I read some comments by Dave Winer on March 15th about users/development of Drummer and how he got little feedback on a feature and how he might go back to just writing software for himself. I also just finished listening to a podcast from March 16th where Dave Winer talks about the need for Drummer users to test new features, or “we can’t move”. As an early tester and user of Drummer, I would like to offer my perspective on these items.

I was one of the early testers of Dave Winer’s Drummer application. I was pretty active in the first month or two, but then I had a negative experience – getting deleted from the Drummer support repo for posting a link to a river of news of Drummer users using Drummer to create blogs. I understood the reason for the deletion (I wasn’t reporting any problem), but I felt the attitude was wrong. As I watched other Drummer users giving opinions on the product, instead of reporting problems, their comments would get deleted, usually after some negative back and forth with Dave Winer. I can understand having rules about participation in support forums, but this consistent pattern gave me the impression that Dave Winer did not want any other feedback except for problem reports on Drummer. To me, this behavior does not give the impression that someone is interested in other people’s opinions. Also, I think if someone is going to criticize others in public, be prepared to stand behind your comments. For people who followed the Drummer support repo, all of this back-and-forth was plain to see via the Github emails.

I spent some time working on developing outline renderer scripts, but got a dig (I think) for using the word “Drummer” in the title of my Github repo. That didn’t feel good. I had started work on integrating a presentation library with Drummer, but decided after that to hold off on investing more. I guess some people can include Drummer in their repo name, but not others.

The first major feature of Drummer to get traction was the Old School blogging tool. Many people gave it a try (including me (original blog and relocated blog when I had a overwrite problem) and there were lots of comments and problem reports. At first, these were welcomed, but within a short period of time, negativity returned. In addition, people posting about the tool or possible changes were deleted or got negative responses. I worked with another Drummer user to create a separate repo (awesome-drummer) to collect information on Drummer, and to provide a place where non-problem-report conversations could occur. Dave Winer created a separate repo called “RFC” – Request For Comments – where people could contribute ideas that could be developed further. There were some user posts there, but most initial posts were by Dave Winer, so it did not appear to have much uptake in terms of suggestions from users. Full disclosure – the awesome-drummer site did not take off either, but at least no one’s comments were deleted for being off-topic…

When Dave Winer rolled out the Daytona search engine, some reasonable initial comments were met with replies like “…people who won’t even read the fucking manual.”, but those “docs” were somewhat hidden in the first days of the release of Daytona. How does this behavior help build a community?

I have worked in software development for 37 years, primarily in small teams in the aerospace industry. If I or other team leads treated team members in the way other Drummer users have been treated in the Drummer development project, I believe they would go find some other project to work on. 

Frank McPherson sums it up well: “Developer yells at users, wonders why then users don’t participate in the development process.”

So how much activity is Drummer getting now? The small flood of users who tried use Old School for blogging have stopped. There are an average of five people who still post to their Old School blogs on a regular basis (from reading the Old School Drummers river of news). New items on the support repo have slowed. This could mean that Drummer is working great. To me, it says that many of the early Drummer users have moved on.

I am glad that Dave Winer made a choice to share Drummer with the world. I am using Drummer to write this blog post. I have a copy of Electric Drummer for Windows, for which I am happy. What I don’t have is a compelling reason to use Drummer. I don’t need another writing tool (strictly speaking), writing in outlines is fun but getting that text into something other than a blog post using the Drummer tool being hosted on someone else’s site is not straightforward (did I mention that the blog is hosted on someone else’s site?). I don’t have a lot of content that could be searched using Daytona, so that is not enticing. Markdown is not part of my workflow, so the work on that feature is not something I am interested in.

There are ways to add functionality through scripting, which is great. Several users did develop some independent features (WordPress integration, Gatsby integration, HTTPS proxy mapping, my outline renderer script), but these did not get much participation from other users. Still, their contributions are still present and available for use.

I get the comment that Dave Winer wants feedback on features. The work I did was a collaboration with two other Drummer users. However, the tone of the podcast comments and the blog post comes off to me as more “demanding” than “asking” or “requesting”. In the end, my impression of Drummer is that this is Dave Winer’s application, a logical outgrowth of his previous work on Frontier and the OPML Editor. It is his application to shape and grow. Other people may not share his vision or interest, but that should not be a roadblock for development, unless Dave lets it be a roadblock. Look at how other development tools have evolved/grown over the past 20 years – a tool scratches someone’s itch, gets some users, gets traction, interest grows, people start to talk about the tool itself, people start making contributions to the tool or environment. Perhaps it will take more time. Perhaps it will take a change in attitude. I don’t know, but I think there are at least two sides to this story.

(Cross-posted from my Drummer blog).