Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#281

Post by dang » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

moreaccountspls wrote: post #237

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 is 100% a PR firm doing damage control. Go look at the other thread and tell me if this sounds like someone who's actually sorry, or sorry they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. edit: A lot of people in this thread are naive to the nature of sociapaths....

The cookie jar argument is fine, plenty of people are making it. The sociopath thing is over the line - you can't attack someone like that on HN. I'm happy to see that users rightly flagged it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. While I have you, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is also in the site guidelines. You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#282

Post by mattm » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:23 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #216

mosselman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm surprised they didn't consider beta testing the feature with a subset of users to see how it'd go first.

According to one of the CEO's replies in the other comment thread, one of the drivers to push forward was that they need to meet their sprint goal.

I don't have any inside information but it seems that this could also be a case of the downsides of deadlines. They set a deadline and then all other considerations go out the window when trying to meet that.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#283

Post by jki275 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:23 PM UTC

greenyoda wrote: post #273

jki275 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They emailed their entire user base and notified them of their intentions. You make it sound like they tried to hide this and got caught - that’s absurd given the facts.

They gave their user base only one week's notice of the upcoming change[1], and according to the discussion in the original thread, had dark patterns in their UI that made it hard to opt out of the feature (it would only allow you opt out for 24 months)[2] or cancel your account. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23283237

I got the email. Your characterization is inaccurate.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#284

Post by redshirtrob » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

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.

Are you sure about this? I didn't comment on the previous story. I didn't tweet about this. I didn't email TripleByte. I just silently purged my account of meaningful data and opted out.

I'm only commenting now to cancel out your anecdote.

(And FWIW, I would have done nothing had it been opt-in. I would have been happy to leave my information private and strategically take it public when it suited me. The email, and Ammon's behavior in the original thread gave me little confidence that was an option, so I nuked my data.)

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#285

Post by colejohnson66 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

fma wrote: post #235

JoshTriplett wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, yo…

I woulda thought they have enough engineers in the company that the engineers would have raised a red flag...

Studies actually show that subordinates generally do not raise concern to their superiors about issues for either fear of reprimand or thinking the superior knows more than you.

If @ammon had said, “this will be a great feature,” the devs would keep quiet because they either (1) don’t want to be fired, or (2) trust he knows better than them.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#286

Post by eloff » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

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…

So many companies issue an apology that's been composed by a PR team and edited by legal. It ends up being a wishy washy we admit nothing but care about our customers kind of statement.

It's refreshing to see a real, detailed, apology. Just taking responsibility and owning each mistake of judgment or process along the way.

My opinion of these guys actually went up a notch over this debacle.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#287

Post by mattm » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

RandomBacon wrote: post #225

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…

I'm in a different industry, but I read the HN thread about it a few days ago. In the CEO's comments, I saw a lot of 'I'm sorry you feel that way' type of apologies. I wrote that he should take responsibility for his own actions. Perhaps he read that and took it to heart. Perhaps he read that and realized it would sound better if it seemed like he took it to heart. Perhaps after the monumental PR screw-up, they hired…

They scrapped the feature so that's an action backing up his words.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#288

Post by BurningFrog » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

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.

> He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar

This confuses me. What big payout could they have gotten from making this public?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#289

Post by nogabebop23 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #195

JshWright wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I interpret such a statement as expressing sympathy with someone's point of view, but also disagreeing with it.

It's pretty well understood by people far less experienced than the CEO (i.e. me) that you need to split those messages up.

Empathy is unconditional. It says "wow, that must be really painful/terrible/scary". It carries no judgement around the accuracy of such feelings, only an understanding that they are real for the other person.

Disagreeing comes later after you have shown there are legitimate competing solutions.

"I'm sorry you feel that way" fails at the first so you haven't yet earned the right to disagree agreeably.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#290

Post by colejohnson66 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

washitallaway wrote: post #205

samel1994 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Triplebyte is not for EU users. You're forgetting that Triplebyte is an American company, they're not subject to European nanny laws.

Any European citizen is covered by GDPR no matter where they are located.

I’m curious how that’ll work in practice. The sovereignty of a nation is a big thing. The US isn’t going to just prosecute TripleByte because Europe said they should. Sure, if @ammon visits the EU, he could be arrested, but a nation’s laws (generally) don’t extend past their border.