MySpace didn't have these issues though - nor did Twitter (to this extent). It's also a relatively straight forward blogging platform though - it's not particularly hard to figure out how to allocate resources despite exponential growth. The fact is - responding to issues in such a manner might not affect the outlook of Tumblr immediately - but the fact that he does respond to emails like this might be a representation of his overall attitude towards running the site - one which might contribute to the ultimate downfall of the service.
What do yo mean Myspace and Twitter didnt have these issues? One of the reasons Facebook gained prominents is that in 2005 or so Myspace was down CONSTANTLY. I mean it was never up. They blamed it on coldfusion at the time and eventually moved the site over to Asp.net. Twitter also barely worked because the whole web services architecture was only taking shape so it was designed like an old cms.
Putting that aside this persons response was unprofessional to say the least. He needs to publicly apologize to all of his users and start hiring people who can fix the site. To tell people to fuck off is immature and absolutely ridiculous. Especially when you have so much VC money at your disposal. When Twitter first got funding they spend alot of it on engineering. They went from being on just a few servers which was one of the reasons it was down all of the time. To hundreds of servers to deal with the load. It seems like this guy now thinks he can keep the money to himself and not spend anything expect on pr. Reminds of Friendster actually.
Does nobody remember LiveJournal? The site with the community that was willing to look past growing pains and security exploits to communicate on their own terms? The "straight forward blogging platform" that created a need for memcached amongst other scaling tools?
Read the history of LJ's architecture from 1 server to hundreds: http://www.danga.com/words/2007_06_usenix/usenix.pdf
