I get it. You want to sound like an authority on something. All the other authorities have said something is dead, but you want to fit in so you swirl the words around in a cup and say it is dead on your blog as well.

That’s lovely.

Now can you shut up about it.

If this service is dead, why are you still making it a point to remind people who are still using it once a month? Sure the development has stopped, but I didn’t die after puberty and neither did billions of other people.

At first all the talk of services “dying” didn’t bother me. Most of the pundits would wait until the official announcement that all the lights were off and all the servers were unplugged before they started rolling caskets up to doors. Now every time the subscription rate drops or slows by more than 5 people everyone runs around like the village is burning down.

Geocities was dealt the dead treatment years ago, but it was still around up until about a month ago. There are plenty of services still around that have been called dead for months which have stated no intention of shutting down in the near future and have thriving communities. Just because you don’t like the UI doesn’t mean you need to stick your head in the door and yell that it is dead to make yourself feel better.

I have touched on this issue before, but that was more reflection on how chasing after new services was getting old.  Picking on the ones you don’t like and saying they are dead is different, especially when you are still using them. If you want to be seen as an authority, then maybe you want to lay off the hypocrisy for a bit.

Saying blogs were dead in a bunch of blog posts designed to spur traffic didn’t really do you any favors, sending a bunch of tweets that Twitter is useless just made you look like a jerk. If you want to be an authority on something you have to remember that part of the job is being respected. Every single time you nag about something being dead, it raises the discussion from being a potential statement of fact to condescension.

Quit acting like someoone crapped in your cereal and stop trying to drive people away from places. The goal of these places is for you and go build a community, not try your best to shatter them before their time.