I am posting this on Max's behalf. Here is the email I just received from him that he asked me to post:
I woke up this morning, and realized something. I am not happy. I usually feel great when I wake up in the morning, full of energy and full of life, full of excitement. But not this morning. And so I asked myself why that is. And then I remembered last night.
Last night at around 6pm I was going to write a nice long development update that I promised you guys. I was going to tell you about the multiple new developers who will now be working on our project, I was gonna tell you about AngularJS and all sorts of other things, and I was going to ask that those of you who have messaged us expressing interest in participating in our open source project please go ahead and join us.
And then I realized how tired I was. The night before, a Sunday, I had stayed up working until 5am, and was back at work again in the morning after just 4 or 5 hours of sleep. And now, exhausted after working 7 days a week for god knows how many months, exhausted from lack of sleep, I would have to give up my few hours of rest to spend the evening clicking the spam button on crazy comments full of swearing and lies posted by several trolls with half a dozen fake accounts each. We had to ban something like 10 of them the day before, all brand new fake accounts created just hours earlier. And so I just said "screw it," and put on a movie.
And then this morning I woke up and realized that nothing had changed. That now, I again had two choices: go about my life and my work and be happy, or go back here and spend half a day warding off trolls. And that's when I realized that every minute that I would spend doing so, would be a disservice to both myself, our people, and our company. Because every minute I spent arguing with trolls, is a minute I could have instead spent on building our company.
And then I thought about Sergey.. Sergey, as some of you might already know, is my long-time partner, our Chief Operating Officer (the 2nd man in charge at our company), preacher, former pastor, and the father of 10 children. Last night I excitedly spoke to him about how today we would sit down and get him back on reddit, twitter, linkedin, and also create his accounts on facebook and all the other social networks. And then I realized something.. that this man, a good man, a great man, a holy man, would have to sit here and read comments like "I fucked your mother." And that's when it hit me.. I could never explain to him why he had to do this. And I could never force him to do so, even though he would. And I also realized this: that I don't wanna come back to this place.
So today I am going to go about my life. I am going to chat with programmers, and deal with development. I am going to deal with the bank and the government. I am going to continue building up my media contacts. And in the evening, as planned, I am going to sit down with Sergey and get him started on every other social network.. except reddit. I think it's high time that we took a break from this place. We are not leaving, but we are not promising that we'll be coming back either. We will leave our subs frozen in time so that if we do come back here again, we'll just pick up right where we left off.
To the many many wonderful people here who have posted here or have messaged us with heart-warming messages of thanks and support, my thanks go out to you friends. I salute you for having the bravery and character to stand up for what you believe to be just and right, even in the face of animosity. You are men among men, and when you go outside today you should walk proud, with your head held high. You have my respect. To those of you who wish to join us, we send a warm welcome, and ask that please don't bother sending messages or leaving comments here, as there will not be anybody here to see them. Instead, we ask that you go about reaching out to us in the following ways:
Thank you all again, and have a wonderful day! I sure will. :)
ここには何もないようです