FA sold to 11 year old commercial internet game

[Emil Barr]

If I may, allow me to indulge in WILD SPECULATION

You know what would be funny?

I assume everyone heard how Alkora left FA after the sale was announced.

Wouldn't it be funny if Alkora and Arcturus decided to let bygones be  bygones and doctor up that paperwork stating that Arcturus has 50% stake in FA?

Well I think it would be funny.

But back in reality, looks like there was a QA with the IMVU CEO. First I heard about it was when they posted the journal. Nothing new in it, just the same PR speak we've already been getting. CEO pretty much told artists that they can go to hell and file DMCAs to remove their stolen content.

[scribbles]

And now a long interview on Penguin?Random House (the publishing company) blog about FA and IMVU:

http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/fur-trade-when-niche-community-goes-corporate

Man, then the interviewer even says "That kind of describes a frighteningly large chunk of the Internet: People squabbling on a platform that doesn’t really work, and is probably run by somebody evil and/or stupid."

[Conan]

I left Amazon AWS after being transferred to a manager who was openly passing the blame onto other employees who didn't deserve it. I refused to work for him, and put in my resignation.

Explains why the sale happened so fast. Also, didn't the same thing happen at his last job? Weird how he keeps getting moved to shitty managers and dead weight groups before getting laid off or quitting (or in this case, probably in line to get fired).

I'm sure the irony of quitting because a manager was passing the blame onto people who didn't deserve it is certainly lost on him.

[quantityorama]

Explains why the sale happened so fast. Also, didn't the same thing happen at his last job? Weird how he keeps getting moved to shitty managers and dead weight groups before getting laid off or quitting (or in this case, probably in line to get fired).

What are the odds of hearing the same thing from him about IMVU in a few months?

[an hoopoe]

This is interesting, the first time I've seen someone try going over Dragoneer's head to IMVU, two shouts from his page:



Dragoneer chose to interpret that as a threat (despite the person saying it wasn't) and left two shouts on that persons page:

I've passed your ticket up. In the mean time, please don't threaten me. IMVU is aware there is a ticket backlog and we're working on it.

We are working to close the backlog and have brought on new mods to help. IMVU is aware of that.

[Conan]

November, who is a pretty well-known "art whore"-tier "popufur" has published a letter he wrote to Dragoneer about the sale. Allegedly, he sent this to Dragoneer and received no response (not a huge surprise there)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o3X3AC9vIWx877VWyWyJu8_q964oqo6dxDu_N6JrUcE/preview?sle=true

To Dragoneer:

I know you’ve gotten mountains of feedback from the FA community in recent days now that the sale to IMVU was publicly revealed. Many people have voiced legitimate concerns about this acquisition because they care about their community. Yet among the thousands of comments and opinions, you specifically reached out to me on Saturday with a very personal statement. I wanted to discuss it with you in private but you didn’t respond back. So instead of continuing my public expression, I took the last two weeks to try to calm my emotions and think rationally. However, with the numerous announcements, clarifications, and Q&As issued in the wake of the acquisition, my feelings about this deal have only solidified.

I’ve been part of the fandom for over half my living life with nine of those years on FA, growing into the fandom as the fandom grew into me. Through ups and downs, glitches and storms, I’ve been distinctly mute on any criticism on you or FA because I recognized that you and the volunteer staff had exceptionally difficult tasks. Despite the unfulfilled promises and errors in judgment, I stayed quiet. But do not mistake my silence as forgiveness or implicit agreement with your decisions in the past. And now, with the acquisition by IMVU, everything has changed.

On Saturday, I tweeted that the sale of FA was “a spectacular failure of due diligence and disclosure” by you and IMVU. These words were not plucked from the air but picked with purpose and intent. It is in these words that you directly expressed disappointment that I did not contact you first and privately. However, the irony is deep: two years ago, I gave you everything I had on DMK in the hopes that you would take action behind the scenes to get rid of a leeching pest from our community; instead, nothing happened for over a month and I was forced to release my findings publicly. If you didn’t act on matters of fact despite my credibility and reputation being on the line, then I had no reason to believe that contacting you on matters of opinion would result in a different outcome.

Fundamentally, I didn’t contact you because you are no longer a furry protecting furry interests anymore. You and FA are now corporate entities who answer to stakeholders with financial interests, not the community for our well-being, and I have no qualms about voicing my opinion publicly on an entity whose goal is to monetize people for profit. I have stayed quiet in the past because we could rely on you having our best interests at heart, but don’t expect the benefit of my doubt or silence now that you and FA are part of the corporate chain and system.

That corporate system is at the heart of this discontent. Furry was the one last vestige where a fandom is truly free from corporate influence: Star Trek belongs to Paramount, Star Wars belongs to Disney, even MLP belongs to Hasbro. The Wikipedia entry for “Fandom” lists over a dozen notable ones, of which furry is the only one that is not derived from someone else’s ideas or creation. Furry has thrived on independence and creativity as we built ourselves, almost exclusively free from external influence. Although no entity can ever own our community, you alone sold our most populous platform not only to an outside corporation, but to one whose association with furry is so non-existent that their outlook for a #furrific union instantly became a universal point of derision on Twitter.

Such is the chasm between IMVU and Furaffinity, as stark as the difference between the fandom’s creative design in anthropomorphism versus the sculpturing of stereotypical Southern Californian fashion models. To make things worse, you hid the acquisition from the community for two months, miring this acquisition in public distrust and suspicion. Despite how many times you repeat it, I will never lend credence to your claim that IMVU acquired FA just for ad space and to “grow the community,” especially given how you and ownership were still and continue to be woefully unprepared for the community’s questions and concerns. What remaining shreds of your credibility have been strewn across eight journals about this deal, each of which only regurgitates the same non-answers that spawns further confusion and concern.

What is most damning, though, is that despite having two months to put together a comprehensible rollout plan, the community had to find out for ourselves that the very entity that acquired FA is profiting off our intellectual property! People know that IMVU corporate is not stealing, but it is the failure of due diligence to identify that FA was being sold to an enabler of theft who has already reaped unquestionable profits with highly questionable methods. You and IMVU then insisted that artists must and can only go through the DCMA process to remove copyright material, squandering a prime opportunity to create and build rapport and trust with the community. Even worse, there is still no resolution to how our community can monitor the rampant violations in IMVU’s pay-only adult section. In a business transaction supposedly to create synergy, you’ve created none, and from the get-go, it’s clear that you and IMVU wanted our trust on a silver platter when you neither earned nor deserve any.

I’ve kept my opinions strictly on the acquisition itself so far and have refrained from speculating on the future impact of IMVU’s ownership. That said, I believe the process to turn FA from a creative community to a corporate commodity has already begun: you and IMVU are so eager to convince us of this acquisition by touting about how many active accounts are on each site and how its traffic ranks, yet you can’t even quantify your assertion of just how “many furries” share the two communities. Furthermore, IMVU’s repeated intention to stay hands-off but only change advertising is the most direct reflection of FA as a financial and commercial commodity. It will be a matter of time of when, not if, the foundation of the website dissolves and the ugly heads of monetization will rear on FA.

At the end of the day, regardless of how much you want to sugarcoat your rhetoric, the future of FA as the largest online furry website in the world belongs to IMVU and not the community that built it, of which you were once a part. You owned FA and had every right to do whatever you wanted, but that doesn’t absolve you from criticism from a community who’s just as invested as you, especially if you nixed consideration of keeping this website within the fandom purely based on whether or not you would maintain control. Now, you’ve become merely a figurehead for IMVU, despite what you or ownership want us to believe. It’s a matter of when, not if, your tenure with IMVU ends and responsibility this website gets passed off to someone else who’s possibly as clueless about our community and fandom as their social media team. I can only wonder if you’ll sign another NDA to leave the community to fend for ourselves for months on end when this eventually happens.

For years, the community could always count on you to have our best interests in mind, but now, we face a future of corporate ownership who’s demonstrated interests are not so much creativity itself but the commercialism derived from that creativity. In the end, you spurned numerous efforts to keep the world’s largest furry community within the fandom, instead ironically selling to a company whose ad-stricken freemium service hosts users who had already been stealing and profiting off of our very community for years. Despite having two months of preparation, you absolutely failed to anticipate or prepare for the community’s skepticism of the acquisition and remain utterly inept in addressing those concerns. The community is not bound to a website and can always move, but it should have never come to this if not for years of mismanagement, ultimately leading to this unceremonious and bastardized transaction to sell out to a bidder whose motives for our fandom lives on corporate balance sheets and not the hearts and minds of our community.


Note: This letter was provided to Dragoneer for review before dissemination. The recipient declined any comment.

Of course, Dragoneer shows up to people replying to November's tweets to remind everyone of how much he CARES.

[rodox_video]

yes let's watch this man's grandstanding about the latest bullshit in furry and ignore the (likely) thousands of dollars he's shoved into adam wan's paypal account