Anonymous asked:

Hey, whatever happened to floof? I feel like I remember you mentioning shelving it, but I don't remember why or where you left it. I liked reading your blog posts about it. Any retrospective insights?

aw man what a sad tale

ok well basically it was killed by three things

  1. i am never happy with anything i build and keep fiddling with it forever.  often before it’s actually finished.  this is not conducive to building a big complex project that can only succeed if lots of people use it.  it can be mediated by having other developers, but the dev team consisted only of a couple people poking at it in their spare time (a description which applies to me as well).
  2. there wasn’t a whoole lot of interest.  certainly not of the sort weasyl got before it had even launched, even though we had a public alpha and source code available.  i knew some artists who wanted to use it, but it never quite became clear what features were necessary to get artists to actually start using it, which left us with a chicken-and-egg problem of artists vs watchers blah blah.  basically i don’t like doing marketing or advertising and i didn’t have anyone else to do it for me.  which segues into:
  3. i slowly realized i don’t like most of the obvious target audience.  a great many furries are disproportionately entitled and gross and i didn’t really want to interact with them, let alone do community management things.  (consider, for example, that weasyl still actively supports posting art you bought rather than made.  who does that tell you the site is actually for?  this also led me into lots of arguments when trying to rewrite FA, as well as with the weasyl dev team later on.)  i could’ve, and wanted to, expanded the target audience—but to whom?  i know relatively few artists as it is, most of them are served well enough by DA, and the rest seem pretty satisfied with tumblr.

so there you go.  i still think we could do better than deviantart, and certainly far better than furaffinity.  but it’s hard to work on a project for which i’m not the target audience, i’m absolutely not the right person to do all the people things like hype generation and moderation, and i don’t know who would use it or how to convince them to try it.

supposedly weasyl wants to finish up floof sometime and switch to it, which ironically would’ve solved almost all of these problems if they’d said something before i burned out.  on the other hand they still haven’t shown any signs of actually starting to do that, nor talked to me about it since i first heard the idea.

at the moment i’m mostly working on things targeted at other developers, because that involves solving problems that actively irritate me.