"Do the carrier has legal protection from the content of airmule bag", thus making him not responsible if it's filled with heroin, is a yes/no question.

Anything longer than that, or running in circle refusing a clear answer, should be interpreted as "no" by the users, which is what the article says.

how hard is it for the founder to answer a yes or no question over twitter? Dodging it by saying they are like other OBC is basically an admission that they aren't legally protecting their carriers. If they had made known that they don't claim legal liability _at all_, then i would be fine with their service.

The founder just doesn't understand the risk, hence this behavior.

He's the average victim who would fall for a $99 fare. He certainly can't believe the risk would be that high, hence he's upset with "a hit piece"; He probably just read a bit on the internet about what it means to be OBC. He may not even have a lawyer and it could be a side project. They describe themselves as average bros, probably not because they've thought it through for marketing reasons, but just because that's their identity. Simple guys organizing something cool, patching a genius opportunity that no-one has taken before, and targeted ad hominem by a blogger. He just can't understand it any other way.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance, indeed.

It's true, but this is not the tone you would write a journalistically sound article with. Let's just call it what it is. It's blogging, it's great and sometimes even more effective of what we journalist can achieve, but it indeed has different standards. My personal opinion is that the Twitter interaction was enough as a comment. If that's the case, tho, I wouldn't report anything more than strictly necessary, i.e. Co-Founder answered on twitter like this, failing to clarify my question. No further comments, no innuendos to unsaid liabilities.

Even if he answered that question directly, I still think it wouldn't be enough as material to base a story on. How hard wouldn't it have been for "the journalist" to reach out for the co-founder for an interview?

The real story is that the founder refused to give a straight answer to a simple, explicit "yes or no" question when directly and repeatedly asked. Where there's smoke there's fire! His non-answer shows he knows there's a problem, and he's actively trying to deflect attention away from it.

Have you stopped beating your significant other? I just need a simple, explicit "yes or no".

Not every question that can conceivably return a bool answer should be answered that way in PR.

> Have you stopped beating your significant other?

that's an unfair comparison, because this is a loaded question (implying you were beating your SO). The question being asked in the blogpost is asking for clarification, with no assumption behind it.

There is an assumption behind the blogpost's question, IMO: that only by being setup exactly as Fedex and UPS can the couriers be adequately protected.

Maybe that is the actually the case (I'm not an expert in the field), but the underlying assumption of that being a hard requirement is present. Now, if Airmule thinks that they don't need to do exactly that but have another means by which the couriers could be protected, they can't reasonably answer "yes" (because they aren't organized that way) nor "no" (because that's a misleading answer from their point of view).

Easy response he could have made, but didn't:

"Not a common carrier - this page on our website describes exactly what protections are provided: <link>"

"I have never beaten my significant other" is an explicit answer that fulfills the question and doesn't hide behind the facts, unlike the founder in question.

That's a trivial thing, you would simply categorically deny the implicit accusation. But his answer instead did not come even close, it was "I have stopped about the same as other people".

Instead of beating them, I send them on an airline trip to Beijing with a suitcase full of contraband, and the Chinese government beats them for me.

So if I wanted to write a HN comment based on a question I had for the founder that I posted on Twitter, would I be doing a potential hit piece? Should I have scheduled a interview? This is the internet: we're all in some ways journalists in your terms.

He wasn't writing an interview so it doesn't matter how hard it'd have been.

How hard is it for the author to say "I'm writing a piece on you and would like some clarification on some points"?

He never told them he was writing a piece and gave them a chance to read it or comment, AFAICT.

I see, schrödinger companies. The answer to a question (that isn't any company secret but a simple question) is totally different depending on you being a client vs. being a journalist.

I don't so much see the answer as being totally different as I see the amount of effort going into the answer varying wildly.

Should Consumer Review disclose the fact that they will review the car when they buy a car from a dealership?

The author didn't review the service, he basically assumed many things about the inner workings and didn't give the company a chance to clarify.

Consumer Review doesn't have to disclose the fact that they will review a car when they buy it from a dealership, but they probably should ask GM to comment when they say "it seems to us, without having driven one or heard from anyone who has driven one, that GM are making their cars so they explode on impact".

> Consumer Review doesn't have to disclose the fact that they will review a car when they buy it from a dealership, but they probably should ask GM to comment when they say "it seems to us, without having driven one or heard from anyone who has driven one, that GM are making their cars so they explode on impact".

Do they have to disclose that they are Consumer Review when they talk to GM?

Or the CEO of Airmule could have take a few seconds to look at the Twitter profile of the user asking questions before responding publicly.

The Twtitter profile for user @TPrphet states that he is a blogger for a site called Seat31B.

Also the blogger may not have had any intention of writing a blog post prior to the exchange.

As a startup founder myself, I don't take writing a negative post about another startup lightly.

That being said, I always reserve the right to blog about anything I think is interesting or important to my readers, and this subject meets the bar given the seriousness of the potential consequences here. "Move fast and break things" is something you can do in a social app but lives are potentially at stake here.

It's also fair for me to move quickly. Airmule is out in public advertising $99 flights to Beijing right now. Why should I have to wait until Rory is back in the office on Monday to write about it?

It's fairly normal to write blog posts without interviewing anyone. If the facts are clear, why spend the time? There isn't a law that says that I have to schedule an interview with an airline before I blog about their economy class cabin, and there isn't a law that says I have to schedule an interview with a startup founder around his backyard tile laying project and Costco shopping trip.

Note that my readers are largely young backpackers - think the /r/shoestring and /r/solotravel crowd. I would have written an entirely different blog post--and one that the founder would have been completely happy with--if the answers had been different. It's unfortunate that they weren't.

For me, it's about how certain you are about what's going on. If you've flown with an airline and have seen their economy class cabin, then you're okay to write about it without talking to anyone. You presumably didn't fly with this startup, though (unless I missed it in the post), so I'm wondering what their side of the story is.

It's probably "err, yes, you might get the death penalty", but I don't know that, because nobody from the company was reached for comment.

I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of press (and certainly blog) articles are written without actually talking to anyone; they're based on public information and--at most--email requests.

If the founders were doing the right thing here, they probably wouldn't have felt the need to dodge all my questions. I'd have gotten clear answers with evidence to back them up. Normal companies do this.

Also, if Airmule wanted an interview, they could have replied asking for a phone call and giving me their phone number.

For folks who claim I didn't clearly represent myself: My Twitter handle identifies me as a Seat 31B blogger, I emailed them from my seat31b.com address, and I publicly stated on Twitter that I was planning to blog about this. I don't know how it could possibly be any more clear. Yes, like many people in the startup community I do more than one thing (I am also involved with multiple startups) but given that these very different lines of business (a dating app and an information security consulting firm) I don't think there could be any reasonable confusion.

None of this actually happened, so I think it's pretty clear what's going on here.

I wasn't even remotely defending Airmule in my comment, just the opposite. Maybe you should reread my comment and it's context as a response to the OP?

Relax, I'm not going after you - this is part of a broader conversation. :)

The whole article is based on a single, short and simple question. I don't think the blogger is looking to interview him; or really want/need to.