XYZ and jark

I see two distinctly separate issues: jark being fired, and the XYZ groups system.  anybody mixing the two into some grand conspiracy is delusional.

first, Scott "jark".

it's my understanding that Scott was only a figurehead.  he may have been the impetus behind the initial formation of dA, but if others had not been brought in at key points, dA would have years ago fallen apart under a pile of unpaid bills, underperforming servers, and overextended bandwidth usage.

jark still holds shares in dA, and he still has a day job.  he never risked as much as other staff members.  dA ceased to be his baby when he and matteo brought on others to help with the technical duties and got it to pull its own weight from a monetary standpoint.  it grew up, whether he realised this at the time or not.  in retrospect he can claim that he was left out of decisions and not given information, but I suspect ignorance plays a bigger role.  he certainly didn't act like a president from a business standpoint.

dA is bigger than you, or me, or even jark.  it doesn't need a champion or a figurehead anymore.  it needs solutions for self-organization and scaling, neither of which a figurehead provides.  the v1 code is long gone and buried.  as a shareholder, jark still has a vested interest in dA's continued success.  it will enlightening to see if the threatened legal proceedings even happen, and if they do, what information will be presented.

XYZ groups:

spyed's mistake was describing what he is/was trying to do instead of simply implementing it and examining what happened.  by pre-selling the idea he leaves/left interpretation open to wild hyperbole and rumors.

dA needs better self-organization.  right now it's like drinking from a firehose or swimming in the middle of the pacific.  I have no fucking clue how to find more art I'm actually interested in, aside from traversing chains of favorites and doing keyword searches which may or may not turn up things I'm looking for.  (which keyword usage I may or may not agree with.)  writing about photographs is like dancing about poetry -- there may be some vague correlations which can be made, and eventually a vocabulary may be formed, but it's still a far cry from dealing with the actual work.

the paradox is attempting to place metrics on abstracts of artwork which are essentially unmeasurable.  the metrics are necessary in order to sort and present artworks in a non-random order.

some people want themselves to be labeled -- others do not.  I see nothing in the proposed XYZ groups system that forces anybody one way or another.  it's simply another metric to be utilized.

my main objection with dA is that the interface doesn't allow users to create their own sortings based on metrics.  personally I'd like to see old submissions with low views -- "forgotten" pieces, so to speak.  I'd also like a framework to create my own relative metrics between pieces, IE "I like piece A better than B" with some way of overlaying that with other people in the system to generate suggestions.  have all of this completely open-ended and up to the user to assemble at will.

but now everybody has jumped down spyed's neck we may never know if his metric was any good or not.