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What was/is TripleByte's plan to "push the industry to look beyond traditional credentials"? [1]
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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.…
(For those who wonder: that and the Buzz incident made lots of people hate or at least distrust Google.)
Why why why do companies do this?
During the last 6 months I've stopped logging into Stack Overflow. It is a nice resource but for me it is read only for now because they messed up so hard - and refused to come up with a real apology.
Same goes for Quora: they betrayed us hard by trying to tell everyone what we were looking at. (Edit: next sentence added later:) Now imagine you've been reading up about health issues and realize it is suddenly on your profile. Still now, many years later I shun them as they haven't as far as I see come clean.
In some cases, if it get caught early enough, just saying: "we messed up, sorry, here's what we will do:" can be enough.
In other cases - where there are layers of bad patterns, lies and contempt for users and volunteers I actively want to punish them until they start behaving.
Quora (broadcasting sensitive information), Google (trying to kill the web, insulting me with insanely misplaced ads for years, trying to kill Firefox), Stack Overflow all goes on my list of companies that I actively work against, but I guess only until I see real change ;-)
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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.
Is it possible to look too kindly at somebody? I think so. Clearly the CEO is backpedaling now that there's been a public outcry. He's not sorry about what he did. He's sad he got caught.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280137
This comment is the hallmark of a company that doesn’t feel like it needs to answer to users or criticism. They can reverse a decision and send out a tearjerker of a mea culpa but people do not change their nature over a weekend, and I am just not going to trust the man who wrote the comment I linked above.
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He didn't spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it.
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).
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> 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.
There was a study about surgical fuckups. In almost every case, multiple people in the OR admitted they recognized the problem but were too scared to speak up because the surgeon said things were going fine.
I certainly believe it. Projecting my own anecdotal bias, most surgeons I've met have been a special kind of arrogant.
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I think you've missed the point ... that parenthetical comment is what was previously in his mind, he's sharing with us why he was, at that time, still pushing and defending. I don't see this in any way as still digging the hole. As for the rest of your comment, you seem purely to be repeating what he says he now knows. Although others have, I haven't downvoted you, but it feels like you're still being angry about wh…
Yes, I'm repeating what he already claims to know, because my point is he should already have known it. I am casting doubt on his sincerity, given this feature, his arguments on HN the other day, and what he's said now. I'm not still angry about what the situation was - I believe the only reason this feature was rolled back is because there was a big backlash. I really believe his whole attitude towards other people'…
I think it's also important to distinguish the idea from the execution. A LinkedIn alternative for developers is a great idea. The problem was the incredibly short opt-out (instead of opt-in) with notice given to users on Friday afternoon of a long holiday weekend.
It seems to me there's a whole cultural problem going on.
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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.
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…