let's all wait and see what comes. After all, the investment was probably in Dustin and team, and not necessary in Svbtle.
That said, I couldn't care less about Svbtle, frankly, though I certainly understand what it is. Good luck with Y Combinator's investment is my sole commentary on this news: I'm smart enough to divide between Dustin Curtis and Svbtle and realize that my thoughts on and the trajectory of one don't necessarily impact the other.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/6531610/America...
He blogged about not liking the aesthetics of a website, sparked a discussion with on of the designers of that site and then AA fired the guy and Dustin said that he was "horrified" that it happened.
What's missing?
I'm guessing that pg's comment was at least partially in response to my own below[0], and you've exactly stated my issue with Curtis and the Svbtle network. There's nothing horribly wrong with the general concept behind Svbtle - perhaps it'll work, perhaps not. It's definitely legitimate enough that it's worth a shot.
But the way dcurtis went about it - the way he worded his initial post on Svbtle, his responses to the Svbtle theme being cloned, and so on, were very off-putting, to say the least. Moreover, the fact that he was so fixated on people copying the theme suggests that he was placing value in the wrong things in Svbtle.
To use a newspaper analogy, is it the layout of the NYTimes that gives it prestige and distinguishes it from your average tabloid rag? Is it the font? Is it the type of paper they use, or the size of the paper? No, it's the content, and the people who create it.
By stirring up such an enormous shitstorm over some people copying the Svbtle theme and creating RoR[1] or WP[2] clones, dcurtis gave up his reputation (which is actually important for running something like Svbtle) in a futile attempt to preserve the uniqueness of the Svbtle theme (which isn't all that important). His best hope now is to spread Svbtle outside the tech community, to people who aren't familiar with him, and thus don't have any impression of him at all yet.
0: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027577
I would like to explain my hypothesis as to why he jumped on the fact that people copied the theme.
Consider pg's statement: "it's what I'd guess a traditional magazine evolves into when it hits the Internet: a loose confederation of lightly edited writers with their own individual reputations"
If you are building brand around a loose confederation of writers, decentralized between domain boundaries, then brand recognition (and, conversely, brand dilution) is an important issue.
Just to dig into your example a little further: Yes, the value in the NYTimes is the content. But if you can't tell whether the content is from the NYTimes or a knock-off competitor, then you don't get the value of recognition when you see something that resembles the NYTimes before you consume the content. So brand differentiation is important for value-creation.
As I said, I don't know how he addressed this question of brand dilution. Nor do I know exactly what the right way to preserve the brand of a loosely federated organization on the wild wild web. Perhaps a trademarked seal for all participating sites?
That and the air of superiority within the announcement: svbtle would only be used by people who are "intelligent and witty" implying that everyone who couldn't, wasn't.
Unfortunately, like you allude to, most people also saw his reaction simply to being a stolen theme, and don't appreciate that it was intended to be much more than that.
The network's introduction introduced Dustin's concept and site. If you ever visited his blog before that, it's clear he was building the site before. Part of the introduction was sharing a novel approach to the blogging workflow and get a glimpse of the CMS. If it's "just a theme," you'd imagine that people would steal some of the more interesting things, like his approach to editing, or build on it. Instead, people insisted on duplicating the theme -- some just to spite Dustin.
Dustin was explicit about his goals in the beginning - to create a great publishing/blogging network. If yoiu look at how it's panned out, people are making Svbtle their personal blogs and the theme is the differentiator. writers were willing to forego a complete branding of their website and demonstrated they were willing to accept this brand. When you're working to build a brand and key piece is plagiarized (and subsequently insulted by people who don't understand the work that goes behind it), the reaction is a bit more understandable.
I'm being polite. I recognize that it interpretations may differ
They were intended as footnotes, but I forgot I was writing in markdown
I suspect that a good chunk of hate comes from that Kudos widget not having an Undo. It comes across as cocky, hence the backlash.
1) there's no down-kudo, and 2) kudos are mysterious, what's a kudo, and then SURPRISE, it's a 0-click rollover vote.
I find kudos deceptive for both those reasons. That's not what subtle should mean.
By contrast, the kudos widget looks like nothing in particular, its location doesn't correspond to any convention I'm aware of, and mild curiosity (mouseover) is taken to mean enthusiastic support.
To me, the kudos widget makes me feel like somebody took advantage of me in an unguarded moment and stole a dollar. It's not much, in the grand scheme of things, but rubs me the wrong way.
But I've followed more than a few links from Hacker News to articles on Svbtle over the past months and came away with the strong sense that they're of unusually low quality. Maybe I'm just not the target audience, but the articles I've seen have been vacuous without exception. I went to the home page just now and scrolled down and found more of the same. Having been the editor of a print magazine in a past life, I'm a fan of the curated approach, and I like much of the front-page content on Hacker News, so this surprised me.
It looks like saved stories aren't public here, so I can't use them as a constructive example of content I think is good. But I use reddit for similar purposes
http://www.reddit.com/user/clumma/liked/
and here are my Google +1s (from Reader)
https://plus.google.com/115045287509032322837/plusones
If I had to describe the Svbtle content direction, I'd say it's like somebody is randomly scraping longer comments off of TechCrunch articles and putting them into a blogging system.
I couldn't agree more. I guess I'm out of the loop of the drama involved, but every article I've read seems very light/thin, and had no real substance, outside of the standard SV gossip. I actually kinda go out of my way to avoid reading them when I see a svtle link on HN...
Looking at the front page and at Ethan Kaplan's posts in an unscientific way it appears as though everyones posts on Svbtle make the front page (although I could be wrong and if so please say so - I didn't take a particularly large sample). I'm not sure where the curation is.
It seems that anyone can apply to join svbtle, but it's not clear why they'd choose to versus hosting their own blog or writing online for traditional print outlets.
Is there an editorial process for posts on Svbtle?
I ask this because I want to get my head around what makes it special compared to other blog networks. I don't really care who Dustin is (one of the benefits of not being in the valley I guess) or what he's done/not done.
It was clear to most that Dustin was expecting adoration and when that didn't happen, the conversation changed.
I don't know how many tweets, posts and "thoughts" I read where Dustin was "abandoning HN" or laying claim to "the downfall of HN"[2], only to end up back here posting some other ego-laden[3] dribble.
"You're welcome", I believe is what used to be on the footer of Svtble. Really gets me thinking about how modest he is.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749035
I disagree. I doubt Subtle is getting funded because of Dustin Curtis' audience. For funding, the conversation of "market" had to come up and if the answer to "market" was "Dustin Curtis' fanbase", the investors would have had to be nuts to proceed. How big is the "Dustin Curtis" following? Hundred? Several hundred? A few thousand?
I don't think so.
I am curious as to what their business plan is, especially for a blog network that strives to minimalism, having an ad presence would seem anathema.
And to that end, I am curious why anyone would fund them -- what is it that they offer in terms of being able to generate income that makes them more viable than say, any old "webring" that uses the same CSS?
Or makes them different from various other focused blogging sites: science 2.0, freethoughtblogs, pjmedia, etc., none of which seem to be doing especially well as far as I know.
My problem with svbtle is that unlike Salon/The Atlantic/ArsTechnica/JUST ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE/ since there is no masthead, or links from one svtble writer to another, so at this moment, I don't see a real difference between svbtle the company, and svtble the CSS design sheet. So I don't see how they build up brand, or how they build on top of network effects since they don't link from one author to another. (And should ads be added and mastheads and footers added well will social toolbars and unother unsubtle widgets be far behind?)
And while I read svbtle when I come across it, I find their content not much better, not much worse than anyone elses.
(I will say, I am much less put off by svtble writers once I had adblock plus block their 0-click kudos.)
But you know, there's really nothing wrong with that! The problem I have is that so many want to pass this off like it's something new and special when really it's the same old shit with a new name. Maybe if someone would just say "yeah, DCurtis is creating a blog network and it's cool because of who he is, who he knows, and the stylesheet" then I'd be happy and say "cool, I'll read it".
On one level I get it. It's not about what it actually is, it's about the feeling, the aura, this attitude about it that makes it feel special. On the other hand, it's just another blog network. To me, I see it as the difference between Newsweek and the New Yorker. It's all about the public sentiment. Or maybe I missed the mark completely but when I hear things along the lines of "well people are haters and it's kinda hard to get but you'll see" they seem kind of like cop-outs to me.
There's nothing wrong with Suvbtle at all though. No one should have a problem with the basic idea. What I, and I think others, have a problem with is the sneaky feeling that this is just another blog network and we're being told it's somehow more and special. Like we're being served hamburger but someone's calling it filet mignon. I've eaten my share of beef and I've read the Svbtle network blogs and I know when I'm being fed ground beef.
Still, I don't think something I wrote several years ago in a completely different context should impact your opinion of Svbtle as a network.
People's first impression of Svbtle happened in the context of the whole argybargy surrounding the launch and copied design, and even I didn't get a great impression of Svbtle as a result. People impute, when creators and founders don't explain what the project is about.
Maybe it's time to re-explain what Svbtle is and aspires to do to salvage the brand.
EDIT: mladenkovch did a good job of summarizing what I find to be the inkling of a lack of humility in the project description: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027929.
Let's be honest, Dustin, that article was from 2009. It wasn't exactly written in the '80s when you were on a coke binge. I think your attitude in a lot of blog posts reflects quite negatively on who you are as a person, and that's where a lot of the hate for you comes from.
You're presumptuous about our industry in a lot of ways without much to show in terms of accomplishment. Often I've asked, who is Dustin Curtis? Why is he telling me the important things about building a startup? The answers to these questions are thin, vague, or nonexistent. I'm glad you have opinion and I certainly don't resent yours, but I also don't position myself as a commentator on all things Silicon Valley without having actually done anything in Silicon Valley. This isn't a critique of you nearly as much as it is a critique of punditry, I think, since I haven't given it much thought; that said, it's still my reaction to most of your writing.
I don't hate you, as it were, nor do I seek every opportunity to piss on your brand, I just hold a quite-negative opinion and will share it if asked. Again, as I told pg above, I'm also willing to be proven wrong but you've simply made it worse since I developed it.
I genuinely feel bad for you (and I mean that), that you want to accomplish something but you have to deal with this crap when you do. If you're self-aware about why it happens, I can sympathize, as I've made grievous mistakes in my life that cost me some reputation as well. If you aren't, then you should figure out why it's happening.
As someone who is neither in the hater not fan category, this is what I've been trying to figure out. I have no clue who he is and it's very difficult to find out much besides he's an opinionated person with a taste for design.
Do you hold others to the same standard? How quickly do you forget about their unrelated past?
The problem you're experiencing is that it is much easier to gain the "douche" label than it is to get rid of it.
Telling an unfamiliar company to "fire designers" he hadn't interacted with wasn't helping a brand. It was being a douchebag and demonstrates an astounding lack of maturity and experience at best.
Edit: Dustin responded to a sibling post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027792 .
A UX architect came forward to apologize and let him know why things were the way they were (again, corporate politics and the design process). AA found the email by scrubbing their Exchange server and fired the guy over discussing that process.
Original complaints: http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html
The UX Architect's response: http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html
Dustin's response to the firing: http://www.dustincurtis.com/incompetence.html
In the meantime, I'll be unchecking "AA" on the sidebar of the Kayak site for the foreseeable future.
And I don't think that registering that Dustin was "astounded" that the designer he received the email from had a good portfolio or only admitting to having been "partially wrong" with respect to the firing comment was particularly cordial or respectful, either.
I agree that the whole debacle reflects -much- more poorly on AA than on Curtis, but his conduct wasn't beyond fault by any means either.
Truth be told, I would be grateful because my voice has gone unheard. That's the name of the game with a lot of in-house design; you make due with implementing non-designer's ideas for a steady paycheck and good benefits.
I can't help but laugh at this. All Svbtle does is slap a pretty, unified design on the articles of people that have interesting stuff to say. It's very good at doing that and I appreciate it for doing that.
Like Curtis intended, when you see the Svbtle design you can expect something interesting. Most of the articles I've read on it were indeed interesting. However, these articles would also exist without Svbtle, they just wouldn't look the same.
Svbtle's got a good thing going, but future of journalism? Please.
In other words, what they build next could be "the future of journalism".
I just don't think Svbtle is that container. At least not yet.
>Svbtle is a curated, invite-only collection of great people who have things to say. ... >Our goal is to make it easier and more natural for interesting people to write down their thoughts. ... >Think you should be a part of the network? Apply for membership below.
The most exciting thing about idea exchanges (whether in oral or written form) is the openness of it. You can go out into the world wide web and read as much or as little as you want. You can have favorite sources of information, least favorite sources and have some of your beliefs confirmed, while turning other ones on their head.
In Svbtle, it seems like everyone is a self-proclaimed "great" person with interesting things to say. Then the Svbtle network invites you, gives you a stark blog theme to share your brilliant thoughts with other people of equal greatness. I guess the quality of content will ultimately be deciding factor of whether this has merit, but for right now I can't get excited about it.
I applied (and got in) to Svbtle because of two things: exclusivity and the interface. Svbtle at least attempts to have only high quality writers there, and it was made clear that sometimes, if posts were of low quality, they'd be asked to be revised. There was also talk of helping Svbtle members with their writing through things like copyediting. I haven't heard of any of those things happening yet, but I can tell you that (generally) I try to keep Svbtle much higher quality as a result. I still maintain a personal blog where I put shorter/news kinds of things, but bigger, more in-depth essays go to Svbtle.
The interface is also really nice. It's good enough that I actually write in-browser, rather than writing in Vim and copying it over.
Oh, and also: I suck real hard at design, and I'm sick of maintaining Yet Another Blog Platform/design. I really like the look and feel of Svbtle. My personal blog is basically just Skeleton default with a few small modifications: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/archive
Assuming they've taken, say, $500k, to get that back from 200 writers they'd need to make $2.5k from each of the current writers. Even doubling the number of writers, that's still $1.25k - 25 months at $50/m.
So actually, to recoup the investment from writers in any reasonable time they'd need to charge more like $100-200/m. I doubt many of their 200 writers would stay in those circumstances. Would you?
Other than charging the writers, I don't see what business model svbtle can support, other than advertising, which would also jar with the way the site is designed, and also with the ambitions of many star bloggers, who typically want to eventually have the option to put their own discreet ads à la DaringFireball on their blog...
One of the things dcurtis promised was data portability, and if I had to pay $50/month to be on Svbtle, I'd probably exercise that option.
I have no idea what the business model is either.
I'd recommend creating some way of chaining posts, either linked-list style (to simulate a blog) or tree-style (to simulate conversations, ala Branch).
Obvtse emerged from the initial backlash to Svbtle. The demo seems to be down but from what I can remember is has the same interface.
Your decision to segment your blog onto two URLs is interesting. Won't this degrade your personal blog since you only put short, and by your admission, lower quality posts on it?
In the past, I've gotten paid by IBM to write articles for their developerWorks blog. Long form. High quality stuff. I always felt like they paid me for the privilege of hosting my writings on a website they control, that they make money from...as opposed to me writing something that lives on my personal blog forever, hopefully giving my blog/"personal brand" (yuck, but not sure what else to call it) the traffic.
Thanks! Here's the thing, though: Dustin is always working on improving Svbtle, and I don't have to think about it. For example, the code formatting on my blog is terrible. I haven't felt the need to fix it. So it keeps looking terrible. The highlighting on Svbtle is great. One day, the 'related posts' feature just appeared: I didn't need to code that up.
> Won't this degrade your personal blog since you only put short, and by your admission, lower quality posts on it?
It may. It depends: if you care about more news-feed personal stuff about me, then you can read that. My blog used to get on HN all the time, and I'd have a hard time building an audience, because a complex, theory-driven post would get a bunch of subscribers, and then the next one would be a "I released a new version of $PROJECT" and people would unsubscribe. Now I can have two audiences in two places.
Also, Svbtle is on my domain, so it's still 'my brand' as much as Svbtle's.
I'm very, very happy with Svbtle so far.
For example, there are a lot of shitty blogs[2] on this network. Even shitty posts[3]. It's just like any other blog network with some extra-hype and a minimalistic design mixed and matched from theme sites (Trust me, I've seen a dozen themes like this before Dustin came up with this and dismissed anyone trying to create a similar design[4])
A really good quality-oriented network would be something like Quora, but for blogs. The readers, people, us should rate what is good and what is bad,what is ethical, what is unethical, what is right and what is wrong. Not at the mercy of some clown advocating minimalism to emphasize elitism and branding for himself.
[1] This was SVBTLE's pitch initially.
[2] massivegreatness.com [An arrogant, unethical Apple fanboy, writer at Techcrunch who supports anything Apple without proper logic]
[3]http://influencehacks.com/the-stunning-hypocrisy-of-ventureb...
[4]http://howells.ws/posts/view/93/svbtle-vs-obtvse-and-on-copy...
Not everyone gets to send a piece in to the NYTimes, the WSJ, the National Review and get it published as an op-ed. But for someone in political science or macroeconomics it's definitely a status symbol. Note that anyone could just as easily put something on their own blog. In fact, many people who regularly send in pieces do publish on their own blogs. People who have much larger fan-bases, power, and immediate influence than almost anyone in tech still seem to find value in spending a few hours writing a piece for no profit, no ad revenues, no pictures next to their name. Larry Summers, who was the head of arguably the most gate-keeper-ish institution in the nation still wanted to get his views published in the WSJ.
Tech people may not view these venues as worthwhile for their field. What then, is the prestigious place to have your content featured? I think Svbtle could be that. If you own something every influential person wants to be featured in, that would be huge. You'd be a gatekeeper of ideas.
As for evidence, plenty of research has gone into respect and credibility, particularly as they relate to leadership.
[1]: http://9rules.com
I hope this doesn't happen to svbtle because some good content is coming from it, but as you said it is a difficult balance that will need to be achieved moving forward.
Personally I would like to learn more about how Dustin used the situation to his advantage, even leading to funding.
It's trying to fix 200+ differently-shaped circles into the exact same square.
Dalton is the guy behind App.net. Svbtle is a Dustin Curtis thing, I believe.
Check it out: http://hveem.no/simple-blogging-with-lua-and-git
Is there a directory of all blogs in the Svbtle network? The only ones I've seen have been about technology/entrepreneurs, but I'd be interested in finance topics.
Why be cautious of who you pick to be in your network yet not promote who you've picked to be in your network?
Our blogs are our online identities. Using something like Svbtle take all the personality and brand recognition out of it.
For me, I designed my own blog around my personal tastes in minimalism, and the way I want to brand myself: http://kswizz.com.
Edit: Now says "(including, previously, Y Combinator)"
It was never an artistic -- it was always a branding issue.
If Svbtle is to ever monetize as a "publication" aren't they going to pay the writers? Or maybe they'll take the HuffingtonPost route and not pay them?
Not a hater, just voicing some legitimate concerns.
Curious to see what happens, if nothing it's been an interesting experiment for the web.