To say the past week has been somewhat turbulent for the Fitocracy community would be an understatement. Pitch forks were gathered, lamentations were cried, and it seemed like the sky was falling for a brief period of time.

For context, last week we pushed an update to our strength training scoring system. That set off a firestorm of folks crying that it penalized strength training. In just a couple of hours, there were over a hundred comments on the announcement thread, the vast majority of them complaining about the move.

While this was an issue that prompted us to immediately take action, it highlighted a higher level problem. Many cried out that we were focusing on the wrong things: growing the user base, adding activities that they deemed unimportant, monetizing, etc. And by spending our time on these things, users said that we were failing to meet many promises we’d made in months prior.

Some have even claimed that we have been behaving poorly… in some instances complaining about user feedback or otherwise treating users in a negative manner. Others say that we are ignoring their feedback and even their volunteering to help us when we’re stretched thin.

This post isn’t intended to meet complaints with excuses because frankly, nobody wants to hear them.

What I want to say today is this: yes, we have failed to meet certain expectations from the community. Some of our moves have been outright stupid and have angered a lot of users. And there is a laundry list of promises we’ve made that we haven’t met yet.

And yet after I’ve already said that some promises haven’t been kept, I am about to make another one. But this is one in which I have the utmost confidence:

No matter what we do, it will always be in what we believe to be the best interest of our users and our community. And we will always seek the community’s feedback.

This doesn’t mean we won’t screw up from time to time. And it doesn’t mean that we won’t occasionally be wildly off base from what we think the community actually needs. But we will never sacrifice the experience at Fitocracy for an objective that is counter to our users’ best interests.

So no more excuses. No more “wah wah, our jobs are hard.” We will continue to focus on the mission, which is to make fitness addictive and possible for anyone.

Finally, the only thing that we ask of the community is that they understand change is inevitable but that as Fitocracy continues to evolve, we hope you will work with us to fix what’s broken and to help us figure out how to make things better.

-Brian