I would be surprised if many people here really just assumed that a pseudonymous user chatting with us in the HN comments was speaking on behalf of the company in an official capacity. I mean, obviously there are legal niceties to be observed and he should have appended the usual disclaimers, blah blah blah, but we do have common sense here right?

No, people don't have common sense. People should not post publicly on behalf of their employer without running it by a manager. This is lesson one at every major corporate introduction and I now understand why, because people don't have common sense.

I didn't say anything about whether he should or should not have spoken out about the deal. And I specifically said that common sense doesn't cut the mustard legally. But I am asserting that the damage from people supposedly assuming that he was speaking officially is speculative and likely zero.

This isn’t really about employee recognition. The whole comment was about attribution for the company and marketing the partnership with Scale. Which is pretty standard in some business arrangements but which wasn’t the case here, which the employee wasn’t aware of and turned out to not that big of a deal for scale. Plenty of companies work in the background supporting other. Businesses and don’t always need attribution.

OP is trying to pigeonhole this into some sort of anti capitalist diatribe by trying to make it about individual employees wanting recognition and some big evil company is treating them like invisible cogs in the machine... which doesn’t make much sense since he asked for the company itself to be attributed, not individuals. It’s up to the company to reward and recognize employee contributions, not in some 3rd party partners announcements.

Plus he was always free to comment how he helped work on it or letting people know Scale had a role in helping make it (which are both common on HN). Only if the parent company tried to suppress that would this argument make any sense. But I don’t know why I’m bothering to counter such a position.

that's a strange response. i'm already clearly critiquing the dominant paradigm, capitalism. why would you just itemise a bunch of conventions from this paradigm, which i likely disagree with?

do you need hn to be an agreeable echo chamber for you?

capitalism depends on people not thinking thoroughly about the "deal" they are being drawn into. i'm here to harm this situation.