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What Furaffinity is doing wrong:
12 years ago
General
One of the things about running a site is you have to care about it. I don't mean just caring about how you look or how popular it makes you, but caring about it. Caring about the community, caring that justice is done, that problem are removed from the populace, that bugs are fixed, caring that it thrives, even if people hate your guts for that caring.
You can't afford to slip into apathy when you run a site, you end up in that, you'll spend the rest of your time playing catch up as problem after problem drowns you. You need to be pro-active and dynamic, you need to care.
Some of us can afford to slack off for a couple of months, we're supported by excellent teams who can pick up for us when we're burned out by too much caring, but a site that isn't built on a strong team united by someone who cares? It's a mess quite frankly.
Furaffinity is one of those sites, a mess.
Quite frankly, I don't think Dragoneer care that much about the site currently, perhaps because he's inexperienced in what it takes to make a great site leader and disillusioned because of it, perhaps because he hasn't surrounded himself with reliable strong staffers who will ease his workload rather than add to it and so is overwhelmed by all the potential work and instead hides from it, perhaps because FA is a vanity project to him? Only he knows which one of them it is if not all three.
He stumbles in place like someone whose forgotten there's a wide world out there beyond the tiny treadmill that measures FA's sad and slow plod of existence. There's no heights of wonder or grandeur in that plod, it never goes anywhere beyond keeping a very dim bulb on.
The site is poorly run, it's finances are a mess, I am not even a programmer but I know that FA burns through new hardware faster than it should and requires more cash injections from it's members than it should. I could think of a dozen or more ways to make FA turn a profit, currently I doubt it does.
It's staff team are a confusing mishmash of people some of whom are not suitable for the jobs they're tasked with, others who are simply poorly trained and others who are simply struggling to do a good job given the organisation issues. It's headed by someone who is inconstant and frequently distracted by the next new shiny thing, who really really needs someone to provide stability, and who doesn't have that person.
It has no clear mission really, beyond "be a site" and "make dragoneer popular", hardly definitive objectives. It has no decent programming team, largely because I suspect that dragoneer doesn't play well with others and requires someone who could smooth over those fractures and get the teams working in the same direction without the bickering, infighting and confusion that has reigned to date.
It doesn't have a competent marketing team to tackle things like advertising and it really really needs one from what I've heard. Dragoneer tries to do it, which then further takes away from his time to do the things a site owner should be doing.
I could go on but to be frank Neer really isn't good at what he does. What he needs is a reliable team to take on the work and to free him up to be the 'face' of FA without him having to step into waters where he doesn't have the experience to navigate and is reluctant to do so because of how often he screws up and how hard the community comes down on him for it.
He needs a general manager who is a people person and who can manage people working on things without Neer having to say more than "do this".
He needs a head of programming who can manage a team. Which is not easy because managing programmers is sometimes a little like herding cats.
He needs everyone to have a specific task, currently everyone ends up doing a little of everything, the result is a wild mishmash of admining and inconsistent responses, that only infuriates the site members.
He needs team leaders who will train new staff and watch for trouble in the ranks so the site isn't constantly tackling months old problems that exploded when they could have been nipped in the bub months ago.
He needs a consistent long term plan, I don't think blind flailing counts as one.
He needs a face team who can handle advertising, appealing to members and damage control when things mess up.
In short, if this place was a business, it would be fucking bankrupt already. The only thing keeping FA going is the fact that it was the first and largest furry dedicated site of it's kind. It won't die overnight but as more and more viable rivals rise, it'll be bled away a cut at a time unless Dragoneer drastically and massively changes the structure.
Unfortunately, it's easy to get defensive and I think the number of problems are really overwhelming right now and without a complete redo of the site from the ground up it's pretty hard to know where to start. Still, I do hope that improvements do gradually occur, because the site really has the userbase potential to be of quality and profitable.
I doubt we will get improvements, because they're going to keep on building on broken code, and he needs a strong well trained team really to start a new build.
Yes you could say a lot of the problem lies with the fandom and how a lot of people bicker and cause problems from the simplest things, but at the same time it's not hard to deal with a lot of the problems. Like I've heard a lot of times from a lot of people there's the always simple block feature. But when that doesn't work or something flairs up something should be done about it.
As you said as well a lot of what it seems like anymore is a popularity contest for him. That's also why I refuse to go to FAU. Because all I see it as is him to get even more attention from people. Along with from what I've heard from others it's not run that well and I seem to remember him posting a journal about walking around drunk for most of the con instead of running it. And picking the admins he has now it's much of a step up from some of the ones that were on here being problematic. I'm sorry, but his wife has no reason to be on the admin staff and should not be. Because if something happens or something goes on action will not be taken against her. Same thing goes for reappointing people in secret and then up and showing them after people have found out about it. And again making up another excuse as to why it hadn't been made public yet. You can't make an admin staff of friends and then expect to not say/do something against them when something happens.
Like you said there's a reason why this site is going down the shitter. But there's also a reason why people stay around. Mine anymore is just to watch this ship sink and burn. Because it's more or less a matter of time anymore till it happens. The only reason it's still floating is because people either don't know or care about the problems and support the site/dragoneer no matter what. Hence why when they need some kind of equipment they usually get it. Even though that's the last thing the site needs. But what do I know. Because according to that little suckup journal I'm basically an idiot.