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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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201–210 of 678 posts

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#201
post #83
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.

Thanks for recognizing it. I think it'd be encouraging to see a post mortem detailing the positive changes that came out of this whole ordeal, the sort of user hostile behaviors that you (as a company) recognized from this self reflection, their origins and corrections.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#202
post #49
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Friday announcement was a result of us pushing to get the profile toggle feature out that the email linked to, and shipping late. Not something I'm proud of (either from an eng management perspective, or, more importantly, from a not violating the trust of our users perspective). It was a rushed schedule. In hindsight I see that the timing of the Friday announcement is ALSO a problem.

Just curious, did you have any engineers/product owners telling you that you should probably not do this feature, especially not push so hard (doing stuff late on Friday that can easily wait for Monday, etc...) to get it out?

Yeah, we don’t even do any kind of code deploy on Friday after 10am. Not even bug fixes unless they are for site reliability.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#203
post #79

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.

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.

Quick correction:

> spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it.

It was actually a only a couple of hours and a few (very inflammatory and highly downvoted) comments, near the beginning of the thread, and then radio silence as the fire raged on.

I think that he took a step back and began reconsidering after realizing that his comments weren’t helping any, but because they were the only thing he said in that thread and a lot of discussion was focused on them it seemed like a lot more activity than it really was. (Not that this excuses anything, but I think it’s important to be clear about what happened.)

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Yeah but not for a couple days. He got whipped by downvotes and left after a couple hours. Agreed about the sorry you feel part.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#205
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Triplebyte is not for EU users. You're forgetting that Triplebyte is an American company, they're not subject to European nanny laws.

Any European citizen is covered by GDPR no matter where they are located.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a link to the study? I certainly believe it. Projecting my own anecdotal bias, most surgeons I've met have been a special kind of arrogant.

That last part is called the God Complex. Many surgeons have it.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#207
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Regarding [2] This is extremely bad, like Google+ forced-real-name-policies bad..! (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 apolog…

I think I missed the SO news. What happened there?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a link to the study? I certainly believe it. Projecting my own anecdotal bias, most surgeons I've met have been a special kind of arrogant.

I can't find the specific study, but it is part of the third part of the book The Power of Habit.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What I've come to observe is that you can never make everyone happy - a truism detached from this specific incident.

So when you receive negative feedback on something - how should you respond?

What if you're used to some certain baseline level of negativity? How should you respond then?

I feel like there is feedback on the individual level and the aggregate level. Clearly in this case TripleByte saw that they would have alienated a large and important community but I'm convinced you can blame a CEO for being diplomatic but thick skinned.

I mean this is the community famed for trivialising Dropbox

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#210

I 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…

Are you kidding? Pandering to covid-19 based urgency to release this feature?

To put it much more politely than they deserve, this company is scum.

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