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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#61

Post by photonios »

tikthot wrote: post #50
photonios wrote: post #33

I am not an active Triplebyte user, but I have an account and followed the thread(s). This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. They fucked up, realized it and turned the ship around. They listened and that's what counts for me. They listened to the negative feedback and responded to it. Some comments around here are extremely negative of the whole situation. More negative than I think they deser…

> Some comments around here are extremely negative of the whole situation. More negative than I think they deserve People would have gotten laid-off to this. The dark patterns are just cherry on top. The negativity is well deserved.

The negativity towards to original announcement of making profiles public was deserved. For me, the negativity towards the CEO's apology and cancelling the feature is not.

Everyone makes mistakes and if nobody would be willing to look past that, then we'd never get anywhere.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#62

Post by dang »

trianx wrote: post #2

... (continuation of Triplebyte email) Rather than safeguarding the fact that you are or were job searching, we threatened exposure. Current employers might retaliate if they saw that you were job searching. You did not expect that any personal information you’d given us, in the context of a private, secure job search, would be used publicly without your explicit consent. I sincerely apologize. It was my failure. So,…

I'm going to inline this text into the top post so that everyone can read it. (Edit: that's done, and I deleted "continued in comments" - normally I'd ask for permission first, but in this case it seemed better not to wait.)

You probably split the post up this way because the software told you the text was too long. Tip for the future: you can get around that by clicking 'edit' and adding the rest later. Don't tell anybody :)

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#63

Post by EGreg »

gbear605 wrote: post #39
EGreg wrote: post #23

Oh boy. Where do I begin? Rather than safeguarding the fact that you are or were job searching, we threatened exposure. Current employers might retaliate if they saw that you were job searching. You did not expect that any personal information you’d given us, in the context of a private, secure job search, would be used publicly without your explicit consent. I sincerely apologize. It was my failure. How about we sto…

TripleByte is literally the perfect example of a company that should be centralized. They work because they have a reputation that companies can trust. Trying to make it decentralized takes away any value that TripleByte provides.

That's exactly right, it does take away that value from TripleByte and gives it to everybody. The value that TripleByte provides is because of the current state of technology.

Take for example the telephone industry. We had telephone switchboard operators, and it cost $1-3 a MINUTE to make overseas calls. You could make the same argument: "AT&T is the perfect example of a company that should be centralized. They have a reputation for connecting your calls reliably, and you trust them to not broadcast your calls to others. But, of course, in the last 20 years the Internet has introduced Voice over IP and now ANY company can provide faceless, nameless infrastructure and get paid, while your calls go end-to-end encrypted via the wire.

Are we all better off? Yes! Having decoupled infrastructure from power over your data (calls), we have dropped the cost to zero. We went from monopolies and cartels and feudalism to "dumb pipes". We have videoconferencing right now, something unimaginable 20 years ago not just because of bandwidth but because there were "perfect examples of companies that should be centralized" and "reputations that we can trust". There is far more at stake.

In the past, we had human calculators, printers, mailmen, etc. They provided a lot of value. Lots of industries did. Today we don't. Don't blame TripleByte. Blame the lack of good permissionless, encrypted alternatives.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#64

Post by JoshTriplett »

ammon wrote: post #19
GordonS wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why was the CEO on HN arguing for the feature, implying people complaining were the ones with the problem? I don't buy it, and I'll be steering clear.

My head was still in the place it was when we were developing the feature. I thought it was a communication problem (if I could only communicate how this feature could help a lot of people everyone would understand). Perhaps I'm just slow. But it took some time and repetition for the magnitude of my error to sink in and me to really hear what people were saying.

If you don't already have one, have you considered having a collection of users who you can privately ask about potential features (or run email wording by) to figure out how it would go over? A user of the product could easily have told you, in advance, "some people are looking for a job secretly and this would be a problem".

You could also come up with incentives to encourage job seekers to opt in; for instance, you could temporarily tag such users as "likely to get hired sooner" in reports for prospective employers.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#65

Post by abh123 »

rebotfc wrote: post #46
xiphias2 wrote: post #15

I already changed all my data on my profile (including email), so I won’t be getting the apology email. It’s not just failure of ,,effects’’. I’m an EU citizen and it was a clear intent of GDPR violation.

Wow, they had European users? They are fucked. This is about a serious and willful GDPR contravention as you can get. I hope they have good lawyers because they are gonna be hauled over the coals by multiple countries' data commissioners. Wow just wow.

well no, because they didn't actually release the feature, therefore no damage was actually done.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#66

Post by thaumaturgy »

I haven't received the email yet. Are they canceling the feature altogether, or just making it opt-in by default?

I liked the idea of the feature quite a lot. I'd love to be able to publish select Triplebyte info. It just needs to be something I can choose to do, rather than chosen for me.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#67

Post by GordonS »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #45
ammon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Friday announcement was a result of us pushing to get the profile toggle feature out that the email linked to, and shipping late. Not something I'm proud of (either from an eng management perspective, or, more importantly, from a not violating the trust of our users perspective). It was a rushed schedule. In hindsight I see that the timing of the Friday announcement is ALSO a problem.

Unfortunately the most vocal people are the only ones you’re hearing. I got the email and didn’t really care. My angel.co and LinkedIn are already public, why not Triplebyte too, especially if it raises my market value. Haters gonna hate and I wouldn’t take it too seriously.

> My angel.co and LinkedIn are already public, why not Triplebyte too

Because you opted in to creating those profiles and the information they contain, and made them public. You opted in.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#68

Post by jiveturkey »

alexpetralia wrote: post #14

This is a very good apology. Yes, it is possible that this is merely the perfunctory apology TripleByte's users were undoubtedly due. It is possible it is entirely inauthentic, a mere artifice for damage control from a reputationally maimed business. But it is also possible that, like all people, the CEO seriously screwed up. There were some bad premises, some bad motives, some bad confirmation bias at play here. Tha…

> It is possible it is entirely inauthentic, a mere artifice for damage control from a reputationally maimed business.

I honestly don't think that matters in the slightest. One of two things happened.

1. deletion requests spiked like you wouldn't believe

2. the board caught wind of the bad feedback and forced this response.

#2 i don't believe for a second. it beggars belief that the board is following day-to-day activity and further, at the start of a holiday weekend? no. way.

not independently anyway.

#1 must have happened, ammon asked for advice from the board and other close allies, who wordsmithed this reply. there is 100% no way that this email came from the same hamfisted person that deployed this change in this particular way with this particular timing.

So why doesn't it matter? Because the action is taken, quickly, and the lesson learned. For observers this is also a great lesson - in damage control.

The problem as I see it is that this has to get buried, quickly. The damage is done. TB was obviously already on the ropes, leading to this poor decision in the first place. I've never used TB, but what I hear about it is more bad than good. Good luck to them.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#69

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

adnanh wrote: post #49
ammon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Friday announcement was a result of us pushing to get the profile toggle feature out that the email linked to, and shipping late. Not something I'm proud of (either from an eng management perspective, or, more importantly, from a not violating the trust of our users perspective). It was a rushed schedule. In hindsight I see that the timing of the Friday announcement is ALSO a problem.

Just curious, did you have any engineers/product owners telling you that you should probably not do this feature, especially not push so hard (doing stuff late on Friday that can easily wait for Monday, etc...) to get it out?

Yeah, those guys got laid off early on the COVID-19 cost reductions as being 'troublemakers'.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#70

Post by ammon »

woofie11 wrote: post #43
ammon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Friday announcement was a result of us pushing to get the profile toggle feature out that the email linked to, and shipping late. Not something I'm proud of (either from an eng management perspective, or, more importantly, from a not violating the trust of our users perspective). It was a rushed schedule. In hindsight I see that the timing of the Friday announcement is ALSO a problem.

Hi Ammon, 1. There is an opportunity. 2. You did lose a lot of trust. 3. You didn't have enough trust in the first place to really take advantage of this opportunity. I would encourage you to think about how you can earn that trust. This comes back to transparency and checks-and-balances. If you want to go that route, you will need to build hard constraints: legal and technological constraints which would have preven…

We are thinking about how we can make a stronger (and specific) privacy guarantee so it's not just a matter of our future intentions. I had a long conversation with my co-founder about this yesterday. We did not get anything together in time to include it in this email. But we're planning to.
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