The Mind of Dave Winer

Dave Winer has a bad reputation. He’s got a reputation for challenging anyone who disagrees with him. He’s got a reputation for blocking people by default on Twitter.

Yeah. It’s the rule, not the exception.

See, blocking on Twitter is an acceptable action. I’ve blocked people that are so troll-like, I can’t deal with them. These are people who have indicated in the context of their tweets that Christianity is responsible for pedophilia, nearly all murder and bloodshed in the world, etc. While I won’t argue that Christianity has historically included bloodshed and murder in the name of Jesus and that there are sad cases of unacceptable sexual actions in the name of Jesus, that does not qualify for an ongoing, destructive attack on a religion that has done much good, has a significant number of followers, etc. Blocked.

I also have blocked people who belligerently disparage people unprovoked. But very few, and only after a long period of time where my tolerance level have been diminished.

Blocking is an acceptable action in some cases. Most people looking to filter noise simply don’t follow people in return and if it turns out that a person is creating too much noise, unfollowing is the socially acceptable thing to do. Blocking is an ultimate action that is usually only taken when there are no other options. See, Twitter is all about opt-in. I opt to see your updates and vica versa. It’s a “pull” technology, not a “push” technology. I cannot control who hears my messages, but with a block I can control who doesn’t.

Dave has opted to take the ultimate action on gads of people, and while that is within his right to do (the action is not necessarily in question), the perception is a different story. The perception is that he is silencing those who disagree with him. Like Stalin did. Like Mao Zedong did. Like Fidel Castro did. Like the government of Myanamar is currently doing.

Dave’s inability to tolerate those in opposition to him flies in the face of his political fantasies of inclusion for everyone. Here’s a tweet where, in broad strokes, he paints the Republican party as racists. Another one where he quantifies the use of “average white person” as meaning “racist” - more broad strokes from a guy who demonstrates his own inability to get along with people.

Here’s what Dave needs to understand. While he is, without prejudice, responsible for many of the technologies we use today - RSS and blogs - he is past his time, out of touch with reality, and quite possibly a lunatic. His inability to behave in socially acceptable ways pushes him to the fringe of, not only the social and new media space, but civilized society as a whole. His knack for building technologies that someone else has created and calling them his own innovations - whether explicitly or implicitly) his getting tiresome. See Dave’s Twitter uptime monitor of May 23, 2008 vs. Pingdom’s report from Dec 19, 2007. Also see Dave’s decentralizing Twitter “idea” from May 4, 2008 is something I talked about on Twitter quite a bit months before he came up with his groundbreaking idea.

So Dave, instead of building silly apps that do nothing particularly fancy and using Comcast bandwidth, why don’t you go re-inherit your seat at the table and write a whitepaper/spec for decentralized Twitter. Think of it as a protocol, much like email, and go from there. It should include SMS gateways, APIs for handing messages around. And for a business plan, make the open APIs accessible via a pay model. You might be on to something then and it will allow you to be productive as opposed to squashing dissent and blocking people for no apparent reason.

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About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He is Business Development Manager for Lijit and he worked as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.