Frustration & Growing Pains

So, I don’t know when I began, but I’ve been really into a website for the past couple weeks. Even as I link to it, I’m hesitant to link to http://750words.com/ because the reason that I’m writing a blog post is that 750Words is currently down.

The thing I love about the site is that it’s completely private and I can jot down any thoughts or musings into a website and it’s not publically accessible.  I know that anything you put on the internet is ‘public’, but I’m not worried about hackers or data miners trying to get at private blog postings comparing ‘Avatar’ to ‘Hurt Locker’.  We’re not talking about big secrets here or anything, but as the site isn’t a publishing platform, I’m much less prone to self-censorship when I’m writing about who pissed me off or writing derogatory remarks about something I didn’t like.  No self-filter which encourages more writing.  More writing, about anything, is a good thing… right?  I mean, I’m putting up a blog posting just to get these thoughts and frustrations vented so that’s gotta be a good thing, right?

So now the bad.  I dunno what hit me but as I was reading the websites FAQ, I was really moved about the whole coffee shop patronage metaphor and…  OK, so as a quick aside, I don’t typically purchase small bits of software.  I buy large packages that I’m going to use everyday, but given the choice between the free scrabble-esque app loaded with ads and the ad-free version for $2.99, I lean towards the free app and just ignore the ads.  BTW, iPhone & iPod Touch people, Words with Friends is Hella-fun.  Go start up a game with ‘GilbertErik’.  Anyways, I can put up a filter and not pay much attention to marketing and advertising and I’m making a choice to be a stingy, penny-pincher or whatever.  (Actually, I think my personal bias is more against the Apple App Store ecosystem, but that’s something for another blog post.) 

So I was reading this FAQ on the website talking about how he buys cups of coffee as a patron of the coffee shop and he encouraged people to buy him ‘virtual cups of coffee’ to help him pay for and make some money on the site and… It was a mix of the coffee shop metaphor (and me making more coffee at home) and the tone of the petition for assistance and probably the amount of caffeine coursing through my veins, but I decided to Paypal the dude some cash.  (I think it was also related to a background project I’m trying to spin up with friends at work to reproduce a simple online game we used to play back in the day).  So I don’t typically support small developers, but I thought, since this was a replacement for therapy, sending a few bucks to support the guy who made this little typing platform.

It really does some cool things.  Check out the statistics it provides on each days entry that you type.  It’s worth a few bucks for me to have a place to open up emotionally, dump out all the random thoughts that bug me in the middle of the night or that distract me right in the middle of a good conversation with Erin.  It’s neat, and the value I get out of someone gluing all these stats together and putting together clean, elegant visualization should be rewarded.  My cheap therapy is how I typically refer to it around the house.

The site is something that I like. I’ve even convinced my mom to give it a shot. I find it having value so I decided to ‘become a patron’.  As such, when I go to the website and there’s some simple problem, I get a little frustrated.  Actually, I get a lot frustrated.  Probably exponentially more so because I decided to pay for it. I think it’s the mental divide between the increased scrutiny we put on things that a free and things that we’ve purchased, for whatever small sum.  If I wasn’t paying for it, I’d just chalk it up to growing pains and be done with it.

To the guy’s credit, he did just start the site in December and it got featured at lifehacker.com by the ex-Editor in Chief in February.  As such, he’s probably had a huge surge of users and has had to learn work on scaling up and increased serverload.  It’s hard to blame him, but I’ve got the American ‘customer service’ mentality where everything I pay for should come with a money-back guarantee if anything goes wrong with it.  I think I really need to wrap my brain around this new economy of buying services instead of products.