panda888888

19 subjects? I'll disregard the results. That's not a big enough sample size to be meaningful.

If you read the article, it said it was a 4 hour drive in a rural area. Too much risk of bleeding out, even if you're in an ambulance.

The concept of an ontology is really simple: thing - relationship - thing. Example: peanut butter - goes well with - jelly.

This is in contract to a taxonomy, which is hierarchical:

(upper-level category): Sandwiches

(sub-type): peanut butter & jelly

(sub-type): grilled cheese

(sub-type): BLT

(upper-level category): Soups

(sub-type): tomato

(sub-type): chicken noodle

Taxonomies are kinda boring because they're just hierarchical lists.

Ontologies are cool; the relationships are usually the important thing.

Eh, maybe. I feel like once you're a sellout, the situation is out of your hands. As a founder, you have to accept that, or you shouldn't sell the business in the first place. Or you could structure some very strict buyout terms, I suppose.

Companies pay obscene amounts of money all the time for things don't end up using. Google does it all the time. Was Disney acting a fool here? Absolutely. But is it within their rights to do so? Also yes. (I'm actually kinda surprised they didn't sunset it sooner, since I don't think it was making much money.)

I guess I read the tone of his blog post a little differently than you did. I basically interpreted it as boiling down to "disney sucks" and while he did admit to making some mistakes, IMO he didn't take nearly enough personal responsibility for the situation ending up with what we have today. I can empathize because it obviously is a disappointing result, but I interpreted the blog post as basically a complaint against his ex-employer (a "how could they have done this!" type of thing), not as a mature reflection that recognizes that he himself effectively caused this result. If he had said, "I shouldn't have been a sellout to ANY big corp," I'd feel differently.

Maybe it's just a stylistic choice, but if this happened to me, I wouldn't write a long post about it. I'd tweet, "They deleted the archive; what a sad end to this chapter of my life" (or something like that to let the world know what happened & that I was disappointed), but I wouldn't write a long rant. Maybe a short blog post, maybe.

I don't view his post as useful or insightful, but instead view it as demonstrating a lack of understanding of normal business practices. It's like he didn't anticipate that this could happen, whereas it's always a risk when you sell out. The exact same thing has happened to lots of other small blog/media outlets, like Kara Swisher's Re/code. This isn't an unexpected situation, but he's acting like it is. And that simply demonstrates a lack of maturity.

Sore losers absolutely complain. It's one of the biggest traits of being a sore loser.

A mature person would be disappointed, vent to their close friends/spouse, and then shut up about it. They wouldn't publish a long blog post to air their grievances.

You hit the nail on the head with your last sentence -- he agreed to sell to a big corp, and this is the kind of thing big corps do. I get that it's unfortunate, but this is the kind of thing you have to anticipate when you sell a business.

Yes, but he's failing to see the big picture. Selling any small company to any big company leads to this risk. To hold water, his argument should be: "we shouldn't have sold the business at all," not "we shouldn't have sold to ESPN."

I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a startup. I don't have much sympathy.

I agree, and am getting downvoted in other comments for this position. If you sell a small company to a giant one, there's a major risk that they will sunset your work. It's the risk Nate knowingly took on when he sold the company.

No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser.

(Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)

I guess I feel like Nate should have anticipated this situation. By choosing to sell his company to a big conglomerate, this is the type of risk he opened himself up to. ABC/Disney certainly isn't blameless here, but this is the risk that any smaller company takes on when they get acquired. (The exact same thing happens to the startups that Google buys and then sunsets 12 months later.)

I can easily see the argument that once an election is over, people don't read the content anymore. Granted, storage is cheap so this is kinda silly, but I bet the old articles weren't getting very much traffic.

I wrote this exact comment elsewhere on the thread and got downvoted for it. Business is business! It sucks for Nate but he's acting like a sore loser, when this is a totally normal and expected outcome. Businesses acquire other businesses and sunset them all the time. Zero sympathy from me.

I view Nate as basically acting like a sore loser here, which is why I find it unprofessional. I'm not arguing that we should clamp down on free speech or anything like that.

If a company wants to buy another company and sunset it, that's a normal business practice. I get that it's disappointing, but in no way is this "mistreatment." At least to me, this is a perfectly normal business situation that doesn't merit this level of complaining. It reads as an ex-employee being petty.