Reply to post #1698 (show post):
Great find, Susanna!

I tried again on Twitter and see that at least two other folks have tried to. No replies to anyone.

I'm in until the end, so they're out of luck with that.

You can't get rid of me /that/ easily, BL!

Reply to post #1702 (show post):
My opinion, just based on my interpretation of their behavior and not on any hard evidence, has long been that they aren’t invested in the long-term growth of the site. I’ve probably repeated this far past the point of being annoying, but their lack of interest in gaining and retaining new members speaks volumes.

I think, as long as they can earn revenue (from ads, or whatever) that surpasses their operating costs, and as long as they can do it with minimal effort on their part, then they’ll maintain the status quo: a general absence on the site, but keeping it operating and occasionally showing up to fix major site issues. In other words, I think they'll continue doing the bare minimum to keep things going until and unless they start losing money.

I felt a little hopeful back when they told us they’d hired new technical staff, because that seemed to indicate a willingness to put some money into the site. It was also a rare moment when they actually seemed to give us some tangible info. But they didn’t change their attitude toward new members, and the lack of general communication continued, so the hope didn't last long. The recent issues also make it appear that nobody is monitoring the health of the site, receiving alerts, and so forth, as one would expect from technical staff. I wonder if they’re no longer there, or if they were just a consultant who gets hired on an as-needed basis to fix specific issues.

And if they actually wanted to grow the site, they are missing an opportunity right now, as there is quite a lot of angst I've seen on GR, and people saying "I'm fed up with this, what other book sites are out there?"

A year ago I'd have recommended BL without reservation.

This is not a year ago.

Reply to post #1709 (show post):
Agreed. They also missed opportunities when Shelfari was shut down, and again when Leafmarks was shut down.

Well, given the gentle stalking I and others have been doing (thank you Susana "Lost in Fantasy Land"), my newest imaginary scenario of what the hell is wrong in BookLikes land is this:

Dawid handed over the reigns of the company to Joanna in April so he could focus on their newest startup (whose name escapes me atm), but Joanna has a 1 year old son now and they've moved to Berlin, so she's become quite literally an absentee boss, probably thinking she can do this from a distance, only it seems her heart isn't in it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, either BookLikes has become a complete work from home company or there's a tiny office in Poland that has two employees: the fabled programmer and the elusive Ilurii, who may or may not work full time and may or may not be on holiday.

I know someone is getting the messages we send: someone was jacked enough last week over posts on Facebook that they turned off posting on their page. FB Messenger (hate) has at least one redeeming quality: it shows you when your PM has been read by the receiver. So I know they've seen the PM I sent, even if they didn't respond. I also notice the site is working better today, if not snappy, it's a least useable again.

If any of this is right - and it's pure guesswork - either Joanne is going to snap out of whatever space she's in and start actually running this as a business, or she's going to be permanently stuck in mommy-land or wherever and they're going to have to find someone else to run things, because this I feel confident about: they aren't going to just let BookLikes wither away. They can't unless they have the most apathetic Venture Capitalists ever to exist. BookLikes is largely funded by a Venture Capital firm (and also by an EU grant) and those guys are rather pesky about getting back their investment and then some.

I have no doubt that Dawid and Joanna are in this to sell it; so is the VC. BookLikes at this moment isn't worth nearly what it was a year ago, so I have to believe something has to get better at some point if only to make it worth enough to sell. Which is sad, but at least it's not death.

Also, if things don't get better, I'm totally going to channel my father-in-law (the undisputed king of complaining his way up a corporate tree, god bless him) and write the Venture Capital company. They have a stake in this business and they should know how unhappy its user base is.

@Murder by Death and Athena - "gentle stalking" LOL Yeah, I was just googling "has Booklikes been sold?", from there I went to Joanna's FB and finally to the elusive Dawid.
For a moment there I actually considered asking for friendship, so I could ask him what the hell was going on... and then I realized that this is me. -_-
Why won't they admit that they've lost all interest in the site? If they wanted to sell, wouldn't they be HERE?
Gr's is getting crappier by the minute. This would be BL's time to become a real rival.
I really don't understand their stance.

Also, they're really asking for us to start spamming them on twitter ( for eg) with Adele's "Hello" -_-

+1 to YouKneeK's #1708 post because clicking on the discussion stats number doesn't do anything (at least for me).

Oh that's a lovely idea.

Reply to post #1716 (show post):
Wow, I've never tried clicking that before - it works for me. Man, I'm a chatterbox. :P

Reply to post #1711 (show post):
What private venture capitalist is BL funded by?

All I can see on their "about" page is grants by the EU and Polish state agencies (PARP is one, too, even though their logo looks like they're a corporation: http://en.parp.gov.pl/ -- the name behind the acronym translates as "Polish Agency for Enterprise Development"). If there is NO private funding, except perhaps for a bit of personal investment by Dawid and Joanna (which they will likely have had to bring to the table to be able to be shareholders in the first place, but which they've doubtlessly long since written off), I don't see complaining to the source of the funds for this project getting us very far. EU and state investment funds of the sort that BookLikes has received aren't given with the certainty that there's money in the project down the road for the investor; quite to the contrary, they're given despite the uncertainty of the project's success, solely to foster innovation. They were handed out years ago and have likewise long been written off entirely.

I think most of us have concluded by now that Dawid and Joanna are typical entrepreneurs -- they start a project, take it to the point where it reaches critical mass, then try to sell it to some investor. If that fails, they just let it trickle out. Which is clearly what they've decided to do here; otherwise there is NO explanation why they wouldn't go head over heals after a silver-platter-handout like Leafmarks and Shelfari dying within the space of a few months, and the GR membership's increasing discontent with site management, features and appearance.

Also, they apparently have a lot of other things going on in their lives at the moment: On Dawid's FB page, someone asked him (in Polish) why they moved to Berlin. His answer more or less translates as "don't get me started."

Like YouKneeK and MbD (and, again, I think many here), I took it as a sign of hope when a new engineer was hired to take care of the tech issues behind the scenes -- who I actually think is "the elusive Iiurii" (love that phrase): So for practical purposes it all comes down to this one person. And I agree with Bookstooge: within the next couple of weeks, quite likely by the end of this month, we'll know whether Iiurii has just had some time off and is now back in the saddle (for the time being, anyway), or whether he's quickly given up on the site, too, and moved on elsewhere.

In terms of finding a new online home for my own reviews, I'm glad my skepticism back in spring when the site started to wobble was at least big enough to start building a full-fledged blog on Wordpress, instead of just signing up so as to be able to follow others.

The real question, though, is what do we do about this community? I think we all feel that the people on this site, and our sense of community, are / is this place's greatest asset, and the one thing that keeps us coming back and hoping (even against hope) that BL will survive.

Wordpress has a "Reader" panel that works similar to the dashboard here on BookLikes; and it also allows WP members to follow non-WP blogs (Tumblr, Blogspot, etc.). Would one alternative be for us all to create blogs somewhere else (if we haven't already) and exchange blog URLs so we can at least follow each other and stay in touch that way?

Or is there one particular site we can all agree to move on to if BL folds? I know many here still maintain a presence on Goodreads; so do I, but personally I feel less inclined than ever to return there full-fledged. (I'm not necessarily more optimistic about LibraryThing, either.) Which, I suppose, brings us back to the question, what other game really is there in town if BL should fold, too?

Anyway, I'd hate to see this phantastic community break up just because the site owners have lost all interest in playing host to us. Let's put on our thinking caps and see what we ourselves can do about it -- please??

I'm still on high alert for bad news and have been since all this started back when the speculation started. I'm happy to be proved wrong but my pessimistic side is expecting the worst.

I've had my own blog for years and it's my bolt hole when other sites let me down so I expect I'll retreat there when (not 'if') BL pulls the plug. It's a blogspot blog but I use a reader to keep up with all the blogs I follow so it's kinda like the BL dashboard. A bit.

Hope it doesn't come to that but either way, BL is definitely not same place it was when I joined very nearly three years go. Blimey, has it really been that long! Time flies when you're having fun :D