Let me clarify what happened here for anybody who couldn't read between the lines of Fictive Kin's ridiculously biased representation of this situation.

Cameron Koczon hits up Jeff on Twitter asking to talk about Punchfork. Jeff has just sold Punchfork and most likely has legal obligations prohibiting him from talking about too much, plus he's busy transitioning the company into a new parent organization, along with whatever else he has going on in his life. They don't provide context, or email him with more information. They tell Jeff to DM them if he wants to talk, as if this now puts the ball in Jeff's court.

Jeff politely responds: "I'm sorry I can't right now." Nothing hostile here.

Then, OP posts a page about Hugspoon. They intend to scrape and replicate Punchfork's data, in particular its user data. Keep in mind, Jeff's site generated traffic for the sites he scraped, much like Google does. By not showing full recipes, Jeff has become a discovery tool for those sites, not a competitor. Hugspoon will not be providing value to Punchfork, the site it scrapes, or Pinterest, the site that now owns it. Hugspoon competes with Punchfork by stealing its data and giving no value in return. OP's claim that they're doing it for the users doesn't really matter. They are stealing this data and it is not an apples to apples comparison to say that Punchfork also scraped data, because it provided significant value to the companies whose data it shared. Ask any of those sites if they minded.

Jeff asks the OP if they are cloning his site and scraping all of the data. He says it's extremely uncool if so. So far, not hostile. He has turned down a context-less request to chat with someone, and has now very level-headedly responded to a blatant attempt to clone his site and steal his data, competing with his new parent company and him for the same users.

Cameron Koczon does not answer the question. He evades it and says, "not trying to do anything uncool. Still super eager to talk more. Happy to do so anytime."

Let me translate this last part for you. "We have stated publicly we plan to scrape your data. We'll say we're not doing anything uncool, but that's because we think "liberating" your site's data is cool. The ball is in your court to contact us, because you owe us that. Just so you know, we can't wait to chat with you!"

Jeff responds. "Please do not scrape any data from PF for your product. I'm asking you unequivocally and in public. OK?"

Yet again, I see absolutely nothing hostile on Jeff's part so far. In fact, if someone insisted I contact them in order to find out more about what they want to talk to me about, and then posted a note saying they intend to pull all of my data, I'd say asking for clarification and a confirmation that they are not going to do that is pretty fucking cordial.

Then Cameron says he will email Jeff in the AM. Four days later, Jeff has to ask if he's going to get an email about this clone site that the OP has publicly announced. Cameron responds that he "ran out of steam" and was away for the weekend. Apparently, him being busy is a perfectly good excuse to leave a big issue out in the open un-addressed, but Jeff being busy isn't enough of a reason to send the guy more context about your plans in an email before announcing publicly your bullshit intentions to rip his site off.

And now there is the article on Fictive Kin, which could not be more ironically headed with the tagline "Work Hard. Be Nice." by people who are going to scrape all of the data they want from a single site, while bullying the site's owner into dealing with them in the way that they expect him to. The post criticizes Jeff's acquisition announcement as callous, an opinion of theirs that I didn't share when I got the same notification. I use Punchfork all of the time. They criticize the "ominous shutdown banner", which I imagine was intended to alert users about the site's imminent closing. Had he not posted such a banner, they would have said he didn't take enough action to alert users to the site's future. Then, they take their arrogant opinion of the situation and paraphrase Jeff, saying: “We’re excited to share the news that we’re gonna be rich! To celebrate, we’re shutting down the site and taking all your data down with it. So long, suckers!”

And as for Archive Team. I assume you're talking about the guys that announced their own intentions by saying "Injecting terabytes of Punchfork user/recipe data into http://archive.org . Relive the assholery of this goodbye: http://punchfork.com/pinterest ....

Now that we've clarified all of that. Explain to me the part where Jeff is the hostile one. Explain to me how these aren't a bunch of bitter dicks that saw a site get acquired, didn't like another company getting bought and absorbed, and decided to steal all of its data and compete with it, pausing only briefly to insist that the owner of that site give them a call because they would like to tell him to his face about their arrogance. Explain to me why Jeff's request to "Please don't copy any Punchfork data" is a hostile response to being called an asshole.

I don't know a single level headed person who would look at this communication outside of the context of Fictive Kin's ridiculous blog post and not think that these are some of the biggest douchebags on the internet.

I'm surprised you blame us for the way Jeff is perceived. The only thing I think we could have maybe done better is omit the links to his actual replies. In retrospect, that might have been better. Our link text is pretty benign, e.g., "Then, we heard from Jeff."

The story is simple. We offered to save the likes of users who asked us to. Jeff objected, so we didn't. We offered to save the recipe data and make a searchable index. Jeff objected, so we didn't. While we might have been surprised, we complied; we didn't want to ruffle any feathers.

I can only imagine that you either object to the fact that we started the Open Recipes project or that we shared the story behind it. Either way, I'm afraid I just don't care. If there are exactly two people who think we did something wrong here, and lots of people who support what we're doing, then I think we chose wisely.

Also, you can't truthfully claim that anything we're doing is competing with Punchfork. (It was shut down at the end of March, before the Open Recipes project existed.) Not that there's anything wrong with competition.

Your link text is benign, set between accusations and hyperbole. You could have emailed Jeff with context on what you were thinking. You didn't. You tweeted asking him to DM you about a conversation you wanted to have, not him. He told you he was busy. You could have emailed him context then, you didn't. You posted a page publicly saying you planned to save a bunch of the data from his site. He asked you if you were planning to scrape his data and said he thought doing so was uncool. You didn't answer the question. You said you weren't doing anything uncool, which is a matter of opinion, not a clarification of fact, and again acted as though it was his responsibility to pursue clarification from you.

Your approach was wholly unprofessional. The reason it pissed me off is because I know what kind of person Jeff is to those entrepreneurs who approach him professionally, respectful of his time. He is completely approachable, super friendly, and incredibly generous with his time. The reason he wasn't here is because your approach lacked common courtesy and respect. You acted as if he owed it to you to reach out and discuss your project. He doesn't. Then you all but slandered him in your post, paraphrasing him with things like "So long, suckers," which is something that anybody who knows Jeff knows could not be further from his attitude about anything.

I'm glad you came around to respecting Jeff's request. It's too bad you didn't approach the situation as reasonably from the beginning. I get tired of seeing good people have their name tarnished around the community by people whose sense of entitlement leads them to paint a one-sided picture of someone who has worked so hard to contribute to the community, simply because they didn't get what they wanted, how they wanted it.

I don't think having an easily incited mob of trolls supporting your view validates what you've done. I think if you take a step back and look at the situation subjectively, you'd realize you owe Jeff an apology.

> Hugspoon competes with Punchfork by stealing its data and giving no value in return.

How are they competing with it? Punchfork is gone. Isn't it Pinterest's fight now? I doubt that a term of the acquisition was "personally deal with people who are copying the Punchfork data".

I'm sorry, are you saying that stealing from larger companies is okay? Anyway, I'm done here. This behavior is scandalous, rude and shameful. I don't think I need to defend this view point anymore than I already have.

Eh, I think your viewpoint is clouded by your friendship with Jeff Miller. You "know" that his motives are pure, because you think he is a good person. But this is not at all clear for someone who doesn't know him, especially if you look at the initial messaging about the Punchfork acquisition.

It really doesn't matter what tone you read that note in, all of Cameron and team's behavior is completely unacceptable, unprofessional and unethical.