I don't want to speak in absolutes, because absolutes are unrealistic and "we will never shut down or change policies!" is a promise that is so impossible to guarantee that just the mere act of someone making it is enough in my eyes to file them as making pie-in-the-sky promises and therefore untrustworthy! So instead, let me talk a bit about how we roll, which I hope will let you appropriately calibrate your risk tolerance. :) You may already know a lot of this, but I figure it's worth a repeat and it'll be good for anybody else who's reading the comments!
* The site (and its associated LLC) is owned by me and mark -- that's it. Upside: we're the only ones who can change policies or decide to shut down and run off cackling with everyone's data trailing merrily behind us. Downside: progress/development can sometimes get slow when we're both held up. (He's got a dayjob and a young kid; I'm hella disabled.)
* We have two part time contractors to back us up: Jen is my backup, and Robby is Mark's. That increases the chance that progress will not grind *completely* to a halt when we're both held up, and -- more importantly -- it means that there's much better chances that somebody will be available to fix an urgent problem if it happens. Or, let's face it, "when" it happens, because there's no such thing as an uncrashable system.
* All of us (me and Mark, and Jen and Robby) have been working in tech for a long time. (Over twenty years in my case, actually, which blows my freaking mind sometimes.) So, even though it's just us, "it's just us" encompasses a lot of professional and technical experience, and we put that experience -- and, more importantly, the knowledge of "what not to do because it caused problems last time" -- into our work here, on both technical and social levels. In short: you can pretty much have confidence that we know what we're doing.
* When Mark and I started DW, we had a number of very (*very*) long talks about how we wanted to run the site, what we wanted it to be like, and -- most importantly for your questions -- whether or not we were on the same page about things like content policies, development philosophy, core ethical principles, etc. We agreed then, and most importantly, we still agree even after ten years of doing this. We believe that DW should remain independent, should never accept advertising and venture capital because it changes the entire dynamic of a site and what a site's acceptable content policies should be, and should only place restrictions on what users could post if those restrictions were required by US law, and neither of us forsee those beliefs changing in the future!
* Part of those pre-launch (and even pre-announcement) talks involved our commitment to radical business transparency -- that we should always explain what we're doing and why, and that anybody can ask questions and get an answer. We've tried our best to uphold that over the last decade, and while we aren't always perfect at it, we try our absolute hardest. We wrote down our guiding principles back then at the beginning, and while you'll have to check with people who've been here for a while to see how well we've been able to uphold them, they still apply today.
* We do have some evidence of walking the walk, though -- back when we were first starting, PayPal suspended our ability to accept user payments until and unless we implemented additional content restrictions such as disallowing "adult content" (they meant sex, people always mean sex when they use that phrase). Instead of doing that, we went without any income at all for 3 months while we set up an alternative, and we'd be prepared to do that again if we had to.
I can't promise we'll never change policies -- we may have to, for any one of a number of reasons. I can promise that if we do, we'll tell you with as much notice as we can give, solicit feedback ahead of time if it's not an urgent change stemming from some outside factors, and tell you the reasoning behind why we have to make changes instead of waving around some bullshit like "making these changes to empower the vibrant community blah blah blah" (and that we'll listen to your feelings about the changes, carefully think about any problems that people foresee, and change anything that we can change if you convince us we got it wrong). You can read back through dw_news for some examples, if you want!
Likewise, I won't promise that we'll never shut down -- I can think of a few scenarios where we would have to, unlikely though they might be. Mark and I have our backups in Robby and Jen, and we discussed ahead of time what we'd do if one of us had to step back from day-to-day operations of the site for a while; we have a really strong volunteer community who helps with things like support, and we're open source and our volunteers contribute a lot to site development. But even if we've tried to reduce the chances, we are as vulnerable to the good old "what if both your company principals get hit by a bus at the same time" hypothetical as any two-person LLC would be, and progress does slow when both he and I have less time and energy to put to things.
We're also entirely user-funded, and while it hasn't been a problem in the last ten years (or rather, it was only a problem when we had three months of not being able to take payments due to PayPal fuckery), it's certainly possible that someday, we wouldn't be able to afford to keep the site running. If that should ever happen, though, we've got a number of contingency plans that we could activate, none of which involve "sell user data and/or the site to some big conglomerate". If it ever comes down to "sell out or shut down", which I fiercely hope it won't, we would choose "shut down in an orderly fashion with tons of notice and have the world's biggest farewell party with as much time as possible for people to make their plans and pack their stuff." Barring that, well, I've been saying for the last decade that we're keeping this place open until the eventual heat death of the universe, and I fully plan to be writing tl;dr news comments in another 40 years. :)
Mirroring important content or stuff you'd be devastated if you lost in multiple places is always smart, because there's always a chance of disaster, even only of the "shit I deleted the wrong post" kind. (We have backups! But our backups are server-wide and can't be used to restore individual posts or accounts.) We've planned around things like disk failure and servers suddenly deciding not to work anymore as much as we can (and y'all generally don't even notice when stuff fails unless it's a failure in one of the systems that we don't control), and we've tried to reduce single points of failure as much as possible, but there's an extent to how much we can failure-proof everything. But in terms of stuff we can control like major changes to the site philosophy or our plans for the future, I can pretty confidently assure you that we ain't going nowhere.
no subject
* The site (and its associated LLC) is owned by me and
* We have two part time contractors to back us up: Jen is my backup, and Robby is Mark's. That increases the chance that progress will not grind *completely* to a halt when we're both held up, and -- more importantly -- it means that there's much better chances that somebody will be available to fix an urgent problem if it happens. Or, let's face it, "when" it happens, because there's no such thing as an uncrashable system.
* All of us (me and Mark, and Jen and Robby) have been working in tech for a long time. (Over twenty years in my case, actually, which blows my freaking mind sometimes.) So, even though it's just us, "it's just us" encompasses a lot of professional and technical experience, and we put that experience -- and, more importantly, the knowledge of "what not to do because it caused problems last time" -- into our work here, on both technical and social levels. In short: you can pretty much have confidence that we know what we're doing.
* When Mark and I started DW, we had a number of very (*very*) long talks about how we wanted to run the site, what we wanted it to be like, and -- most importantly for your questions -- whether or not we were on the same page about things like content policies, development philosophy, core ethical principles, etc. We agreed then, and most importantly, we still agree even after ten years of doing this. We believe that DW should remain independent, should never accept advertising and venture capital because it changes the entire dynamic of a site and what a site's acceptable content policies should be, and should only place restrictions on what users could post if those restrictions were required by US law, and neither of us forsee those beliefs changing in the future!
* Part of those pre-launch (and even pre-announcement) talks involved our commitment to radical business transparency -- that we should always explain what we're doing and why, and that anybody can ask questions and get an answer. We've tried our best to uphold that over the last decade, and while we aren't always perfect at it, we try our absolute hardest. We wrote down our guiding principles back then at the beginning, and while you'll have to check with people who've been here for a while to see how well we've been able to uphold them, they still apply today.
* We do have some evidence of walking the walk, though -- back when we were first starting, PayPal suspended our ability to accept user payments until and unless we implemented additional content restrictions such as disallowing "adult content" (they meant sex, people always mean sex when they use that phrase). Instead of doing that, we went without any income at all for 3 months while we set up an alternative, and we'd be prepared to do that again if we had to.
I can't promise we'll never change policies -- we may have to, for any one of a number of reasons. I can promise that if we do, we'll tell you with as much notice as we can give, solicit feedback ahead of time if it's not an urgent change stemming from some outside factors, and tell you the reasoning behind why we have to make changes instead of waving around some bullshit like "making these changes to empower the vibrant community blah blah blah" (and that we'll listen to your feelings about the changes, carefully think about any problems that people foresee, and change anything that we can change if you convince us we got it wrong). You can read back through
Likewise, I won't promise that we'll never shut down -- I can think of a few scenarios where we would have to, unlikely though they might be. Mark and I have our backups in Robby and Jen, and we discussed ahead of time what we'd do if one of us had to step back from day-to-day operations of the site for a while; we have a really strong volunteer community who helps with things like support, and we're open source and our volunteers contribute a lot to site development. But even if we've tried to reduce the chances, we are as vulnerable to the good old "what if both your company principals get hit by a bus at the same time" hypothetical as any two-person LLC would be, and progress does slow when both he and I have less time and energy to put to things.
We're also entirely user-funded, and while it hasn't been a problem in the last ten years (or rather, it was only a problem when we had three months of not being able to take payments due to PayPal fuckery), it's certainly possible that someday, we wouldn't be able to afford to keep the site running. If that should ever happen, though, we've got a number of contingency plans that we could activate, none of which involve "sell user data and/or the site to some big conglomerate". If it ever comes down to "sell out or shut down", which I fiercely hope it won't, we would choose "shut down in an orderly fashion with tons of notice and have the world's biggest farewell party with as much time as possible for people to make their plans and pack their stuff." Barring that, well, I've been saying for the last decade that we're keeping this place open until the eventual heat death of the universe, and I fully plan to be writing tl;dr news comments in another 40 years. :)
Mirroring important content or stuff you'd be devastated if you lost in multiple places is always smart, because there's always a chance of disaster, even only of the "shit I deleted the wrong post" kind. (We have backups! But our backups are server-wide and can't be used to restore individual posts or accounts.) We've planned around things like disk failure and servers suddenly deciding not to work anymore as much as we can (and y'all generally don't even notice when stuff fails unless it's a failure in one of the systems that we don't control), and we've tried to reduce single points of failure as much as possible, but there's an extent to how much we can failure-proof everything. But in terms of stuff we can control like major changes to the site philosophy or our plans for the future, I can pretty confidently assure you that we ain't going nowhere.