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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#311

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

rebotfc wrote: post #37
ammon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do realise that if you have any European users you have majorly contravened GDPR regulations and data protection rules. I'm talking 20 million euros in fines

> I'm talking 20 million euros in fines

Unfortunately, the real fines are nowhere near the theoretically possible ones.

This is egregious enough that it could have actually resulted in a fine as opposed to a "please don't do that", but realistically, I doubt the fine would get near 100k.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#312

Post by rammy1234 »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #226
tmpz22 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the greatest of apologies is not a time machine that will completely undue what happened. A C-level/director-level team pushed out a massively privacy violating policy with zero feedback in an effort to compete against an incumbent company (LinkedIn) on a Friday afternoon. It reeks of they-raised-too-much-money-and-now-have-to-do-BIG-things syndrome and would seriously discourage me as either a user or enterpris…

People screw up. It happens. I accept the apology.

Really even if it’s a bank or a financial entity. Here it is privacy

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#313

Post by skinkestek »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #265
MintelIE wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One continues to be taken advantage of, over and over again. Assuming good faith is not prudent when dealing with people who want your money or data. We have enough collective experience at this stage to say this conclusively. Edit: Being cynical is the new normal when dealing with companies. Especially if they have your data, or want it.

You’re assuming ill intent on a new company. To be so cynical is not a good way to view things in life. Also, they don’t want my money. You literally pay nothing to use them; they get paid (a one time lump sum) by the company who hires you

Think of it this way: If someone I trusted with my data doxxes me it doesn't matter if they do it for free!

Yes, we know they weren't doing it for the goodness in their hearts, but there's a huge leap between

- using what they know about me to sell services to others (classic Google)

- and outright selling/publishing my data to others

There's a reason why I still - despite all my dislike for Google - still respect them somewhat: they actually seems to try to guard their treasure chest of juicy customer data against both governments as well as everyone else, they seem to be in this for the long haul.

Edit: try to avoid being rude / abrasive

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#314

Post by aaomidi »

akerl_ wrote: post #306
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.

Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction. As soon as a company does something that a chunk of people on the internet don’t agree with, there’s really no way out. They’re going to get bad press regardless of whether they retract, whether they apologize, and whether they say they’re taking actions to avoid the sequence that led to the actio…

I mean I deleted my account. They probably realized they're getting a ton of account deletions and went back on it.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#315

Post by christiansakai »

gkoberger wrote: post #291
trfhuhg wrote: post #154

Nothing to see here. Ammon has tried a bold move to chase big money, used a few common tricks (release on Friday night, opt-out and other dark patterns), it didn't pan out and now he's doing damage control. When the dust settles, he'll give this idea another try. This is all from a corporate playbook, but it seems Ammon hasn't read the entire book. There's a chapter there that tells how to systematically manufacture…

I don't know Ammon, but I don't think he's chasing "big money". The best founders I know, when they make mistakes like this, aren't doing it for the money. They're doing it because they are trying to create the world they want to see exist, and that blinds them a bit. In this case, I genuinely believe Triplebyte just wanted to have a bigger impact on the hiring world, and try to fix it for engineers. Did they fuck up…

Triplebyte wants to go toe to toe with LinkedIn profiles and take the gatekeeper throne from it. Once it has the throne it can do anything, forget about fixing the world.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#316

Post by sah2ed »

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.

> 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.

Appreciate the honesty here by admitting that account deletion relies on dark patterns, but it brings up two salient questions regarding how you approach product development.

1. Internally, do you at least have the equivalent of a “directly responsible individual" (DRI) for the product? It seems no one spoke up in the interests of users against legal’s overzealous decision to tack on lots of friction to the account deletion process?

2. It seems you could have also garnered some push back on the feature from your alumni Slack [0] but didn’t, perhaps due to the rush to ship quickly?

In addition to the changes you’ve pledged as part of rebuilding user trust, hopefully, you & your team will reassess your product development practices to add these checks so that such mistakes are not repeated in future.

[0] @hysan mentions that TB maintains an alumni Slack upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304199

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#317

Post by greenyoda »

jki275 wrote: post #230
tikthot wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I really doubt this. If a company would lay you off because you have a profile on a jobs network, they’re really a shit company you wouldn’t want to work for anyway. Not that I agree with their actions - anything like this ought to be opt in only, but I can’t see people getting laid off. I have a profile on linked in with my boss and multiple people from my company as contacts, I’ve got profiles on multiple additiona…

> you wouldn’t want to work for anyway

That would have been much easier to say a few months ago. But now, lots of startups and even large companies like Uber and Airbnb are laying off workers. Suddenly, for many, staying at that crappy company they currently work for is starting to seem like a much better option.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#318

Post by g_p »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #296
g_p wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 datab…

> massively privacy violating service And that's saying it gently. Not sure if they're still doing it, but the way they were harvesting e-mails and then using them to spam the harvested contacts, they were no better than any other phishing site. For people who use the same password on LinkedIn and their e-mail account, it was extremely easy to accidentally "consent" to this, and I've seen many an apology to the spam…

Agreed - I think they stopped doing this, but I am still tempted to make a GDPR complaint on the basis I have never consented to receiving contact from them.

Looking back at my email archives, I was still getting "X's invite is awaiting your response" emails in October 2018, after GDPR began.

Perhaps I am taking an overly strict view here, but given my email address is my personal data, no amount of consent (or indeed waivers/warrants from users that they have my consent, which LinkedIn has no genuine reason to believe true) can grant them permission to store and process my personal data.

It seems nonetheless unavoidable for LinkedIn to have carried out the process of linking my email to the person that sent the (unsolicited) request. This kind of behaviour is really rather scummy. I hope that invite spam could be a separate case on the basis of a GDPR violation, rather than the "accidentally going into people's email and getting their contacts" (as incredulous as it is to even write this!)

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#319

Post by wolfgang42 »

marmaduke wrote: post #266
trfhuhg wrote: post #154

Nothing to see here. Ammon has tried a bold move to chase big money, used a few common tricks (release on Friday night, opt-out and other dark patterns), it didn't pan out and now he's doing damage control. When the dust settles, he'll give this idea another try. This is all from a corporate playbook, but it seems Ammon hasn't read the entire book. There's a chapter there that tells how to systematically manufacture…

> When the dust settles, he'll give this idea another try. This was my reaction when the word "feature" was still used in the apology. If it creates risk or user unhappiness, we call it a bug, not a feature. It's like calling mitigations for spectre from Intel a "generous rollback of performance features". > Basically, he should've created a clueless VP of business relations or something of that sort reminded by of t…

The feature is public profiles, and I for one think it’s a neat idea to make a better alternative to LinkedIn for developers. This whole mess was not about the feature, but the way it was going to be rolled out at short notice to everybody who hadn’t explicitly turned it off, which is very different. I think Ammon himself put it best:

> I still believe there's a need for something like this. But to release it as a default public feature was not just a major mistake, it was a betrayal.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#320

Post by moreaccountspls »

dang wrote: post #281
moreaccountspls wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Sure, I didn't realize the account thing was against the rules.

I don't mind being flagged though. This is a [YC invested] company that just exhibited another example of the valley libertarian "the rules don't apply to me as long as I make money [or I get caught]" mentality. And hey, if that's what his priority is, more power to him! I personally think "sociopath" is an accurate label for that group of people, but sure, we can use a different term. How about objectivist? :)

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