Shutterstock blocked me on twitter because I keep talking about their censorship in china but don’t want their customers to know about it. Internally leadership was so proud that they made the right chose for the company but I guess hiding it from customers is also how to make a right choice for the customer? They can’t get upset about what they don’t know!
TechCrunch has an article covering Shutterstock, its censoring, and my departure. It’s a great article and I hope you read it. It is a complex issue. I hope Shutterstock finds a way to take a stance other then saying it will follow local laws and do any censoring needed to keep it’s partnerships.
Today is my last day at Shutterstock. I’ve been here for nine years but when an ethical dispute remains unaddressed and I have the privilege of being able to move on and I am proud to.
I know two others who are also leaving Shutterstock for the same reason. More are looking to leave and even more wish to leave but don’t think they will be able to.
Shutterstock is typically good at answering questions at company updates but in this instance my questions were deemed not appropriate.
I helped organize a petition that almost 20% of the company signed but zero changes were made.
Many have tried hard to find compromises and middle ground in an effort to make peace with the censorship we now participate in but zero changes have been entertained.
I wish I didn’t feel like I had to leave but I never want to work where I can’t fully get behind the company. I wish my coworkers the best of luck in their struggle to change how the company thinks about censorship.
I’m super proud of all the work I did at Shutterstock from growing Bigstock to building a powerful design tool in Editor. As well as all the work I have done to building culture with my coworkers. It was an amazing journey.
Read more about SHUTTERSTOCK EMPLOYEES FIGHT COMPANY’S NEW CHINESE SEARCH BLACKLIST
UPDATE
This post, which I posted across social media at about 2pm, got me walked out of the office at 3pm. They could have just waited out the 2 hours I had left.
I’m launching a new site called AudioAlerts.io! It’s a live dashboard that can play a sound when your users take action on your site. I’ve been working on it for a few months now and we have a post up on producthunt that you can vote for! Intsall the Audio Alerts npm client and trigger the code from the client or the server!
Signup for an Audio Alerts account and get 500 free alerts!
This is my first big site launch. I built it all in firebase for both the live updates and the static file hosting and it has full integration with stripe for the subscriptions. I’m very excited for people to try it and to keep building out new features.
I made this bookmarklet to make the MSNBC Now player to load a little closer to full screen.
Just drag this link to your bookmark bar and click it when you load up the http://www.msnbc.com/now page.