This is not to say I didn’t miss Textism when it disappeared. Dean made me want to write, and to write code, and to write both well. The site and its author shaped a part of me. I’m grateful for that, and I grieved a little when they went offline, but the memories of that starting point are enough. Dean never owed me anything. I took it as the gift it was — free, no strings, liable to disappear in a minute.

The medium makes no guarantee what’s here today will be here tomorrow. There’s nothing permanent about digital technology. These tools were built for storing data and for changing data, and change means modifying and overwriting and deleting. The destructive mechanism is in the tools. It’s half of what they’re made to do. We don’t have much ground to complain when that functionality is actually used.

I don’t care what Dean does or doesn’t do to the sites he makes or the communities they foster. I care that so many people lack the will to let them go. He proved his point about dependence by taking Favrd down, and I think behind that point, there’s a larger point left to be made about permanence and the web.

It’s as if … my favorite magazine stopped publishing. And all back issues were destroyed. I hate losing access to content.

So do I. In theory, everything published on the web stays on the web. In practice, great content goes away every day. Often, it can’t be helped—for instance, when a company or organization fails, it’s unreasonable to expect that they’ll keep their content online. It’s annoying, though, when content disappears that didn’t have to. And this has always been my beef with my old pal Dean. By my lights, he creates some of the most interesting content on the web—and for that, I am grateful. But he has a tendency to pull the plug just as things are getting interesting, and this will always bother me, whether it’s his right to do so or not.

In the case of Favrd, there are plenty of people and organizations who would have kept it going if we had been approached. But enough about that.

As to people begging for stars, gaming the system, etc., I had no idea any of that was going on, and I can see how it would (a). make Favrd a drag for Dean to maintain and (b.) make it less fun for readers and participants.

It should come as no surprise. Leaderboards on the web inevitably stimulate needy behavior.

Leaderboards are radioactive; they don’t stimulate certain kinds of undesirable behavior among certain needy individuals; they actually change industries and create (and destroy) fortunes. Consider how Digg has created an all-or-nothing paradigm in terms of page views, escalated news organizations’s already troubling tendency to dig up scandal instead of actual news in order to pander to the LCD and get the most ad views, and so on. Love it, hate it, or anything in-between, Digg has changed the news industry.

Favrd was no Digg, but as a leaderboard, it inevitably triggered certain behaviors among some participants. I wouldn’t compare them to needing drugs—no one who has needed drugs would—but I can understand seeing these behaviors as unhealthy, and wishing to disassociate oneself from a product that encouraged them.

The trouble, of course, is that plenty of people enjoyed Favrd as a form of entertainment and a game—it helped some of us understand, and others of us explain, what Twitter might be good for—and to have it taken from us because some people “couldn’t handle it” feels wrong and sad to me.

But enough, and more than enough.

I enjoyed reading Favrd for a good belly laugh and I’m sorry it’s gone. I agree that ephemeral content (Geocities, anyone?) is a problem – Favrd was like my library of funny things, and my own Favrd page was my little record that even I said some pretty funny things at times. It made me feel good.

Some people were getting pretty annoying in their begging for gold stars from their followers – pitiful, really. There was a simple solution to that: UNFOLLOW. Those same people had such needy egos, however, that they also used services to tell them who unfollowed – and would DM you to ask why… ugh. There is a good reason Twitter doesn’t inform you of these things! I finally got so tired of being in the endless cocktail party of the “Favrd crowd” that I created a new ID and started over. Because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by unfollowing. So I abandoned @naturallygeeky and started @naturallygeeky2.

So… I guess in some ways I’m a little relieved that Favrd is gone, but those people will find another Favrd and the endless cocktail party will continue. I just fell in with the wrong crowd and couldn’t hold my own in the funny one-up-manship game, so it’s my own fault, not Favrd’s.

In most other ways I’m very disappointed that yet another good site with user generated content has simply vanished. It’s as if I went to the library and one of my favorite books was removed. Or a better metaphor is that my favorite magazine stopped publishing. And all back issues were destroyed. I hate losing access to content.

I get your frustration with waking up one day to find Favrd shuttered and it’s content hidden, I hope that there is some way the archival content can be open sourced, some great times in there, an awesome juried collection. It seems wrong to hide it away, something like burning books. Should be in public domain for sure.

If somebody’s wasting a lot of time and accruing a lot of bad vibe because they’re spending their time seeing if people like their little e-quips, then perhaps they are happy that’s been taken away from them. No, it’s not as bad as drug addiction, but that doesn’t mean it’s not something that’s grated them in a way so that they’re relieved it’s gone. And flame all you want at the people saying you should be happy for the time Favrd gave you: Everything stops eventually, and if you enjoyed the ride then maybe you should focus on that. The fact that you’re getting so angry/irritated at this maybe says you should take a step back, remember all the other communities that’ve closed down that you miss today, and start looking ahead to the next vibrant, witty, joyous gathering. Hell, start one: Figure out how to appeal to all the folks you miss and get them clapping each other on the back.

@Dean, because nobody else has said anything: I know Jeff was getting pissed off at somebody on the last comment thread regarding Favrd. Brett Trout says:

Passing off Favrd to another host would have been easy. Enabling a junkie is easy too.

To which Jeff says:

Have you ever done so? Have you ever been one? Some analogies are so off the mark from the reality, they perhaps should not be made.

@The guys who don’t understand that a word [social, friend, communicate] can mean two different things in two different contexts: Sometimes a “seal” is a flippered animal. Sometimes a “seal” is something that holds something closed. This doesn’t mean that any use of the former somehow violates or cheapens the latter.

My nephew, who is almost four, likes to play with his plastic cars, but he understands that they aren’t the same as the car he rides in, even though he uses the same word to refer to them. Is his car not real? Of course it’s real. There it is in his little hand, he plays with it, talks with it, does toddler physics experiments with it, loves it. Sometimes he takes a car along to play with when he rides in the car.

Some of my facebook friends really are my friends, in real life. Sometimes they are real-life friends with whom I have no other current correspondence or communication, but our facebook interactions–like two busy suburban neighbors smiling at each other over the fence and taking time to ask a few brief, superficial questions–demonstrate that we are in each other’s thoughts on a regular basis and that we care enough to have some small, digital communication, and that we hope to have more, real-life communication when it’s feasible. Some of my facebook friends are people I have dinner and coffee with several times a week, talk to on the phone, and email one-on-one when discussing matters we don’t care to air before the whole world.

I don’t feel my real-life friendships are cheapened in any way by the addition of an online dimension. In fact, they often facilitate our getting together in real life.

I have other facebook “friends” whom I’ve never met, but with whom I’ve shared enough conversation that I feel I know them a little bit and that I’d be thrilled to meet them in real life. Is that fake? Well, let’s say mutual-friend R, instead of facilitating my online socializing and writing-project-sharing with my new fbook friend S, had simply told me stories about her, recounted examples of her brilliant wit, assured me we’d crack each other up and respect each other. Would my interest in meeting her be fake then?

Meanwhile, I spend roughly 40 hours a week working with people who don’t know me nearly as well. There’s nothing tragic or phony or inappropriate about that: my office-mate doesn’ t really need to know my sordid history of drug abuse and recovery or my tedious little heartbreaks or the emotional trauma of the month in my circle of friends and family. We get along fine, like and respect each other, make each other laugh from time to time, but we don’t have the kind of professional relationship that leads to that kind of intimate friendship. The belief that every social, work, or casual relationship must either be as thoroughly honest, intimate, and intense as our dearest friendships or else be superficial or cheap is a characteristic of the adolescent, willing to limit the world to those people he likes and cares about.