Comments on: Does Dave Winer Have a Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

By: The Mind of Dave Winer

The Mind of Dave Winer — Sat, 24 May 2008 17:58:34 +0000

[...] Here’s what Dave needs to understand. While he is, without prejudice, responsible for many of the technologies we use today – RSS and blogs – he is past his time, out of touch with reality, and quite possibly a lunatic. His inability to behave in socially acceptable ways pushes him to the fringe of, not only the social and new media space, but civilized society as a whole. His knack for building technologies that someone else has created and calling them his own innovations – whether explicitly or implicitly) his getting tiresome. See Dave’s Twitter uptime monitor of May 23, 2008 vs. Pingdom’s report from Dec 19, 2007. Also see Dave’s decentralizing Twitter “idea” from May 4, 2008 is something I talked about on Twitter quite a bit months before he came up with his groundbreaking idea. [...]

By: Sam L

Sam L — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:52:52 +0000

Obnoxious? *Obnoxious*?! That was the first podcast I’ve ever heard and while I feel vindicated in my previously prejudicial opinion that they are an insane waste of time, I haven’t laughed laughed that hard in weeks.

He opens humming an embarrassing little nothing to nobody in particular. Don’t stop listening after 30 seconds – it gets better. He puts on his best stoner voice and tries to say something significant, fails, and tries to go googling for a song, and fails to get it to play, so he literally gets up and walks out of the room talking to himself while he gets his other computer. He doesn’t even edit this cruft out; he’s proud of keeping it in.

He talks to himself about knocking the microphone over. He comments sarcastically, “I know you’re interested in this…”. Well I’m not kidding, I really was out of my seat laughing out loud at this point.

When most people talk in public they say “Umm” and “Uhh” a lot. Not this guy. He sings a monotone “ding ding ding ding ding ding…”.

It’s a half hour running commentary on him trying to sort his turdbox of a computer out like that annoying guy you know who talks himself through everything he does. “OK, I’m checking this in both browsers… Nope… not working… Oh no, iTunes…”

He gives a running commentary on the progress of a download. “300k per second. [silence]. Oh, yup, it’s now 299. [silence] Still pretty fast! Yep, stiiiill pretty fast.”

He goes into some bizarre pseudo-self-pitying rant about being a liberal or god knows what. He says everything short of “I’ll show ‘em! I show all of them!” There’s some guy called Stan who he really hates. He is so bitter.

He makes computer jokes about Windows. Wow, welcome to 1994!

I mean Jesus, this guy actually laughs to himself about jokes he’s just made to himself. He talks about talking about talking about stuff. He goes on about how much time he has left. It’s like one of those self-describing sentences: “This sentence contains 43 a’s, 24 b’s…”

And then he just regresses to the age of 4 where it becomes amusing to clap and wibble. The trainwreck ends with him attempting, and failing, to sing Dixie. Twice.

It’s like listening to the falling whale from the Hitchhikers Guide. “Oh hi there! Welcome to another morning coffee notes! Podcasting is so cool! La la la! All those people listening to my voice! Ding ding ding! I wonder if they’ll be friends with me.”

By: adam_blust

adam_blust — Mon, 16 May 2005 17:44:54 +0000

The DSM-IV entry you quoted sounds quite a bit like Dean Esmay, too. He can seem eminently reasonable, but when one of his buttons is pressed just a tiny bit too hard, he explodes with venom.

By: ymatt

ymatt — Mon, 16 May 2005 03:57:27 +0000

Holy crap. Listening to a small amount of that mp3 file and reading a bit of his webpage, I don’t know how anybody could ever pay attention to that guy.