Wow, I'm actually going to post. How about that.
Ben was still on the staff when Weasyl went into Open Beta, and from what I've learned from different staffers, it was Ben's decision to move to Open Beta, despite the fact that very few things had changed in the 5 months it was online and in Closed Beta. It shouldn't have been in Closed Beta when it was, either, and that has been attributed to him as well, trying to ride some sort of hype by giving people a broken website. That worked as well as expected (poorly). Nobody else gets it, either.
This is not true. On December 14th, 2012, all my staff powers were removed, and my access to all official channels severed (The open beta launched Valentines Day 2013 for anyone who might not be aware). This is because a few staff members harbored a strong dislike towards me, and Kihari felt as though it was better to lose me than multiple people. In retrospect, I do not disagree with the idea that I needed some time away from the site, as relations between me and those staff members had become incredibly contentious, and taking time away from it would have been ideal. I however do feel that permanent removal was a misstep, as the site severely lost its way between then and now, and I've always found it personally disheartening that my staff, the people I handpicked to be on the Weasyl team, turned against me and asserted that they would leave unless I was full-on done away with, seeing no middle ground between "stay" and "go". I can't say with certainty whether or not my sticking around would have prevented certain issues, but I doubt it helped (although I will say that if Juste had stuck around, I do think the site would be in a much better position right now. While it was not solely my fault that a decision was made to keep myself over him, I do firmly believe that he is far more qualified to help with such a project than the current staff, and I regret that things played out in such a way, especially since keeping me did not matter in the long run).
This is why I didn't initially rescind my shares of the LLC after I originally said I would back in March: I saw a project, my baby, in peril, and wasn't ready to let go completely, hoping I could still get back into official staff channels. I didn't even care if I was recognized for any work I would contribute beyond that point-- I just wanted the site to succeed. Ultimately though, a year later, relations had not gotten better, but actually worse, as things I had never been blamed for (i.e. the closed beta launch, and now the open beta launch apparently) were being assigned as my fault. I had discovered that an upsetting echo-chamber culture had been cultivated behind the scenes, with myself being treated like a boogieman and a scapegoat for many things.
After a point, it became clear that there's nothing more that can be done. I tried installing a lifeline for the site in the form of Casmer, as his experiences in management, his knowledge of the inner-workings of DeviantART and his extreme savviness with social media and also being a good public face for the site as far as public event appearances would have been incredible assets. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, these strong points were either never properly utilized or ignored entirely (i.e. he was never given any PR responsibilities).
Additionally, I was not actually in charge at any point during the site's initial launch, with the Directors having been made Fay, Juste, Ficklebee, Taw and himself before closed beta. It was not my decision to push out a broken site-- Ultimately, it was decided as a group to go ahead with such a launch (although there was some disagreement), because we had made a promise to donators to get the site out in a specific timeframe. That being said, I will admit that it was a mistake to hype the site up before having any firm ground to stand on, and to crowdsource funding instead of funding it ourselves, since that left the site indebted to hundreds of people, many of which have never been properly fully compensated. The only people who were properly compensated were the people who donated $19 or less, since paid features and ad space do not exist still, and not all art was made for people who donated $50 or more. Additionally, I'm unsure of what happened with merchandise promises.
In the grand scheme of things though, it didn't really matter whether or not the site was a mess upon closed beta launch, because 16 months later, there are still over 100 things missing from Weasyl by the site's own admission, and when double-checking the
Redmine with my own list, found about a dozen very basic or important things missing from it (I'll give them a freebie:
user groups), which doesn't give me a lot of hope about the site's prospects. To fixate on who's fault the launch date of the closed beta is irrelevant, because that was a very long time ago, and quite a lot could have been done between then and now to make the site far more ready.
I'm of course talking about the fact that actual dedicated coders needed to be hired by taking out loans. There is definitely plenty of reason to take a risk on the site since it's definitely proven to be a popular property that has a significant chance now, and plenty of reason to believe such an investment would be made back ten-fold (and please, no one quote the "lol he wanted to pay coders $15 an hour" thing at me; that was never a hard-set idea that I had, I am plenty aware that industry standards are far higher). From what I can tell, very little about the site has changed between now and when it first launched, and from the outside looking in, it seems as though coding work only gets done when people are actually paying attention to the site, instead of beforehand, which is obviously the major hangup of only having volunteers instead of real employees.
Honestly, what this community needs is a professionally run website. There are too many parallels between how Weasyl and FA are run, except for the fact that there's a lot of people with access to the code. I will admit that a 19 year old (19 at the time anyway) was not the right person to do this. I just wish the grown adults who picked up the mantle in my stead were doing a somewhat better job.
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Asides:
I can vouch for the fact that Prost's reasons for termination are very real. I'm also aware the staff walked back their firing of him and apologized because they had overreacted. I won't get into a debate about whether or not he should have been on staff at all, but I don't think it's common knowledge that the directors themselves admitted they were wrong to fire him, so just putting it out there.
And to be clear, I was very much against the open beta, as Hoot and others have expressed before that very basic things which were found in closed beta were not fixed, and were fixed within days or weeks upon open beta happening, which suggests they very could have easily waited until they were more prepared. Not much thought seemed to be put into it aside from "Valentines Day is quirky, let's do Valentines!" and that's not the way anything should be run. There's a lot of other equally serious issues that have been present that make me think Weasyl is on a bad path, but this post is long enough as is, so I'll provide more if prodded.
This all being said, I don't think it's impossible for Weasyl to succeed. At the end of the day, FA is garbage, and if it can kill it, I hope Weasyl makes it. I just also hope other viable alternatives pop up at some point in the near future, because whether it's FA or Weasyl that falls first, there needs to be another viable alternative out there. I merely wish for Weasyl to not be viewed as the messiah, because there have been a -lot- of people reuploading their entire galleries there, and I fear what cynicism might come about towards the idea of FA alternatives if Weasyl doesn't succeed, cynicism which would only be amplified by furries bitter about having spent so much time re-upping their galleries for nothing. Of course, if Weasyl does make it out alive, then it'll be okay. Ultimately, what people should take away from this whole experience is that it's okay (and also very good!) to support alternate websites. We'll see how this all pans out.
EDIT: I fleshed a couple things out since when I posted this and a couple hours later. I've never gotten a chance to properly unbottle all of this publicly, and I find more and more word vomit flowing out the longer I think about it. Apologies.
