At the risk of writing about two “High School 2.0″ blogosphere situations in one week (the first one being the Loren Feldman and Shel Israel brouhaha), I couldn’t help but notice that Jakob Lodwick — the brash young millionaire co-founder of Vimeo and CollegeHumour.com, and one-time blogging boyfriend of party girl-blogger Julia Allison — has decided to quit the Internet. Well, maybe not the Internet per se, but the “social Web,” meaning he has closed his blog and his Tumblelog (he’s financially involved with Tumblr as well). Why? Because he just can’t take the abuse any more, he says. It’s just too much.

Apparently, some people have been saying mean things about Jakob — about how he’s arrogant, and insufferable in a way that only a millionaire geek can be, that he dresses funny, and so on. It’s gotten to the point where even his Mom can’t take it any more, and has had to shut down her own Tumblr blog. The humanity! At some point, reading through Jakob’s last post to the blogosphere at large, and then through his farewell letter, I started to think that maybe it was just a big prank — maybe Jakob is secretly laughing at us. I mean, could he really have written a line like “I may be a millionaire, but this sort of thing still hurts” and not felt just a little ridiculous? Then he says:

“I am walking away from what might be called The Social Web. This comprises any site where ‘anyone can sign up’ and electronically socialize with one another. The story is the same with most of these sites: a few settlers discover and make themselves at home, enjoying the solitude.

Increasingly, less-adventurous people find their way to the site. The population begins to snowball. A vocal minority of thoughtless jerks begin to speak up, driving away the settlers. In the worst case, the result is something like MySpace.”

Maybe Jakob should go back and read some of the history of the early Internet: of Usenet, and IRC, and the MUDs and MOOs and then the Well, and so on. What he’s describing isn’t anything new; it isn’t some Web 2.0 invention designed specifically to torture well-meaning and creative individuals like our hero Jakob Lodwick, until their Mom writes a blog post about their enemies. It’s just the way people are. And for young Jake to moan about all the negative attention he’s gotten, after happily posting every intimate detail and thought about his life and relationships to public blogs, in an almost pathological exercise in “over-sharing,” is really rich. And not the good kind of rich, which — by the way — Jakob also is. It’s hard out there for a Web 2.0 pimp, I guess.

Update:

I’ve gotten a lot of comments about this post — you can read some of them below — and many of them disagree with my take on it. Bijan Sabet, an investor with Spark Capital, says both here and in a post on his Tumblr blog that Jakob is a good guy, and doesn’t deserve the attacks on him. As I said in my response to Bijan, I would never say that someone deserved the kinds of comments people have made about Jakob — but at the same time, they can hardly come as a surprise, unless he has been living in an ivory tower somewhere. He may be a great guy, but I still think his response to the whole thing is more than a little childish.

Since every weekend must have some drama in the blogosphere, and Mike Arrington hasn’t missed any conferences lately (that I know of), the drama quotient must be filled by Jakob Lodwick, the geeky co-founder of video-sharing site Vimeo — and also a much-loved target of Valleywag cheap shots about him and his red-hot girlfriend Julia Allison. Jake and Julia, in typical celebrity 2.0 fashion, invite such attacks by posting their every thought and action on their blog.

According to a post that has since been removed from Jakob’s own blog, he has left Connected Ventures — the parent company of Vimeo and also two other sites founded by the same group: Busted Tees and CollegeHumor.com. After being acquired last year, all are now the property of Barry Diller and his InterActive Corp. conglomerate, and there have been suggestions that Jake and his bare-all, bong-huffing ways didn’t mesh very well with IAC (imagine my surprise).

It being a slow news day — and/or a topic that Owen Thomas and the rest of the gang just can’t resist writing about — Valleywag has so far written not just one and not just two, but three posts about Jakob and Vimeo, including one about how he had left, one about the fact that he was supposedly fired, and one about whether Julia’s breasts were somehow involved.

Julia amps up the Drama 2.0 by posting on their shared blog that she wished she hadn’t learned of Jakob’s departure from the company he had been with for seven years by reading about it on his blog — which calls to mind her similarly unimpressed posts about Jakob and his shortcomings in the boyfriend department from earlier this year.

Back in the real world, various reports say that Jakob wasn’t fired but left amicably — and that he wasn’t the only recent departure from Connected Ventures, with one other co-founder having left just before him and one having left at the same time, suggesting a potential purge of some kind. Meanwhile, a commenter on TechCrunch’s post says:

“Jakob’s not meek, but he’s not some useless douche. He actually conceived and built a brilliant site that makes YouTube look like a third-grade after-school project. He ran a productive but amazingly happy team, and he inspired love for his site from its users.

Jakob laid his life spread-eagle on the web, and for that he deserves ridicule, like all the rest of us exhibitionists. But it’s lazy and stupid to write off his entire value as a person.”

A surprisingly rational comment amid a sea of Schadenfreude (and worse) and Jakob and the Vimeo phenomenon. I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the commenter was named Matthew :-) Update: As Megan has since pointed out in a comment here, that example of rationality appears to be a carbon copy of a comment made by Nick Douglas on Valleywag. Obviously someone liked Nick’s comment enough to pretend it was theirs — and now I’m left agreeing with Nick Douglas.