You know I'm a little surprised...but not really at the same time.

I read over a bunch of "leaked" journals/comments/skype conversations people had with Neer and while at least in his own mind he means well it's painfully obvious in practice he lacks the proper skills required to manage a large community-based website. In a way he treats it more like a business with a consumer-driven base which is not how it works in a website where the "product" is being provided by the people he is there to serve unlike a consumer-driven site such as Amazon.

Amazon is a good example given I used to work there in the Washington state call center in Tier 2 Kindle Support where I my primary function was technical support for Kindle devices and apps with other duties that included customer risk investigations (people committing fraud) and Kindle Special Projects (basically developing future models/improving current models) so I am well versed in the inner workings of Amazon and the bullshit that goes on in there especially from higher management.

One thing I'm noticing in Dragoneer's behavior is he has the exact same attitude as a typical operations manager. If you confronted an operations manager with problems you are not pleased with...well despite the so called "open door policy" in the 2.5 years I was there it was a semi-regular thing for associates to find themselves on the unemployment line after raising some serious concerns going on in the company. One such issue in particular was the rampant outsourcing that was happening in the US call centers. Our team leads (just a step below general managers) have access to headcount data in all of the call centers Amazon has on the planet. As the overseas ones went up, ours were steadily going down and we noticed more and more empty desks in the facility. As a matter of fact I lost my job on the Kindle Chat support team because "it wasn't frugal to keep it in the United States" as we were told. Despite the fact we were the top performing Kindle Chat team. ;)

3 people brought the outsourcing concerns to the ops manager for our department. About a week later they were gone. Later on I caught up with two of them randomly in town who explained that they were let go for "performance issues." That was a common theme even against team leads that were fired for the same reason who were more than qualified to be a general manager. Morale plummeted because you just didn't know if you were still going to have a job regardless of how well you did it.

Anyway... long story short.. Neer has this same attitude. You can raise concerns and what not but don't you dare criticize him or the site publicly. Doing so means you are creating "drama" for the organization and must be removed if you won't shut up. Doing such things on social media while employed at Amazon can also get you fired (if caught) as well and use the NDA against you as the reasoning for it. The NDA is more of a cop-out than anything and in the business world one way of avoiding to pay out unemployment benefits to those that critique the company because they tend to spin it as you are providing internal information and therefore in violation of the NDA. The more practical use of NDAs really stems from upholding trade secrets and upcoming product. Never really been a fan of those things anyway. Too many secrets going around. :P

I don't buy Dragoneer's excuse that the NDA is just to protect user data. Yeah no it's also a tool to keep mods/admins in line and an unarguable reason to dismiss people from the team. Though reading about misplaced pages is certainly concerning and a judge would tear his ass a new one with how that issue appears to have been handled. He clearly has very little understanding of the law if he thinks you can provide an incomplete document for people to sign and then expect a court to enforce it because he provided the missing parts after the fact. It would be fascinating to see him enforce one in a court, honestly. It's just pretty sad because I'm reading through this stuff and all I see is the exact same corporate bullshit both he and I had to deal with at Amazon. It's also ironic because he and I discussed why he quit Amazon and his reasoning was the same bullshit he is guilty of in his capacity as an FA admin: a shitty manager. I don't doubt him that he wants the site to work out and that he cares about the fandom but his actions where it matters most do not back that desire up.

The dude needs to either take a course in business and human relations or just step down before that site is beyond any shred of saving. The site may be corporate owned now but it's "product" does not come from anything they create or purchase. It's all provided by the user-base itself. They get their funds via the advertising and whatever scam/fundraiser they do. Without the content the community provides there is no point to that site at all just as with no customers there is no point in a site like Amazon. However, without a solid structure to uphold the organization (i.e. employees/mods/admins) then it will collapse on itself and people will simply go elsewhere. FA has a very clear structural problem going on and Neer is at the heart of it. What's frustrating is he had the power to change that but he sold it to the highest bidder and even to this day lets his temper get in the way of his professionalism which in turn is perpetuating the deteriorated structure of FA.

This liberal use of the ban hammer too is concerning. I mean even if you violate a policy at Amazon or are even flat out prosecuted (theft, violating NDA in a serious situation, etc) they don't ban you from using the services they offer. Your employment is gone, sure but you can still shop the site, post to the "forums", buy hosting services, sign up for IMDB.com, etc etc etc. I can't help but to wonder if it's best to try and salvage FA or just let it go much like what happened with Furnation and VCL in Pre-FA days.

it just proves that FA is a rickety old wooden thing pretending to be a bridge and Neer is basically like a corrupted Roman emperor (complete with lapdogs)