Glenn Kelman

Glenn Kelman: Anyone noticed how nasty the TechFlash comments have gotten lately? When I first arrived in Seattle after 17 years away, I was at a low point in my life, working for a company I hadn’t founded in a market I didn’t understand. It was this community that helped me find my way.

Aaron Finn pulled me aside to explain how display ads really work. Udai Shekawat, I remember, had to spell out what SEM stood for on a hike to Snow Lake. And the great Brad Silverberg – if there was a baseball card for software geniuses, I’d have his rookie card -- invited me to his house for an otherwise lonely holiday.

Later, after Redfin had picked a fight with the whole real estate industry, and our blog posts were routinely attacked by Realtors out for blood, I thought, “Now these people, these people are animals.” I was relieved by the certainty that the folks in tech were my people. I had your back -- I still do -- and you had mine.

Well now the civilized conversations are happening on the real estate blogs, and we’re the ones tearing each other part.

Flickr photo via A. Wing

In fact, our we isn’t much of a we at all anymore. Folks are sitting on the sidelines of a history-making game -- software in the Internet era – dismayed that they haven’t tried something on their own, convinced that anyone who has is an undeserving fraud.

What makes it worse is that they’re right: most entrepreneurs are undeserving. It’s hard to say anyone deserves to make a million dollars when most folks hardly scrape by, especially when a big reason we make that money is luck: lightning strikes twice only for the gods.

Meanwhile, the ups and downs of mere mortals have become our theater, with an anonymous Greek chorus of chicken****t commenters going after Marcelo Calbucci, Martin Tobias, Ignition, Wetpaint, Isilon -- anyone who fails or succeeds or stands out along the way.

The commentary resembles nothing so much as an 11-year-old’s glee at watching his friend get mangled on Halo. Except these are real people. And since this is a small town, I know all the people being attacked. You do too. And nobody says a word.

And that’s the part that really bothers me, the way the rest of us just stand there.

Almost every time I read TechFlash, it reminds me of a letter from the illusionless Madame du Deffand, correspondent to Voltaire, participant in royal orgies.

"One is surrounded by weapons and by enemies,” she wrote, “and the people we call our friends are merely the ones we know would not themselves murder us, but would merely let the murderers have their way."

Why don’t we stand up for one another more? A handful of TechFlash readers dance on every grave they come across, and we all just look away. This is not to say that anyone is above criticism. And sometimes, the emperor really has no clothes.

I know what it’s like to feel that the whole business world is like that, that it’s all full of fakes.

In my most desperate moments I have felt despair: covered in what that crazed, doomed attorney in Michael Clayton described as a patina of shit, or buried in a daily baloney avalanche, with teeth and splotches of hair in it too but no eyes or ears.

So much of the business world is a club you don’t belong to, where yahoos lie or scheme and get paid for it. And it implicates you. I know you feel that way because I do too sometimes. That’s why you write these comments.

But -- the hatred, the contempt -- for people you’ve never even met, in big-time jams that you yourself may never have to face -- I don’t get it. It has a real cost.

Set aside the fact that dishing it out makes you miserable. It ruins everything else too.

I write boring blog posts now. I don’t like to think out loud. I start hoping for comments and then dread them too. Basically, I sometimes find that I’ve stopped listening. And so have we all. We perish, each alone.

And if I think that, everybody does. Just look at me: I never get my work done and still night-walk from blog to blog leaving comments nobody reads.

One of my closest friends continually asks why I mix it up out there and the answer is that I can’t stop believing that you can somehow help me, that the back-and-forth is how we figure things out, how we get to the truth no one has the heart to say to my face -- I always hope that one insightful comment can avert whatever tragedy of hubris or miscalculation I’m headed for.

The comments I hate the most are usually at least half right.

But things have gotten so nasty lately that we cannot even see to see; we can only score points. Most of us would rather just quit. Well I don’t want to quit.

John Cook talks about a comment-registration system as the answer, which will help.

And it will probably help too if he takes on the role of a community leader who engages commenters – just look at how Fred Wilson guides the conversation on his blog -- rather than as the author of a series of newspaper articles lowered twice daily into a free-fire zone.

Photo via Rotten Tomatoes

I don’t know how John will wade into it while maintaining his journalistic commitment to remaining absent from the story, though I think he has to try.

But the real answer has to be that all of us just start acting like civilized human beings.

This means taking responsibility for what you say, unless you’re a whistleblower who fears reprisal, by using your real name. And it means too when you see something nasty and wrong that you leave a comment of your own to counter it.

My wife went to a school with a strong Quaker tradition of earnest discussion and dissent; the main forum for this dissent was a wood-and-cork bulletin board with comments written on scraps of paper, each signed by the student; if anyone ever posted an anonymous note, it was immediately surrounded by ten other notes from students outraged by the anonymity.

The modern equivalent of that bulletin board is now AVC, with 100+ comments per post, all arguing with one another, but in a civil way. It has become a much nicer place to be than TechFlash.

Which doesn’t mean it’s boring! We don’t have to be mealy-mouthed wusses.

My favorite poet in college was the famously disagreeable Ezra Pound – not a wuss --who was tried for treason immediately after World War II and probably deserved to be convicted. Instead, he went crazy in an open-air cage in Pisa, and wrote a poem excoriating himself for his own meanness.

As the poem winds up toward a frenzied climax of self-hate, Pound found one thing to hang his hat on – which I have clung to the rest of my life:

How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
               Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
               I say pull down.
 
But to have done instead of not doing
               This is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
          To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
this is not vanity.
     Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

The point is that even if we can bring ourselves to renounce a little nastiness, we shouldn’t give up whatever passion stirred the pot in the first place.

There the error would be all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered. So let’s get on with it! Just remember that we are all more delicate than we pretend to be.

Editor's note: TechFlash is in the process of implementing a new commenting system that will include a simple, universal log-in mechanism. We hope to have that running later this summer.

Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker. Opinions expressed in guest posts are those of their authors, and don't necessarily reflect the views of TechFlash or its staff.