I don’t run a huge publishing platform, but that doesn’t stop me from not caring when people plead for resolution of continuing issues. The most common plea is, “Can’t we get the platform stable, even if for a day?”
The second most often annoying plea I hear is, “Please, I’ll even settle for an hour of stability.”
I think these are possibly the tenth and eleventh pleas that I really don’t want to have to deal with, and really, why would I even want to hear ANY in the first place? If you take your writing somewhere else, someone will step up and give my platform more content. So, I really don’t give a damn. Here’s my list of difficult and important questions I have to answer before I can justify any of your sniveling my site administers bout the constant bugs and your time spent for the paltry few bucks and ego stroking “Atta Boys”:
- What is the goal of MY site and why should I care if it is constantly limping?
- In other words, if you ever catch it working 100%, what specific income will I incur (that’s ME, not YOU)?
- Who are I trying to please? If it’s the content provider, what the hell more do they want? They get all the ego stroking they need in the ranking drug the platform feeds them.
- How many people do I need on MY team? Can I get away with fewer, say at the overpaid and under-worked engineering level?
- Whose pockets am I trying to fill? Can I stuff more in all of them? Do I need to wear two pairs of pants, you know…..more pockets?
- What groups inside my platform can my team get to blindly publish content while the damn thing is broken?
- Are we really trying to fix it, or can we fool the sheep with smoke and mirrors?
- Are we telling a convincing enough story?
- Are we earning respect as the nuts and bolts rattle out?
- Are we trying to get folks to watch one hand while the other is hiding the brass ring?
- Do I actually want someone to post a chart that shows an amazing increase of visitors from outside, while we keep the payout to content providers the same or on the decrease? Well, maybe it doesn’t matter to sheep.
- Are we building a flock of sheep who will use the platform even if it is constantly broken?
- Do people find the platform souring in their mouth and should I really care?
- Is there an ongoing propaganda program?
- Is the platform part of a larger scheme to fill the pockets of the pants hanging in my closet?
- Do we want sheep to be able to bleat at us?
- How much content can we trick into our system and keep all the juice for ourselves?
- Who needs to fix the platform? Why?
- Do we ever really need to spend some of my pocket change to fix the platform?
- Why would we push showing up in the search engines? That just means my content providers will be spending time doing keyword research when they could be providing more content for the good of my platform.
- Do I really need to spend cash to fix the damn thing? Won’t the propaganda help with this?
And finally,
- Do the content providers really need to understand what this is all about, or is it good enough for them to be swallowed up by the popularity contest?
(Please note that is a complete satire wrought out of increasing frustration)