Rafer sez:
Above are a couple of lines that I typed in an IM thread with a guy that I’m not going to identify. I declined to be interviewed for his blog covering the secondary sale of private company stock, a la the current rash of Zynga, Facebook, and Twitter transactions. 

These secondary stock sales are a trend which will end in abuse, tears, and reactionary over-regulation by the SEC. It will further damage the ability of technology companies to achieve liquidity. It’s another deregulated shortcut around our defanged SEC which will be abused by those who want to make a quick buck and don’t give a damn about the future. I’m not concerned about early Twitter employees trying to diversify. I’m concerned about the inevitable ripoff artists who will start shell companies solely to sell their shares on SecondMarket (or wherever). They’ll have documented some silly plan about rolling up small social game publishers, Groupon clones, or whatnot. 

The blogger asked for an explanation as to why I declined, and we went back an forth for about ten minutes on Skype while I attempted to make my position clear. I was unsuccessful in doing so, but some part of the issue was his unwillingness to see my refusal as legitimate.  

His blog covers solely the market for private stock sales. He only succeeds if it becomes a legitimate market. I am very concerned that we’re just seeing the start of a giant wave of these crappy deals and that they will total many billions of dollars in the coming years. His domain, his logo, and 90% of the articles on the site are legitimizers of this poorly considered macro reaction to the over-regulated mess we call the IPO process.

While I’m not remotely one of the big dogs of dotcom, my interviews do drive some ok traffic and that traffic is composed of people who themselves have decent reach. And as is clear, Google is forever. I’m not going to voluntarily have my name indexed alongside his domain.

He asked if I’d have that conversation with a writer at GigaOM or TechCrunch. Yes, I would (though there’s no reason they’d want to). Their success is barely correlated with the market for secondary private stock sales and they have little stake in whether those sales hit volume.

Hopefully, he’ll understand my position at some point. If not, I’ve made enough of an attempt to be reasonable. And yes, that’s a nasty Wikipedia image of somebody’s rash.