I am constantly fighting an internal battle. Do I post a scathing review of a company which has made themselves an easy target for criticism, or do I stand down? Just because I know something sucks doesn’t mean I should call attention to it, right? However in recent weeks I have done exactly that and ultimately, I believe I sacrificed my own values. Before you begin to release tears of pity for me though, let me share a note with you.

The Founding Of This Site

When I first started this blog over 3 and a half years ago, I was able to attract the support of developers who I emailed regularly and interviewed for the site. “Developers” can be interchanged with the word “entrepreneur” as the Facebook Platform started off with a bunch of college students and part-time developers who built highly successful applications. While those days are partially gone, the thing which I sometimes forget is that we were founded on the basis that the entrepreneurs are the heroes. Over the years though I’ve occasionally forgotten that.

Over the past few weeks that perspective has been lost on a number of instances in articles I personally published on this site. I’m not going to link back to those articles as they’ve all been pulled (or will be if they haven’t).

Positive Criticism
A comment that a very well known investor in Facebook told me on drinks one day was that they try to provide “positive criticism” to the company, including Mark Zuckerberg. At the time, I hadn’t realized the importance of the statement. My only interpretation was that some of my posts could sometimes be interpreted as attacks, or at the least, politically treacherous. For the longest time I’ve felt that this area was a great area to navigate as the traffic numbers on my site always experienced spikes as I navigated the murky waters. Instead, I think it was nothing more than an abuse of this site.

Be The Leader You Want To See

Ghandi has an infamous quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” In other words it’s much easier to criticize those in power than to actually bring about change yourself. However on occasion, I’ve crossed the line into criticizing the entrepreneurs who are essentially leading by example, and attempting to create the change that they want to see. While I can articulate on this site the change that I’d personally like to see on Facebook or within applications, slamming the heroes that this site was developed around is not going to push us in the right direction. Additionally slamming products outright without any feedback for improvement is not going to benefit anybody either.

As such I’d like to formerly offer an apology to those entrepreneurs who read our site. Moving forward I’ll set a different precedent, “Be the leader that I want to see”. That leader doesn’t attack the heroes. And at some point in the future when I see a product that just isn’t executing it right, who knows, I may end up creating the change in those products that I’d like to see, just as you are doing now.

Update
Check out this post which explains how negative posts gain much more attention.