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

111–120 of 678 posts

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#111

Post by woofie11 »

ximeng wrote: post #108
woofie11 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Ammon, 1. There is an opportunity. 2. You did lose a lot of trust. 3. You didn't have enough trust in the first place to really take advantage of this opportunity. I would encourage you to think about how you can earn that trust. This comes back to transparency and checks-and-balances. If you want to go that route, you will need to build hard constraints: legal and technological constraints which would have preven…

Extract from guidelines: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

Removed.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#112

Post by sfgweilr4f »

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.

Not trusted so much now.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#113

Post by ferzul »

that's the kind of response from a ceo i want to see. normally, i would just expect “We did something that was unpopular. please buy our other product. also, the word apologize occurs somwhere here but it does not carry any of its significance” but this ammon person actually explained what he did and why

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#114

Post by sockr8s »

conjecTech wrote: post #101

I've had the good fortune of knowing the TripleByte team personally. I'm not at all surprised to see this being handled in such a sincere and agreeable way. Ammon is a sincere and truth-seeking individual. He's willing to be convinced that his opinion is wrong, a character trait we don't do enough to praise and which I've found to be exceedingly rare these days. Situations like this highlight exactly why I've trusted…

Great job PR dept.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#115

Post by polote »

People need to be less naive, how many companies in the world care more about their users than their business ? none ?

Triplebyte reverting their decision is a business choice, they have probably estimated that their brand will be less impacted if they excuse themselves than if they continue. Everything is a business decision

Is it bad ? I don't think so, this is just business. We give our data to companies and they do whatever they want with it, because the legal system is not strong enough on that.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#117

Post by rammy1234 »

photonios wrote: post #87
rammy1234 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point in time it doesn't matter if there is an apology or not. Like above mentioned, some would have got laid-off or for some their intentions of job search is revealed. This is much worst of an effect that an apology would do any good. He apologized so what. It is good but damage is done. Can anything be about it ?

But they didn't. They cancelled the feature in time. So no real harm was done.

I thought it went already live. Misread and misinformed.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#118

Post by krn »

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.

> I thought that opt-out was the way to get critical mass

But what about following every dark pattern in the book to prevent people from actually opting out[1][2]? There was not even an option to opt-out indefinitely.

It seemed like an extremely carefully engineered effort to trick the users. How can something like this be considered "unintentional"?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280040

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23283237

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#119

Post by dccoolgai »

dccoolgai wrote: post #84

I bet _most_ of their users aren't reading HN regularly and probably just skimmed past the email (I did). HN provided a nice little teapot for this tempest to play out in, from a larger strategic picture. As mad as it probably made them when that first user put the comment up the other day, that may have just saved their business from complete annihilation. If I were Ammon, I would find that person and send them some…

Perhaps more distressing to me, I got these emails but I _know_ I never actually signed up to the site: I just took the little quiz. I _know_ I didn't sign up because I recall being irritated that I had to sign up to see the results of the quiz - and I was afraid of something happening _just like this_. I was watching this because I was fairly certain - based on whatever they published about me - that I was going to take some kind of legal action. So in a way, this person saved them from _me_.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#120

Post by californical »

rammy1234 wrote: post #81
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.

At this point in time it doesn't matter if there is an apology or not. Like above mentioned, some would have got laid-off or for some their intentions of job search is revealed. This is much worst of an effect that an apology would do any good. He apologized so what. It is good but damage is done. Can anything be about it ?

It wasn't just an apology -- they reversed the decision before it happened, preventing any damage.

I was also furious when I found out, and still am upset at how they went about this situation in the beginning. They could've handled it much better. But they did what the community asked for, and nobody was harmed in the end. I would argue that this was the system actually working.

I think we should incourage good behavior, instead of being totally unforgiving of all mistakes. Hopefully other companies can learn a lesson from Triplebyte and think twice before making this mistake at all in the future.

I'm still not sure if I'm going to keep my account with them, but I do feel better about it

Post reply on HN