It was all about some bells and whistles, if anything. Email - barely half-baked feature and my biggest problem with Posterous, as initially it was their most hyped core feature (and I believed them). Spaces it's just ol' plain Posterous, they enhanced the name for some vague reasons. Groups is nothing special. Slideshows - another lightbox variant. Sharing to multiple social networks - buggy. The list goes on? So bring it.

Meanwhile, I'll bring my own. Posterous was moderately responsive at most, but e-mail responsiveness and fixing/improving the site and its functionality are different things. Even CEO may be responding to my mails, but it means nothing if it doesn't change a bit of the outcome. I guess the problem was that they had their own vision and roadmap paved with features that will have the biggest impact. They were simply unwilling to pay attention to anything else. It would be fine, really, if they stated it clearly from the beginning.

1. Initially Suyash responded to my first mail (appraisal; asking for markdown inline images, feedburner mybrand and introduction of commenting system such as intense debate). It looked like:

"Thanks for your wonderful email and detailed feedback. I'll pass on some of your suggestions to the team."

2. Second thread (Identi.ca autopost and unwanted location disclosure) didn't get any response.

3. Third thread (wrong URL of the post being previously private and with the title changed before becoming publicized, i.e. premature public URL generation)

"We'll look into changing this behavior in a future update."

4. Fourth thread (<!--more--> doesn't work with markdown, editor doesn't switch to markdown mode immediately, even though the post was written in markdown, no setting for making markdown the default mail posting style) didn't get any response.

5. In my mail starting the fifth thread (1 month later) I collected existing problems. Response, this time from Rick:

re commenting system - "Very few have asked for this, so it is unlikely that we will implement without a lot more support."

re url prematurely created - "I'm not sure I understand your question."

re edit in markdown mode immediately - "this is in our queue"

re <!--more--> equivalent in markdown - "I will check on status of this to make sure it is added the next time we update this feature"

re automarkdown mail - "this is in our queue"

re markdown inline images - "this is in our queue"

My response got no response, so 3 weeks later I asked about any progress.

"Unfortunately, no meaningful progress - these are on our list, but not yet high enough on the priority queue for us to work on yet."

I ask again 2.5 months later.

"Your requests are still on our feature list, but not many people have requested them so they are not prioritized very highly. We're a small team with a lot still to add and are trying to focus on the features that will have the biggest impact."

Finally I was so frustrated that I suggested working myself on some of bugs/lacking features (free of charge, maybe t-shirt or something) as they are mostly easy to implement. I wrote also that it's sad that identi.ca problem was not solved.

"Thanks so much for your offer to help - to clarify, we did look at the identica problem and it's on our list too. Unfortunately, we can't easily open up our code to outside developers right now."

I mailed them no more, as you know, it was pointless.

For some time there was a forum available, when people reported their problems, bugs, etc. It was all the same - "it's in our queue, but not high enough."

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Conclusions

Be honest - if you don't want to fix reported problems and hear about even simple enhancements, as you won't implement them how trivial they are (because it doesn't fit into your vision or whatever, I don't know), just say it clearly in public (on the page) or at least private (in the first response, I wouldn't bother you anymore).

The tragedy of the present times is mediocrity in everything, but software and web services in particular. Let's add some new flashy features no matter how buggy the rest is. Hopefully laymen will think that it supposed to be like that and technicians can be ignored - they are negligible minority.