Punchfork shutdown inspires Open Recipes
blog.fictivekin.com
blog.fictivekin.com
Startups should be required to tell users upfront with a big warning that the business is not profitable, how many months of runway the startup has, and that all data could be lost at any point.
Initially, support for Punchfork will continue, but
we will soon be retiring the Punchfork site, API and
mobile apps. We believe that a unified destination
benefits our users in the long run, and the Punchfork
team (me) will focus on contributing to Pinterest as
the premier platform for discovering and sharing new
recipes and other interests on the web.
These guys are responsible for Mapalong, a (formally great) mapping service that they abandoned early last year and for which they ignore any requests for exported data (I've been asking for a .KML file for a year to move my points somewhere else).
We have had to pause development, but not only is your data still there, you can still use it. New users can't join, but that's about it.
As soon as we're able, we want to finish it and launch it. As part of this, we'll make sure people can get their data out in useful formats. (Perhaps a GeoRSS feed per URL? A KML file per user?)
I genuinely respect you for holding us to a high standard, but I think it's a little unfair to criticize us for an unfinished app.
It would certainly make people feel better if, with slowly progressing software, it was made easier for these testers to feel like they could properly test such software with the full knowledge that they can get their investment out in the form of a reasonable export function - they are after all providing a service to you by testing the software and providing feedback.
Also, you make a very good point. We never expected to have to pause, but we should have put more focus on making sure people never felt their data was trapped, even in the very beginning.
In fact, you've managed to convince me that proper data export should be the very next feature we add.
Let's not forget that the data Punchfork is letting users take out is the exact information they put in: a list of liked recipes. The original recipe data is just one click away.
I'm not sure how this is any different than a personal Twitter archive; it contains only your tweets, not those of the folks you interacted with.
Good on you guys for not rising to Jeff's stubborn/dismissive attitude.
>We were super inspired by Jeff’s “teach a man to fish” attitude...
This left me with tears in my eyes. :)
SOAR had its beginnings in 1993 when someone collected all the recipes she found on Usenet and mailing lists while at UCB.
In 1995 she put the archive on the web as "SOAR" .. the "Searchable Online Archive of Recipies".
In 2001, that moved from (IIRC) a subdomain of UCB and became "Recipe Source" and can still be found at http://www.recipesource.com/
It's very old now, and majorly lacking in features. But then I've never found a recipe site that gave me everything I needed.
Punchfork's attitude here seems similar.
Normally scrapers can be detected and blocked, but if it's passively running in the background on a user's machine, opportunistically grabbing data the user is already viewing, it should be impossible to detect.
This needs to exist.
However I can still see the good that will come, yummly already jumped at creating an API replacement much like feedly promises to be an alternative for google reader.
By the way, is ending your startup in "ly" the new fad in the technosphere?
I think the fad has since passed and a lot of people have been jumping on the .io bandwagon recently.
Disclaimer: After reaching out to him cold, Jeff Miller was an informal advisor to me for over a year providing valuable insights and advice, not to mention moral support, as we built our company. He did this for no reason other than his dedication to helping a fellow entrepreneur. Over dozens of email exchanges and in-person get togethers, he proved hands down, to be one of the most helpful, friendly, altruistic people I've met in the valley. After a year building up this friendship and trust, he invested in our company, and he is consistently one of the first people I reach out to when I have real founder issues to discuss.
The OP has literally ZERO idea what reasons Jeff has for his decisions about the data on his site, not the least of which could be legal restrictions of the acquisition. They provided, what looks like, ZERO background on why they wanted to talk to someone who was incredibly busy transitioning a startup into the hands of a new parent company. Jeff was as polite as he needed to be when he responded to a completely context-less request for a call with, "I'm sorry I can't right now." The OP does not know, beyond building a startup worth acquiring, and transitioning it, what else someone might have on their plate that would prevent them from having time to chat with someone who failed to provide any reason for their request. Then, when Jeff asked point blank whether the OP was scraping data from his site, they responded with an ambiguous, "not trying to do anything uncool. Still super eager to talk more. Happy to do so anytime."
The OP apparently does not have to try to do something uncool. This entire situation is unbelievably uncool, from the beginning of the communication, to their actions in between, to this post. The only thing more shocking than the sense of entitlement displayed here, is that they, or anybody here, thinks this post documents anything other than a pure display of arrogance and entitlement by the OP. They approached this whole situation with such a stark lack of professionalism that it would be laughable if they hadn't also decided to smear one of the nicest people I know in the process.
This post reflects an attitude that is a shining example of so many things wrong in the startup community, from the sense of entitlement, to the lack of common courtesy, to the manipulation of a situation for personal gain at the expense of others. It is so unreal how easily people seek to tear down others, and worse, how quickly smart people jump on the bullshit bandwagon.
This post is a joke. Nobody owes you anything because they built a site you enjoyed. If anybody owes anybody anything, the OP owes Jeff Miller an apology for this time wasting bullshit.
Well, yes, when you invest in your data, you feel entitled to it. I would argue you are entitled to it.
Which is why Advection, as a streaming VOD provider, has maintained -- at our own expense -- license servers for users who bought movies from content owners that went out of business up to a decade ago. We believe in digital ownership, and believe that non-evaporative content principles are good for the whole ecosystem.
I applaud any archiving efforts that help end users have a greater sense of trust in future digital products.
Cameron Koczon hits up Jeff on Twitter asking to talk about Punchfork. Jeff has just sold Punchfork and most likely has legal obligations prohibiting him from talking about too much, plus he's busy transitioning the company into a new parent organization, along with whatever else he has going on in his life. They don't provide context, or email him with more information. They tell Jeff to DM them if he wants to talk, as if this now puts the ball in Jeff's court.
Jeff politely responds: "I'm sorry I can't right now." Nothing hostile here.
Then, OP posts a page about Hugspoon. They intend to scrape and replicate Punchfork's data, in particular its user data. Keep in mind, Jeff's site generated traffic for the sites he scraped, much like Google does. By not showing full recipes, Jeff has become a discovery tool for those sites, not a competitor. Hugspoon will not be providing value to Punchfork, the site it scrapes, or Pinterest, the site that now owns it. Hugspoon competes with Punchfork by stealing its data and giving no value in return. OP's claim that they're doing it for the users doesn't really matter. They are stealing this data and it is not an apples to apples comparison to say that Punchfork also scraped data, because it provided significant value to the companies whose data it shared. Ask any of those sites if they minded.
Jeff asks the OP if they are cloning his site and scraping all of the data. He says it's extremely uncool if so. So far, not hostile. He has turned down a context-less request to chat with someone, and has now very level-headedly responded to a blatant attempt to clone his site and steal his data, competing with his new parent company and him for the same users.
Cameron Koczon does not answer the question. He evades it and says, "not trying to do anything uncool. Still super eager to talk more. Happy to do so anytime."
Let me translate this last part for you. "We have stated publicly we plan to scrape your data. We'll say we're not doing anything uncool, but that's because we think "liberating" your site's data is cool. The ball is in your court to contact us, because you owe us that. Just so you know, we can't wait to chat with you!"
Jeff responds. "Please do not scrape any data from PF for your product. I'm asking you unequivocally and in public. OK?"
Yet again, I see absolutely nothing hostile on Jeff's part so far. In fact, if someone insisted I contact them in order to find out more about what they want to talk to me about, and then posted a note saying they intend to pull all of my data, I'd say asking for clarification and a confirmation that they are not going to do that is pretty fucking cordial.
Then Cameron says he will email Jeff in the AM. Four days later, Jeff has to ask if he's going to get an email about this clone site that the OP has publicly announced. Cameron responds that he "ran out of steam" and was away for the weekend. Apparently, him being busy is a perfectly good excuse to leave a big issue out in the open un-addressed, but Jeff being busy isn't enough of a reason to send the guy more context about your plans in an email before announcing publicly your bullshit intentions to rip his site off.
And now there is the article on Fictive Kin, which could not be more ironically headed with the tagline "Work Hard. Be Nice." by people who are going to scrape all of the data they want from a single site, while bullying the site's owner into dealing with them in the way that they expect him to. The post criticizes Jeff's acquisition announcement as callous, an opinion of theirs that I didn't share when I got the same notification. I use Punchfork all of the time. They criticize the "ominous shutdown banner", which I imagine was intended to alert users about the site's imminent closing. Had he not posted such a banner, they would have said he didn't take enough action to alert users to the site's future. Then, they take their arrogant opinion of the situation and paraphrase Jeff, saying: “We’re excited to share the news that we’re gonna be rich! To celebrate, we’re shutting down the site and taking all your data down with it. So long, suckers!”
And as for Archive Team. I assume you're talking about the guys that announced their own intentions by saying "Injecting terabytes of Punchfork user/recipe data into http://archive.org . Relive the assholery of this goodbye: http://punchfork.com/pinterest ....
Now that we've clarified all of that. Explain to me the part where Jeff is the hostile one. Explain to me how these aren't a bunch of bitter dicks that saw a site get acquired, didn't like another company getting bought and absorbed, and decided to steal all of its data and compete with it, pausing only briefly to insist that the owner of that site give them a call because they would like to tell him to his face about their arrogance. Explain to me why Jeff's request to "Please don't copy any Punchfork data" is a hostile response to being called an asshole.
I don't know a single level headed person who would look at this communication outside of the context of Fictive Kin's ridiculous blog post and not think that these are some of the biggest douchebags on the internet.
How are they competing with it? Punchfork is gone. Isn't it Pinterest's fight now? I doubt that a term of the acquisition was "personally deal with people who are copying the Punchfork data".
The story is simple. We offered to save the likes of users who asked us to. Jeff objected, so we didn't. We offered to save the recipe data and make a searchable index. Jeff objected, so we didn't. While we might have been surprised, we complied; we didn't want to ruffle any feathers.
I can only imagine that you either object to the fact that we started the Open Recipes project or that we shared the story behind it. Either way, I'm afraid I just don't care. If there are exactly two people who think we did something wrong here, and lots of people who support what we're doing, then I think we chose wisely.
Also, you can't truthfully claim that anything we're doing is competing with Punchfork. (It was shut down at the end of March, before the Open Recipes project existed.) Not that there's anything wrong with competition.
Your approach was wholly unprofessional. The reason it pissed me off is because I know what kind of person Jeff is to those entrepreneurs who approach him professionally, respectful of his time. He is completely approachable, super friendly, and incredibly generous with his time. The reason he wasn't here is because your approach lacked common courtesy and respect. You acted as if he owed it to you to reach out and discuss your project. He doesn't. Then you all but slandered him in your post, paraphrasing him with things like "So long, suckers," which is something that anybody who knows Jeff knows could not be further from his attitude about anything.
I'm glad you came around to respecting Jeff's request. It's too bad you didn't approach the situation as reasonably from the beginning. I get tired of seeing good people have their name tarnished around the community by people whose sense of entitlement leads them to paint a one-sided picture of someone who has worked so hard to contribute to the community, simply because they didn't get what they wanted, how they wanted it.
I don't think having an easily incited mob of trolls supporting your view validates what you've done. I think if you take a step back and look at the situation subjectively, you'd realize you owe Jeff an apology.
This reminds me of the Craigslist/Pad-Mapper event, except that Craigslist hasn't been acquired.
As a replacement I found http://www.yummly.com/ today.
>large amount of work into scraping those sites
I think this states clearly the founders attitude about data rights. It's the Wild West out there still.
Wat?
That's precisely the point, isn't it? Right now there's no incentive for them to care. The percentage of users who care about open data right now is pretty small, mostly confined to the very tech-savvy. Maybe this punchfork acquisition kerfuffle can be used to teach non-tech-savvy users the importance of open data. An open, free recipe database - importantly, that follows the punchfork model of not including instructions, so the actual recipe sites still get traffic - is a step in that direction.
C'mon man! It's 2103. Not only are scrappers ridiculously easy to build, it doesn't take a ton of work to build a bot in Perl and have it scan the internet for recipe's.
This guy is a total d-bag. Not sure what his deal is, or was, but everything I've read makes me not like him at all. Did he get screwed out of a ton of cash with the acquisition or what?