[PopAlongKid]

Interesting comments about Dave Winer in the article.

I first became aware of him in the last year or two via a mention here on HN. Since then, I have been receiving and reading his daily blog post via email. (He claims his blog has been running longer than any other in existence, could be true). They guy is clearly smart and hard working, and has lots of ideas, many of which seem good. What he shares about his personal life is also interesting, I could imagine being friends with him if we were in close proximity.

However I also get the sense sometimes that he is a "legend in his own mind", to the detriment of the very technical causes he is promoting. He is fixated on writing tools such as "outliners" (MS Excel and Word have all the outlining features I have ever needed, which isn't very often), and whether or not RSS items need to have titles. The things he agonizes over are, I think, just background noise for most users, and his illustrious history in a niche area of Apple desktop computing decades ago doesn't really buy him anything in today's marketplace, to his (unstated) frustration.

[garyrob]

Dave was really a pioneer. In the early days of the Mac, he created an outliner called MORE which was a very innovative product for the time, which I immediately loved and used as the center of all my information-keeping. He sold it to Symantec for, as I understand it, a couple million dollars (probably twice that in today's money), but then it disappeared. (OmniOutliner, made by people with no relationship to Winer that I know of, carries on MORE's tradition.) Then he made a product called Frontier, which was a programming environment that never really took off. Then when the internet got critical mass he came up with RSS and that was obviously very useful and influential.

His claim to have had the first blog is probably true. I remember reading it way back then.

He's a bit of a prickly character, always has been.

[leejoramo]

And before MORE, he created Think Tank for PC and Apple 2.

I remember reading him say his first outliner was on a timeshare system in the 1970s, and he took inspiration from that Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos

[garyrob]

Man, I forgot Think Tank. I used that before MORE, but that was too friggin' long ago for me to remember without being reminded!!

[eduction]

This seems a little unfair, maybe unintentionally on your part. If you’ve been reading his blog long enough (and I don’t know the value of “long enough” since I’ve been reading so long) it becomes clear he situates new proposals and tools in into a ton of context - how he came to think this new thing would be useful. This involves discussing history. By necessity this disproportionately is his own professional / independent developer history. I find this approach generally refreshing and honest - most software emerges from a path dependent individual context but people tend to suggest they just developed the objectively best solution to a widespread problem. Dave tends to be more honest about scratching his own itch and the influence of his own history on how he approaches problems.

This approach can read as ego / bragging maybe, if you’re not familiar with it. “Why is he talking about his past projects so much,” etc. Well because it led into why he thinks the new project is a good idea.

Not to say he doesn’t have some ego like all people. He does want people to know for example that podcasts were a natural outgrowth of RSS, so natural he hand a hand in adding it himself despite not having an audio background. But his point is almost always that podcasting should stay open, not that he is some genius. If anythint he tends to encourage non developers (eg journalists) to be more involved in developing new standards.

(Also the “fixation” on blogs without titles is about the fact that RSS the standard is perfectly capable of carrying Twitter type items without titles, since it only specifies either a title or description as required - but feed readers mostly assume titles which has encouraged a heavyweight high effort concept of what a post is, to the advantage of closed platforms like Twitter and to the disadvantage of the RSS ecosystem. I think he has a very good point on this. These details matters. That they are “background noise” to many users - well so are most important technical details. Try getting most users to understand the difference between transport and end to end encryption for example. )

[ttepasse]

> He does want people to know for example that podcasts were a natural outgrowth of RSS, so natural he hand a hand in adding it himself despite not having an audio background.

In that he is right by the way: He had a back and forth with Adam Curry, I believe, about audio attachments, and as a result Winer added the enclosure element. Everything else about podcasts, the name, the MediaRSS extensions, the coopting by Apple, the iTunes directory and extensions, the professionalization, came later. Funnily enough Winer tends to think about his own podcasts more as a stream of consciousness voice memo than an edited product.

(Yes, I'm reading him that long. Like pretty much everyone, who reads him that long, I have mixed and complicated about him.)

[bachmeier]

> MS Excel and Word have all the outlining features I have ever needed, which isn't very often

This says more about you than it does about the usefulness of outliners. Not that that's bad, but it's important not to classify them as trivial just because you don't use them. Outlining software is exploding in popularity. Some examples include org-mode, Workflowy, Dynalist, Roam Research, Logseq, and Remnote. It's also fine to dislike DW, but it's not accurate to diminish his importance because you don't personally use outlining software.

[ttepasse]

For a view into 80s, 90s and early 2000s history of (mostly Mac) outliners, here is an article series:

http://www.atpm.com/Back/atpo.shtml

[genericacct]

Outlining is a crucial step in authoring most anything with substance, from essays to books and even project plans (most gantt software Will collapse subitems like an outliner)

My Guess Is mr Winer writes more than you do and therefore uses more outliners.

Besides, your argoment Is a major ad hominem, which makes a bit invalid.

(Apologies for the phone posting)

[AndySylvester01]

I included the information about Dave Winer in the article because (1) there have been problems in his products regarding rssCloud support for WordPress sites, which I wanted "on the record", and (2) I felt that his attitude toward "help" needs to be called out, otherwise people would not be aware, and have that context in reading his blog/side of the story. He mentions Automattic in his post on December 24th (http://scripting.com/2022/12/24/162940.html#a163527) regarding rssCloud work with WordPress, but it was really Andrew Shell (http://feedland.org/?item=880552) that did the work to make it happen.

[latchkey]

I've met Dave in person.

I've talked to Dave on the phone.

I've written an entire web server in Frontier.

I've been an absolute dick software engineer!

Dave is a dick.

Now, we can debate all day long about how/why/what, but it really doesn't matter. He is who he is and nobody is going to change that. The guy must be in his 70-80's at this point. After all these years, he's still treating people weirdly, it must be a personality tick of his.

We can decide if we want to work with him and his stuff, or not.

  "I've made a point of reaching out to old friends in the last few weeks to see if we can work together on any projects. So far most people are still wary of working with others, it seems." -Dave Winer

We can think of him like we do Steve Jobs (and based on his ego, that's my guess of what he wants). He built something that got people's attention, but treated people poorly in doing so.

We can also decide how we want to act towards others. Don't be like Dave.

[coldtea]

>He claims his blog has been running longer than any other in existence, could be true

Could very well be, remember reading his blog in the late 90s