Dean Allen commenting over on Zeldman’s site during the discussion of why he shut down Favrd:
No fit of pique for me, actually. More like a gradual aha, with a slight wince and sigh at the end. I’ve spent the past year or so reading and writing and doing my level best to chip away at 40 years of belief in the logical fallacy that one’s identity meaning – self-worth, self-image, whatever you want to call it – can accurately be measured in the thoughts of others. Much as you and I may enjoy being encouraged through recognition and praise and dislike being saddened by rejection or indifference (god knows we’re taught to right from the outset by caregivers: good boy, pretty picture, heckuva job Brownie), deriving personal value from these transactions in the absence of a well-formed internal frame of reference through which you can decide on your own what does and doesn’t work, and subsequently accept the opinions of others as feedback, is just plain faulty thinking, of the sort that makes otherwise capable, centred people all loopy and weird.
I never used Favrd; I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about the rights and wrongs of shutting it down so abruptly. What I have spent a lot of time thinking about is my own sense of self and self-worth. I intend to spend more time on this in 2010.