[pupppet]

Easy to go after Disney for this, but did Nate have to sell to ESPN to begin with?

I've been burned too many times subscribing to services that go to shit because the owner wanted their payday. Let's stop (only) blaming the buyer.

[applfanboysbgon]

He literally said he made the wrong choice by choosing ESPN, so he's in agreement with you.

[panda888888]

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.

[applfanboysbgon]

It wouldn't have been a business to begin with if he didn't sell it. At the time, it was just a blog driving a modest amount of ad revenue. Partnering with bigger outfits allowed him to hire staff and cover more ground, something that he could never do without outside investment. He has since returned to blogging, which to my understanding drives enough revenue for himself and exactly one assistant.

I replied to your comment, and now you've replied to two other threads I've commented in reiterating that Nate is a sore loser who deserves what he got and he should have expected this. To be honest, it sounds like you have some kind of personal grievance with him. His post doesn't come off like he wasn't expecting this outcome, or that it's devastating him. He mentions that he is significantly happier now having gone back to blogging than he was at Disney. It's just a blog post, about a big era of his life, which is now over with. He's human. He can feel disappointed that 15 years of his work was taken offline, and reminisce about the ways things went wrong, both on his and his employer's end.

[panda888888]

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.

[pupppet]

The focus of the stories making the rounds about this are not about Nate having made some mistake, they're about big bad Disney deleting someone's work (which yes is also true).