I’m heading to Cupertino later this week, and will be in the Bay Area until the end of the month. I’m working with a client down there and also plan on checking out the area while I’m there.

I will be in San Francisco for this year’s Macworld Expo. While I don’t plan on attending the event itself, I’m really hoping to meet up with some friends who I know are also making the trek to San Francisco for the event.

If you’re in the area over the next few weeks and would like to grab a coffee, please shoot me an email and we will set something up. And, if you’re a They Might Be Giants and/or Jonathan Coulton fan, maybe you’d like to join me for their show in Santa Cruz on January 28.

I have no clue.

Update: Since publishing this post, I’ve been engaging in a very friendly and informative email conversation with Andrew de Andrade. Andrew has shed a lot of light on my situation, and has shown me that what I experienced was not censorship, but an attempt to provide the Hacker News with an experience they would benefit most from. I thank Andrew for providing this clarity. I apologize to anyone who was offended by this post. I’ve also issued an apology on this post’s Hacker News thread.

This experience has taught me a lot about community and social norms and behaviours, which Andrew has encouraged me to write about in a future post. If you have any input on this situation or topic, I’d love to hear from you!

I’ve been a reader of Y Combinator’s Hacker News off and on for about a year now. I enjoy the mix of technical, business, and social news it provides. And, more often than not, the discussion in the comments can be just as informative as the articles the site links to.

After hearing my friend Ben Brooks remark that he often submits articles he writes to Hacker News, I decided to submit my post announcing the closure of Simple Desks.

I submitted the story to Hacker News with the title of the article, “Shutting Down My Porno Site.” Yes, the title was provocative. But, it felt appropriate given the context, which was the idea of what has come to be called productivity porn. Most of the article and especially the lead paragraph played on that very idea.

After I hit the submit button, I started getting ready to head out and join the New Year’s Eve celebration. Before I left, I took a quick look at my Hacker News submission and was surprised to see the title had been edited: the system removed the word “porno.”

I was also a bit confused. A quick search reveals 432 story titles that include the word “porn,” 173 with the word “fuck,” and 210 with the word “shit.”

Even more confusing, there are currently 9 stories on Hacker News with the word “porno” in it.

I wondered if my submission was censored because it had quickly made the front page. Maybe I had just missed seeing when it was edited. But, many of the stories found in the above searches clearly had enough points to have been on the front page.

I tried doing a Google search for other instances of people complaining about censorship on Hacker News, and came up empty. Any mention of censorship right on the Hacker News site seems to revolve around Y Combinator’s relationship with the startups that are covered on the site.

I’m not opposed to a site like Hacker News controlling the content that gets posted to their site. They have a brand they wish to maintain and a certain audience they hope to serve. As their guidelines state, they aren’t interested in “politics, or crime, or sports, unless they’re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.”

However, no where in the guidelines does it say anything about the use of provocative language in a story’s title. They do warn against adding your own “gratuitous editorial spin” on a link to an article you didn’t write, but nothing is mentioned about language that should or shouldn’t be used in a link’s title.

Once I saw that Hacker News had censored my link’s title, I posted a quick comment to let potential readers know what happened. My fear was that visitors would see a title that read “Shutting Down My Site” and be offended once they saw the article’s actual title. My intention was never to trick people into seeing my article. I just thought it would be an interesting read for the Hacker News community.¹

If Hacker News doesn’t want provocative titles on their site, I would have preferred the entire submission be rejected rather than potentially deceiving the community into reading something that uses language they don’t want to see. It reflects poorly on me as a publisher and as the submitter of the link.

Whatever their policy is, it should be clearly communicated in the site’s guidelines. I’m cool either way, I just want to make sure I’m contributing fairly to a community that I’ve benefited from in the past.

It was pretty. Damn it was pretty. The subjects were all scantily clad in accessories and the lighting was just right. Whether it was an image I found on the web or a self-shot photo submitted by a reader, my standard was always “will this make my readers’ jaws drop?”

But, it was bullshit. It was such bullshit. We were creating this completely unrealistic ideal that no one should have to live up to.

Who has the most minimal desk setup?

The real question is, who gives a fuck?

I started Simple Desks—a Tumblr site for collecting photographs of minimal desks and work setups—back on March 15, 2010. Its initial purpose was simple: I was having a desk custom built by a friend, and I wanted an easy way of saving photos to use as inspiration. Tumblr’s bookmarklet was the easiest way I could think of to simply keep an archive of the photos I found, without having to clog up my own hard drive.

Shorty after I started the site, I published a link to it on Twitter and asked if anyone had a photo of their desk they wanted to share, feel free to submit it. Eighteen months later I had published over 350 photographs of people’s desks.

Desks.

Empty, lifeless, workless desks.

About 6 months into running Simple Desks I began realizing that what I was doing was running a porn site. No, not topless girls and chest-hairless guys romping around in a beach house-type porn. Just pointless, casual, look-at-this-empty-fucking-desk-you’ll-never-have porn.

And we were all getting off on it.

But I kept it up. I kept it up because, baby, it paid. Not in the thousands-of-dollars-a-month type of paid, but certainly more than what a guy publishing photos of desks should deserve.

Then, in October of this year we finished the short film my friends and I spent countless hours on, and I realized how incredibly proud I was of that and how excited I was to share it with people. I never felt that way about posting desk pictures. Never.

So, I started thinking about shutting it down. Once I returned home from LA in early December, the decision had been made: as of 2012, Simple Desks would be no more.

And, if I had any doubts about whether this was the right thing to do, hearing Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin discuss the fetishism of minimalism on a recent episode of Back to Work quickly put them to rest.

I want to spend my time creating work that is substantial. To hear someone tell me that a scene in Imprint made them tear up, that a lyric in a song I’ve written has uplifted someone who was down, or to see users enjoy using something I’ve created on the web, these are the moments I want to experience more often. These are moments for humans.

About a month ago, I wrote about why, once again, I’ve shifted the focus of this site. At the end of the post I left a link to a short survey. When I created it, I expected maybe a dozen or so of you to take the time to respond. Unless some of you have far too much time on your hands and submitted multiple surveys, I believe 72 people filled the thing out.

To give you some perspective on that number, my Feedburner account tells me that I have around 500 RSS subscribers. I assume most people have forgotten what RSS is, so I also shared the survey with my 1100 Twitter followers. I’m estimating that there is a large cross-section between those two numbers, so let’s assume (for the sake of my terrible mathematic skills) that the number of potential people to fill out the survey was 720¹. Assuming this, it means that roughly 10% of the number of people I expected to reach took the time to respond to my survey. Given that toothpaste companies only ask 5 dentists what toothpaste they like, I’d say my survey produced a pretty reasonable data sample².

So, what did you have to say? Well, let’s find out, starting with you.

How are you feeling today?

I asked this question for two reasons:

1. To show I care, and
2. To see whether how you were feeling coloured your remaining answers.

To the second point, it appears as though your outlook that day didn’t colour your answers. Those who were having lousy days and those who were having great days both loved and hated certain things about my site.

Only one of you responded that you felt awful. Whoever you are, please let me by you a drink or a coffee or whatever will make you feel better. The vast majority rated your day as a 4 out of 5.

How long have you been reading my site?

I started blogging at patdryburgh.com back in 2007, when I was working as a music director at a church. Its purpose was to track what I was learning about leadership, music, and life in the church. The focus of my life and my blog shifted a year later when my time at the church came to an end and my career in design began.

Though I don’t have the numbers saved anywhere, I remember a distinct drop-off in readership when this shift happened. Understandably so, as my readers at the time were mostly music pastors who had no interest in what the latest CSS3 effect was going to be.

The responses to this question really reflect this shift. 78% of you started reading this site in the past two years. I can count the number of readers who have been reading this site for more than 2 years on one hand and a hot dog.

How do you read my site?

I wrote this question as a multiple-choice question so you could give more than one answer. Your answers were very informative, but there was actually only one answer I was truly interested in: “In a ‘read it later‘ type app.”

The reason is simple: is my content interesting enough for people to want to take their time reading it? When I write a longer article, is it skipped, read on the spot, or saved for later? I realized once the survey had been published that the question didn’t really answer all of these questions, but I still hold to the goal of providing content that is worth postponing to read until you have the time to focus.

Turns out, not many of you read my site in an app like this. I believe this result speaks to the lack of long-form articles I’ve posted to the site over the past two years. I plan to rectify this in the coming new year.

Post Frequency and Link Posts

I asked about my post frequency because I knew what my next question would be. A lot of what I publish here are link posts, which are my way of sharing what I find on the web. I rarely post links on Twitter—I save that space for dick jokes and complaining about Apple products. I care a lot about the link posts, because I truly value the work other people produce and share. If I could make a living sharing with you the work others have created, I would gladly take that opportunity.

It seems as though most of you at least like the link posts. If you don’t, please stop reading my blog. They aren’t going away. In fact, seeing the results of this survey has encouraged me to increase the rate at which I post links. My commitment to you regarding link posts is two-fold:

1. I will rarely, if ever, post something that everyone else is linking to, and
2. I will only publish something I’m really, really excited about or interested in.

Which of the following topics would you like to see more of? / Which of the following topics would you like to see less of? / Have you learned anything valuable from my site?

I asked these questions because I wanted to get a sense of why people were reading this site. Turns out, a lot of you read it for multiple reasons, both professional and personal. That actually means a lot, because it tells me you read this site not only for your personal gain—though I certainly hope you do benefit from what I write—but also because you care about me. As a human being in the 21st century, that means a lot.

Further Input

A lot of you were really nice in your additional comments (especially when it came to complimenting my beard). What I don’t think I’ve communicated nearly enough is that I really, really care about you. I want to hear what you think (in any medium other than a blog comment), how you feel, what’s going on in your life. If you’ve written something you think I’d be into, please let me know. If you’d like to grab a coffee or a drink and get to know one another better, let’s set a date. If you have a question or a problem you think I can help with, feel free to ask. I’ll do my best.

In Conclusion

This site is about me (see: the domain name, the about page, the silly cartoon face), but it’s also about you. I believe this, because I believe that we as humans are inextricably connected to one another. We grow together, we learn together, we laugh together, we cry together. I read your site or follow you on Twitter or like your Instagram photos because I care about you. It feels great to know that’s probably why you’re reading my site, too.