Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 678 posts

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#141

Post by GordonS »

ammon wrote: post #86
imheretolearn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be precise this the email they send you when you request them to delete your account. "We're processing your request and should be done within 30 days. We will verify your request using the information associated with your account. Government identification may be required and we may ask you for more information in order to verify your identify. Any questions? Email us at privacy@triplebyte.com" They didn't need "…

Yikes! Was this today? We pushed a fix for this yesterday, but if it's not fixed I need to look into it.

How did this happen in the first place?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#143

Post by vehementi »

treis wrote: post #79
photonios wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would have gone over a lot better if he didn't spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it. And it would have gone over a lot better if he was honest about what happened. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and he's all "was that wrong? Should I not have done that?". They knew exactly what they were doing and calculated that it was worth it.

You're just full of misinformation, aren't you?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#144

Post by JshWright »

username3 wrote: post #130
treis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have gone over a lot better if he didn't spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it. And it would have gone over a lot better if he was honest about what happened. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and he's all "was that wrong? Should I not have done that?". They knew exactly what they were doing and calculated that it was worth it.

He didn't spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it.

He certainly spent a great deal of time saying "I'm sorry you feel that way" (a classic non-apology... there's no better way to make a bad situation worse than by starting off with those words).

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#145

Post by GordonS »

ammon wrote: post #83
phreack wrote: post #17

One of the first things they could do is stop with the dark patterns. The original thread had many people mentioning that deleting an account was a ridiculous process, with a 30-day delay once you managed to start it.

Yeah... we made this better yesterday (removed the delay and the request for ID). It was totally a dark pattern. We built the initial deletion process right after GDPR passed. We were thinking about it mostly from a legal perspective then, and had not reviewed it since.

But this makes no sense. Why would you legally need someone's ID to delete their account, but not to create it?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#146

Post by MintelIE »

treis wrote: post #79
photonios wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would have gone over a lot better if he didn't spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it. And it would have gone over a lot better if he was honest about what happened. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and he's all "was that wrong? Should I not have done that?". They knew exactly what they were doing and calculated that it was worth it.

Is it possible to look too kindly at somebody? I think so. Clearly the CEO is backpedaling now that there's been a public outcry.

He's not sorry about what he did. He's sad he got caught.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#147

Post by g_p »

ammon wrote: post #78
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #31

One of two things happened: 1. Triplebyte attempted a big move against LinkedIn, tried to ease the blow to users by dumping on a Friday before memorial day weekend 2. Triplebyte, the company built around helping people find jobs, truthfully didn't understand that people might have concerns about their current companies knowing they are job-hunting It's pretty obvious it's #1, and that opt-out rather than opt-in was t…

I'd say it was both. I wanted to move against LinkedIn profiles, I thought that opt-out was the way to get critical mass, and I screwed up and did not realize how large a privacy violation this was.

Kudos for owning up straight on this.

I think LinkedIn is a massively privacy violating service, and alternatives are a very good and important thing to see. I would add one comment though perhaps helpful in the future:

One reason people here take such a vigorous stance against startups doing these kinds of "dirty tricks" is because they want real alternatives that treat them as more than a number of a row in a database. The incumbents will use opt-out techniques and consent walls, and dark patterns to grow.

But at the end of the day, they're being valued by the number of rows in their database. It seems there's a real potential to have lots of (but fewer) rows in your database, but for them to be actual valued users who get value from your service, and you make money from. Hyper growth scaling doesn't always have to be the only way. A curated network of a focused and high value verified demographic is likely worth orders of magnitude more than the incumbent, without any data selling or shenanigans.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#148

Post by sockr8s »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #96
sockr8s wrote: post #73

Why are you under such tremendous pressure? It is this a desperate move of a company finally going out of business or a result of an extreme pressure from the vc side? Who has accessed the data already? Not only directly but indirectly as well? Have you received any compensation or settled any transactions by exposing the data?

They didn’t expose any data. The feature wasn’t live yet.

"The new profiles will be launching publicly in 1 week" It means a preview was already available in a limited way.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#149

Post by zebnyc »

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.

Given that interviewing is a skill unto itself which needs to be practiced, what happens to candidates who need to take a few interviews before they start hitting their stride. For me, I can see that using Triplebyte once the candidate is "warmed up" makes sense.

If TripleByte was the only game in town then a new candidate would fail their test and then it is game over. No more job search.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#150

Post by ravenstine »

mosselman wrote: post #140
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…

> This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. Even if it is heartfelt, I'd argue that if no alarm bells went off internally when they were discussing this feature, they are not the group of people to entrust with information such as this.

They're undoubtedly going to have to do more to make things right in the future for those who have been following this issue, but it's at least refreshing to read what seems like a genuine apology. If we can take away anything from this, it's that Triplebyte actually understand why people were upset over this. I've read lots of apology emails where those in charge clearly either didn't understand the problem or they were dismissive towards their consumers.
Post reply on HN