Luke 17:4 and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”
[deleted]
Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
371–380 of 678 posts
Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
#372I 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 totally agree with this. When I see corporate apologies I look for two things:
1. Actions speak louder than words. In this case, they are reversing what originally caused the outcry.
2. Did they look introspectively to try to really understand what made people mad in the first place. In this case I believe the CEO did.
If we don't ever accept sincere apologies, then we're left with a world where there is never an incentive to apologize and improve. Frankly, seeing a taste of this in US politics with politicians doubling down on their past mistakes even when confronted with all evidence to the contrary - this is not a path I'd prefer to go down further.
Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
But this makes no sense. Why would you legally need someone's ID to delete their account, but not to create it?
GDPR devalued PII-stores, and companies tried really hard to only let the value drop on the European portion of their data. Requiring ID is a way to discourage and even deny deletion requests in other countries. These constraints are walked back almost immediately in practice, once companies learn that requiring a human touch for a deletion flow is not worth the hassle. I think "legal" here meant what's the bare mini…
[deleted]
Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
#374Nothing 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…
He did the next best thing outside of not releasing the feature in the first place. Credit to him, many companies would double down or ignore HN (a very small community relative to Triplebyte's userbase) completely.
I agree with you, although I think the opposite is true about the size. I imagine Triplebyte is a small subset of HN's userbase.
Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
#375Wow, this reads as incredibly disingenuous considering the glaring dark patterns they were using to try and sell your private data and make more money. I cannot reconcile this apology with the underhanded tactics the CEO was using to promote this now cancelled feature.
Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
#376I 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 totally agree with this. When I see corporate apologies I look for two things: 1. Actions speak louder than words. In this case, they are reversing what originally caused the outcry. 2. Did they look introspectively to try to really understand what made people mad in the first place. In this case I believe the CEO did. If we don't ever accept sincere apologies, then we're left with a world where there is never an i…
It is sad that you felt you had to use a throwaway account to post this totally reasonable opinion.
Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
#377One 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.
I wholeheartedly agree. I can not reconcile this apology with the blatant use of dark patterns they employed when trying to roll out this product.
Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
#378I honestly believe that the public profile fiasco was caused by pressure from his investors/board.
VC money makes you do stupid things. Your next round of funding is your number one priority, customers are second. I've been there (raised $17M for my last startup).
I run a company[1] that is a competitor to Triplebyte. Yes, hiring has slowed, and we will miss all our sales targets this year by miles, but we will be just fine because we are bootstrapped and profitable. So we'll only double our revenue instead of triple. For a VC backed startup that could kill you. But we'll just hire a bit slower and have a huge party at the end of the year.
When you are venture backed, you watch your bank account balance decrease every week. Having a "burn rate" is awful. It messes with you.
With a bootstrapped company you watch your bank account balance increase every week. It's a great feeling.
So many venture backed startups are being really hurt by the current environment. I really hope that it makes more people reconsider raising money.
1: www.facetdev.com
Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Can confirm this is the case as of 5 mins ago.
OK, I just spoke to my co-founder. The functionally was changed yesterday, but the copy was not updated on the confirmation email. The copy will be updated in a few minutes.
Thank you for being on top of this.
Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
#380Earlier 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…
The current position is "sorry for breaking your trust, please trust us". It's hard to find it compelling.
> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.
To project my own opinion onto others: these comments are warranted because an apology has no actual value. The fact remains that Triplebytes can still do this if they wish to, and they are constrained only by what they can manage to slip past their users.
There's a stark asymmetry in the digital space, where service providers are protected by the legal language in their TOS or EULA, but the users have to trust that the service provider will not act outside their interests, and with no recourse. By contrast, in a normal contract negotiation, there will be an opportunity for both sides to ammend the contract to better serve their interests.
If Triplebytes wanted to show that they will not attempt to do this again, they could break this asymmetry and constrain themselves in their user contract, accepting all resulting liability or specifying concrete penalties if they do persue this route in the future. An apology is just a meaningless PR exercise.