First, I'll just say I think the iNaturalist app is great and I've used it before and enjoyed it.

I assume he had good intentions when experimenting with non-hierarchical governance, but this wasn't the right organization with which to experiment with them. If it was feeding the poor, maybe "sociocracy" makes sense. But its main goal was to make an app (and although it's a non-profit it maintains a proprietary machine learning model mind you, this isn't Wikipedia).

And when you make an app you need direction. You can't be going in 5 different major directions based on individual contributors' whims. And beyond even just the structural issues, he also needed basic leadership/management skills to direct the product which he didn't provide. "Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative."

So he was a director who didn't direct. Then later on when he chose to step down from being a leader, he decided he wanted to direct again. Isn't that ironic?

As far as can we criticize? Of course we can. If someone's going to write a public essay calling out other people by name and criticizing them we can criticize their essay and what they wrote about their experience.

He is not being criticized for talking about his fuckups but for ranting endlessly about how other people were not doing what he wanted, putting the blame squarely on them.

> But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me

In that might tome of an essay, where did he tal about how he fucked up? I read the whole thing and it is clear to me that he doesn't think he fucked up.

> Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures

Celebrating failures has become a very confusing concept. When someone shares their stories of trying and failing, the part we're celebrating is that they tried something. We're not celebrating the failure or validating everything they did.

The value in sharing failure stories is that others can learn from them. The person sharing the failure story also gets valid feedback.

If everyone just rolled over and applauded everything that led up to the failure, that's not helpful to anyone. It may feel good for some, but it's really unhelpful. Evaluating the situation and what went wrong is important.

The second aspect is a desire for "blameless" postmortems where we all pretend like the human element was not a factor to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. However, in cases like this, the human factor appears to be at the root of a lot of the discord. I don't think it's unfair at all to discuss that honestly.