Today, on this incredibly important day for me, I want to say more personal words than I usually do. I want to ask you for forgiveness, because many of our hopes have not come true, because what we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully difficult.
I ask to forgive me for not fulfilling some hopes of those users who believed that we would be able to jump from the grey, stagnating, spamfest past into a bright, rich and civilized future in one go.
I myself believed in this. But it could not be done in one fell swoop. In some respects I was too naive. Some of the problems were too complex. We struggled on through mistakes and failures. At this complex time many people experienced upheavals in their threads & posts. But I want you to know that I never said this would be easy.
Today it is important for me to tell you the following. I also experienced the pain which each of you experienced. I experienced it in my heart, with sleepless nights, agonizing over what needed to be done to ensure that TKers posted more easily and better, if only a little. I did not have any objective more important than that.