I just got back from KeyCon where I enjoyed some of the most excellent fellowship and hard-core geekery I've ever had the pleasure to enjoy in my life, and I was actually just musing to myself how fortunate I felt to have been a part of such a great community of people for so many years. Keyboards have become a huge part of my life since that day back in 2013 when I first discovered GeekHack and stayed up for 48 hours straight learning everything I could about Cherry switches. To me, GeekHack isn't the keys to the server that the forum runs on; it's the sum total interactions of the amazing, kind, generous people who have made this place what it has been for so long, many of whom have become some of my dearest friends. So, I have to confess: set against that otherwise happy mood and context, this news arrived to me with a considerable amount of heartbreak.
I frankly didn't even realize GeekHack had an "owner" until yesterday. I had always assumed that it was simply run by a collective of sort of moderator-trustees with the primary aim of serving the community. It never occurred to me that in all my years of interactions on the site, sharing and mutual learning, creating and documenting projects, and more recently organizing group buys for people who want the same stuff I do, that I was actually just cultivating a cash asset for someone I'd never heard of—something that could be bundled up, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder. So, when it comes to my feelings on the matter, the particular identity of that high-bidder isn't really material. It's the fact that there was ever bidding in the first place.
For whatever it's worth, though, while MassDrop may not be the worst buyer imaginable, comparing it against an anonymous hostile Chinese takeover is kind of maybe a low bar. And I think this awesome community is worthy of a very high bar indeed. My experiences as a customer and sometime business partner of MassDrop have been decidedly mixed. Without digressing too much into those experiences, one thing I think that is pretty safe to assert: when it comes to creating a friendly, positive, community-spirited social atmosphere online, MassDrop discussion treads are probably not the greatest portfolio piece for that company as a custodian of online community spirit.
Also, in my experience, it's not possible within most corporate cultures to justify getting into a bidding war and paying top dollar for an asset unless you have very specific plans to monetize it and get some kind of return on that investment. I don't know what MassDrop's plans are for that monetization, but even if they claimed they didn't have any (which they haven't quite gone so far as to do at this point), I'm not sure that would be terribly credible. I'm not looking forward to seeing what the roll-out of those plans looks like, which would surely be timed to emerge well after this controversy dies down. The language of the announcement appears carefully worded to leave just the right openings for this kind of strategic long game. I'm not ascribing malice here; I'm just trying to be realistic.
Obviously, I don't object to commercial activity in this community. I've sort of fallen into that myself, and it's a lot of fun. The whole premise is being obsessed with particular physical objects, and a necessary part of the premise of making stuff is money or goods changing hands. I've also been delighted to be able to buy things from other members of the community for years, whether professional vendors or not. Commerce is one thing; community ownership is something else entirely.
As far as I'm concerned, we the people of GeekHack who have built is content, its traffic, and its culture over these many years are its true owners. (Having watched it all unfold, I can say with some confidence that GeekHack made MassDrop viable, not the other way around.) Despite the bad forum software, eye-ball searing color scheme, and logistical annoyances, I've persisted here in doing projects at GeekHack because of my nostalgic attachment to the site and my deep affection for my fellow members of its community. My participation here has always been about furthering that community, and that's what I thought I was doing all along.
I'm just not sure how enthusiastic I am to continue participating here merely to build further cash-value for the VCs backing MassDrop, rather than being able to think about it as building value for a shared community that can control it own destiny. Without the community-oriented mission and spirit, this is just a really ugly website.
Perhaps American Independence Day is an appropriate day for this revelation. For those of us who have the kind of sentimental attachment to this community that I have described—or at least what we thought this community was—maybe it's time for us to think about rallying elsewhere. Wouldn't it be kind of be an amusing Oedipal irony if it turned out that MassDrop grossly overpaid for GeekHack as asset, the acquisition of which precipitated its own collapse?
