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Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

37signals.com

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Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#101

Post by wheels »

tomsaffell wrote: post #98
mechanical_fish wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loud public fuss is usually a reasonable backup plan if asking them to change doesn't work. You still haven't grasped the problem. I'm sure that 37signals could easily have used quiet channels to remove the offending pages, messages, and marketing copy on GetSatisfaction. But that would not have reached me . Up until three hours ago I was wandering through the world, with a faint memory of the time that I followed a…

Not every wrong in the world needs to be righted. Sometimes righting an old wrong creates a new wrong. Personally, I find new wrongs to be more costly than old ones.

Not to mention that this way of addressing it has no doubt created some new enemies. Sure, it looks like some of the stuff from GetSatisfaction is a bit shadey, but do you really want them as an enemy over it? If you loudly called my startup extortionist and mafia like, I'd be more than a little pissed off, even if I had screwed up.

The startup world seems too small to want to create that kind of karma.

But again, if the post had said, "Hi folks, just to let you know, the GetSatisfaction page for 37s is not official and we've worked something out with them where they'll now offer an option to all companies to redirect to their real support page and will ask permission to use logos in the future and tone down the language." it wouldn't have been the top story on HN.

Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#102

Post by Semiapies »

Gibbon wrote: post #100
Semiapies wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libel has to be a lie . Someone harshly laying out their opinion on a business's practices and saying those practices resemble extortion isn't even in the running for libel unless s/he says something factually untrue about those practices. Opinions aren't libelous.

In law, defamation (also called calumny, libel, slander, and vilification) is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image. It is often, but not always, a requirement that this claim be false, and, or alternatively, that the publication is made to someone other than the perso…

Fried didn't post about the private sex lives of people working for Get Satisfaction. He accurately described their operation and characterized it unfavorably.

While the law differs in other parts of the world, in the United States libel has to involve knowingly false statements meant to give someone a negative image.

Making complaints on one's blog and having the party you're complaining about show up, act highly apologetic, and immediately start rewriting parts of their website to address your complaints is about as far from "defamation" as you can get.

Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#103

Post by Semiapies »

andr wrote: post #55
oldwesley wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like fraudulent misrepresentation/impersonation. Good luck if you try to do that with a brand like UPS. They would be down your neck in a second. A cell phone store in my neighborhood got busted by TMobile for misrepresenting themselves as official TMobile resellers. This is no different. Should be grounds for legal action.

You mean like http://getsatisfaction.com/ups and http://getsatisfaction.com/tmobile ?

Good luck if anyone passes along those URLs to the companies in question. :)

Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#104

Post by webwright »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #92
webwright wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you creating a hypothetical situation about security? Seems like a hypothetical situation about customer support would be more appropriate. The answer is (for customer support)-- moderately. But the question is: What's the goal with a response? To make them suffer? Or to fix it? How does it benefit my business to invest extra time/money to make another company suffer? I think the grown up / smart way to respo…

What's the goal with a response? As I've said elsewhere in this thread: To reach the people -- potentially thousands of people -- who cared enough to type the name of your company into a search engine, but who then read some misleading but official-looking information, came away thinking that your company is kind of lame, and will never be heard of again unless you act. Just because your prospective customers are inv…

No, I was saying: "What is 37s trying to achieve with a response?"

I think the correct answer is: "To get GS to make the site look less official/confusing and a bit less insulting".

If that's the goal, which gets their business there faster? A 15 minute phone call or a well-worded 1 hour rant on the blog?

I TOTALLY agree that GS is confusing, especially for novice users. In fact, I'll go farther and say that the changes they are making aren't enough to fix that. They need to change the page titles/descriptions so that they are obviously 3rd party in the SERP.

In short, I agree with the offense. I'm not sure about intent/malice. Because of that, I think the response falls into the self-gratifying torch-and-pitchfork vigilantism that plays so well on the internet. Humanity should be better than that and give companies the benefit of the doubt unless they have obvious malicious intent and/or a track record of evil.

For all we know, a call to GS could've gotten a response of: "Ya know-- we never looked at it that way and have been so darn focused on stuff that I think we didn't see the forest for the trees."

Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#105

Post by Gibbon »

Semiapies wrote: post #102
Gibbon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In law, defamation (also called calumny, libel, slander, and vilification) is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image. It is often, but not always, a requirement that this claim be false, and, or alternatively, that the publication is made to someone other than the perso…

Fried didn't post about the private sex lives of people working for Get Satisfaction. He accurately described their operation and characterized it unfavorably. While the law differs in other parts of the world, in the United States libel has to involve knowingly false statements meant to give someone a negative image. Making complaints on one's blog and having the party you're complaining about show up, act highly ap…

Any statement can be grounds for defamation if it can be proved true or false in a court.

A statement made as a fact (for example "The site also hosts, without permission, company support pages for over 14,000 companies.") is potentially actionable.

Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#106

Post by wheels »

sah wrote: post #88
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally OT, but aren't posts like this and other similar "I agree" posts redundant? I thought that's what the little up-mod button was for? This feels like clutter to me.

Isn't "this feels like clutter to me" what the down-mod button is for?

I don't think so unless it's pointlessly clutter (e.g. "amen"). In general I reserve voting something below 1 for things that are offensive or contain zero content.

Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#107

Post by run4yourlives »

aka wrote: post #58
andr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only half of the job. They still don't offer a way to "delist" yourself from GS. Customers will still think GS is providing support for 37Signals and will be disappointed. Even if the badge says it is not an official site many people will not read it. Some comments in the post compared this to Google, but it is not a valid comparison, as Google offers a very clear way to get yourself out of their index.

Good, and they should never offer a way to delist yourself. GS is almost irrelevant to companies with good customer service - if your service is good enough that you discover your own GS page, then linking to your official support or monitoring it is better than delisting. BUT there are a lot of corps with dire service who like to avoid public discussion rather than deal with their poor service. A magic gag option wo…

This is what 37S is complaining about - it's borderline defamation.

Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#108

Post by Gibbon »

Semiapies wrote: post #71
Gibbon wrote: post #43

So GetSatisfaction mildy misrepresents their association with 37Signals and uses their IP without authorization.. and 37Signals counters with a potentially slanderous letter in a public forum? Not exactly a great way to start a dialogue or build a legal case. Most any other company would first engage with a civil, private, discussion, followed by legal action before firing off a public lambasting as a last resort (a…

What was slanderous (or, since it was written, libelous) about anything in the blog post? Very simply, GS set up web pages where they appeared to represent another company in a detrimental way. That is not something the other company is obligated to quietly request them to stop - they are well within their rights to open up with a cease & desist order, not an annoyed blog post.

A blog post can be classified either as slander or libel, depending on the jurisdiction. Some courts have placed blogs together with other broadcast media and libel law, while others have ruled blogs are part of an ongoing conversation and fall under slander laws.

Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#109

Post by sachinag »

tptacek wrote: post #62
jdileo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

37signals absolutely has a valid point and I agree with their decision to make this public so all can be aware of the tactics being employed by GS. FYI-GS is using the same type of extortion that the Better Business Bureau (BBB) has used since inception to scare companies into becoming a paid member. The general public has no idea how dishonest many of these client attainment methods really are.

I had no idea about the BBB. Can you tell us more?

Here's an intro article: http://yourbiz.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/13/996827.aspx

But the sentiment is pretty clear: you can pay to stay in the BBB's good graces. If you're naturally OK, you should be fine, but if you're bad, you can pay to get OK.

Re: Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"

#110

Post by sachinag »

ivankirigin wrote: post #4

We switched to UserVoice because GetSatisfaction is often simply broken. Way too many links have just failed. Try to count the steps for a new user to leave feedback. There must be at least 10. Our UserVoice widget ( http://tipjoy.com/feedback ), also has a really easy email form.

I just logged into our GetSatisfaction account to see if I could direct people to our UserVoice. Nope, can't do it.

Until today, we encouraged people who visited our UserVoice page to go to GS with complaints (the idea was that UserVoice would be for feature requests only). I'm trying to remove that language as a result of today's brouhaha.

EDIT: couldn't figure out how to change it on http://dawdledotcom.uservoice.com but at least we're sending people to UV at http://getsatisfaction.com/dawdle/ .

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