That’s a very charitable analysis of the situation. For all we know, this decision was motivated by internal KPIs that immediately reflected what a disaster this was.
The whole situation reeks. Announcing on the Friday on a long weekend, the ceo defending it ardently in HN comments, the very deliberate decision to make it opt-in, the difficulty in disabling it. I mean, sure, this apology could be heartfelt. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a shady as hell thing to do, and a shady as hell way to do it.
There are really only two ways this happened:
A) The company’s culture and values are so maligned they actually, genuinely thought this was something that would excite users and go over well.
B) They were 100% aware that this move was ethically dubious (at best), but were willing to take the risk. This is the much more likely path when you take into consideration how exactly they went about it.
An apology can be heartfelt, but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether it undos the damage. And it can’t make people forget that TripleByte thought this was a good idea. That says so much more about the company and their integrity than any apology ever can.
just a classical SV startup - "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" . This time though we, SV tech, did it to ourselves and thus there are such loud and so many screams of pain - because it is our own pain.
I have been in meetings where everyone in the meeting though "doing X will have no impact on anyone so there is not need to notify", where I knew 100% they were wrong but none of my arguments landed, my final statement was "well if it is not significant then the email should not matter either so why not just send it out just in case."
These things do not happen in the vacuum, and while it is good the CEO is talking 100% of the blame, I can assure you the CEO had internal support and internal dissent for the feature.
There have been similar incidents throughout tech history (and history in general) - it's not always that the culture is bad. It's also sometimes an honest mistake (at least, thinking through the ramifications of it is).
Their culture and values have been much maligned, but you mean malignant. Please don't take this personally, it's just that it seems like this misuse of the word is going viral.
First, this was not shady as hell. Shady as hell would be selling your data to a 3rd party and never telling you. Not-shady is building a feature, seeing negative feedback, and cancelling that feature.
It’s more than likely they had discussions and came to a decision through thoughtful discourse, rather than knowingly saying “fuck the user”.
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.
As soon as a company does something that a chunk of people on the internet don’t agree with, there’s really no way out. They’re going to get bad press regardless of whether they retract, whether they apologize, and whether they say they’re taking actions to avoid the sequence that led to the action in question.
But alongside that, for every time the internet mob has risen up over a company’s action, very few companies seem to have experienced major long term effects. I bet everybody knows a few people who have quit Facebook/GitHub, or who rage about Oracle business practices or MongoDB stability, but these companies still manage to keep trucking along.
In light of this, I’m mostly surprised that Triplebyte bothered apologizing; it seems unlikely to do them any good, and it’s unclear to me whether continuing course would have actually done as much harm to their bottom line as the prior Hackernews thread appeared to indicate.
> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.
To project my own opinion onto others: these comments are warranted because an apology has no actual value. The fact remains that Triplebytes can still do this if they wish to, and they are constrained only by what they can manage to slip past their users.
There's a stark asymmetry in the digital space, where service providers are protected by the legal language in their TOS or EULA, but the users have to trust that the service provider will not act outside their interests, and with no recourse. By contrast, in a normal contract negotiation, there will be an opportunity for both sides to ammend the contract to better serve their interests.
If Triplebytes wanted to show that they will not attempt to do this again, they could break this asymmetry and constrain themselves in their user contract, accepting all resulting liability or specifying concrete penalties if they do persue this route in the future. An apology is just a meaningless PR exercise.
Why is this a hard thing to do? It’s literally what everyone who ever messes something up is asking you to do.
Just because someone once committed a broken build, doesn’t mean I’ll never again trust them with access.
It’s argubly more like “sorry for being a moron, but I hear you. Please give us another chance”?
Because you're treating a service-client relationship as an interpersonal relationship. They are not, and the same norms do not apply. That apology, and its implicit premise(s) and promise, is rooted in the norms of intimate, interpersonal relationships. Those do not apply.
When you screw up and ask your spouse's forgiveness, the psychosocial interaction is quite different from when a CEO fucks up, writes a mea culpa to the faceless masses, gets his draft looked over by a PR flack and a couple board members, and then sends it out to the highest-impact social media circles for his service and waits to see what his KPIs do.
I don't think this analogy is useful. An error in execution can be quite different in an error in judgement.
To offer an alternative example: a contractor decides to publish the source code to a company's closed-source software, so that they can use it as evidence of their work for their next job application.
> It’s argubly more like “sorry for being a moron, but I hear you. Please give us another chance”?
When these kinds of bad judgement happen, the person normally loses some decision-making power to stop it from happening again. This is in noticeable contrast to Triplebyte here: an apology as a PR exercise, and no material change to prevent it in future.
However much you'd like to, you can't just flip that trust back on - and in a lot of cases, it'll never fully go back to the way it was.
Not that we should personify company-customer relations - this was a decision that would have been taken by a lot of people expending serious effort to get it out the door. It's not a single lapse in judgement, but a continued expression of different values.
Not to mention this terrible default practice landed them some great pr to start with and the apology gives them more (this time "good pr")
Correct. I don't want apologies or retractions from companies. I want postmortems.
This is really no different from a technical outage, e.g., "As a result of a bad deploy to prod on Friday, all Triplebyte profiles became public." Why was it not noticed in testing? What is the testing process? Is profile privacy part of the testing process or part of code reviews? What are the practices around making changes that affect user privacy - is there a culture of asking questions about it up front, etc.?
Most importantly, what changes are being made to prevent a similar outage from reoccurring in the future? I really couldn't care less about how bad the CEO feels about it - sure, the CEO probably should feel bad, but feeling bad is not a reliable mechanism. If the CEO said "Bwahaha, I wish to profit and I learned over the weekend that my profits were in danger, so I changed course" but then says that in order to maintain his profits in the future he added an external privacy council that reviewed all major new initiatives (or whatever), that would actually be a lot more useful than contrition.
Now, yes, it's true that basically no company does public postmortems of decisions that they needed to walk back (at best you get blameful postmortems that end with a key executive resigning, but most of the time that doesn't help anyway - either the executive wasn't the problem, or they were the problem and they already spread the bad culture to others). But I think it was pretty rare until a couple of years ago for tech companies to do detailed public postmortems of internal outages, and that expectation has slowly changed. I think we should push for the same change for non-technical incidents like this.
I'm sure the CEO has been taught that good leadership means fessing up when you've screwed up, and to an extent that's true. But it's also an act of ego to assume full responsibility. Ego got them into this mess, most likely, and it will not get them out of it.
The CEO needs to realize there was a systemic failure. It's not just about him having an epiphany – it's about surrounding himself with people, processes, and values that can help keep a runaway product idea from breaking their customer base ever again.
And I absolutely agree that the feelings of the CEO matter less than putting in place some proper procedures.
Profit ain't bad.
Now, I suppose it may be possible that the CEO in this situation dramatically misunderstood the situation. It may even be possible that he had good faith even as he militantly defended those misunderstandings in previous threads. But from the perspective of trust, I can’t get past the suspicion that he’s just sorry that he got caught.
I read the apology letter as essentially saying he single-handedly drove the idea, in part because he was flailing due to COVID killing their bottom line, and was tunnel-visioned enough to not recognize it was unethical. Even at face value, that’s absolutely troubling for a CEO in TB’s domain. But smarter people have done dumber things under pressure, and sometimes dumb is at someone’s (or a lot of someones) expense by mistake.
So I’d like to think this was an exceptional occurrence, and I appreciated his personal post-mortem of sorts. However, taking this as charitably as possible, a process-oriented RCA focused on how he’ll keep his runaway ideas from being a one-man show—or whatever the problem actually was that saw this conflagration actually see light of day—wouldn’t suck.
Potential business processes include "ask about ethics as part of culture fit, and have a good sense of what you mean by 'ethics'," "ask about ethics as part of promo / do not count projects that put user data at risk towards promo," "vet investors for their ethics and see how their other investments are doing before allowing them to take a board seat," etc.
An ethical CEO will probably be doing many of these anyway, which is fine. You don't need to formalize them. It's fine for the CEO to say, for instance, "Ordinarily I would have put the brakes on this via this particular means, but I failed to notice because of this unexpected circumstance. I'm sorry and this is how I'm going to make sure I notice and make the right decision next time." (That is't too far off from what was actually said, actually, except for the bit about how to make decision-making more robust in the future. Everyone, ethical or not, fails to live up to their expectations of themselves at least occasionally.)
I absolutely agree. But this only works if the top leadership are themselves ethical people. If they are unethical or even neutral, it’s going to backfire. Instead of hiring people for their backbone in terms of pushing back against unethical decisions, it turns into hiring people for their willingness to conform to what they are told.
> It's fine for the CEO to say, for instance, "Ordinarily I would have put the brakes on this via this particular means, but I failed to notice because of this unexpected circumstance. I'm sorry and this is how I'm going to make sure I notice and make the right decision next time."
Definitely. But you only get to use that excuse so many times before it starts to lose credibility.
> That is't too far off from what was actually said, actually
Here I disagree. To his credit, Ammon has taken full personal responsibility for pushing this through, even over internal objections. It’s not a failure to notice something that happened when you’re the one doing the thing.
The resolution is also more personal than procedural: be more conscientious about your users and listen to people who object to your ideas. Demonstrate that you can do that over time and you can regain trust.
As it is right now, I’m giving some charitable credence to the idea he’s the CEO equivalent of the skydiving photographer that, in his passion to get a great shot, jumped out of his plane with no parachute. It certainly may end up having an analogous effect on Triplebyte’s credibility.
Exactly this. The only thing that _might_ actually make me trust Triplebyte with my data again is if their current CEO actually stepped down to a less influential role. If I were part of the board I'd actually be advocating for him to step down or be forceably removed if possible.
He didn't put a stop this catastrophic breach of trust after being made aware of it. Even worse, he seemed to have actively drove this forward in spite of opposition. I'm simply not willing to trust a company where he's the top-level decision maker with data as sensitive as they're dealing with, apologies or not.
To me it doesn't seem credible that you as the CEO of a recruiting company didn't realize the issue of "default public" profiles. You literally have a section about confidentiality on the front page of your website so you must have known it was important to users.
Because the people running the company have a conscience which causes them to feel bad and want to apologize when they harm people? Are we really entertaining the idea that the only reason someone might apologize is if it benefits them?
It's disturbing to me how absolutely normal your comment is on Hacker News. There's a significant portion of HN whose entire concept of ethics seems to be, "if it's profitable, it's right" and who can't imagine any motivation except profit. Over and over again we see profitable corporations doing terrible things and people on HN defending them on no other grounds but the fact that what they are doing is profitable. And when people disagree, it's almost always because the profitable corporation's actions affect them directly. All I can conclude is that a significant number of HN users are just amoral, which is terrifying, because a lot of HN users hold positions with significant power.
And before you tell me that everyone acts selfishly--no, they don't. I've met hundreds of wonderful people in my life who were generous, honest, kind, and/or brave, at great personal cost and risk to themselves. The behavior you're engaging in isn't normal, and it's not okay.
>... And before you tell me that everyone acts selfishly--no, they don't. I've met hundreds of wonderful people in my life who were generous, honest, kind, and/or brave, at great personal cost and risk to themselves. The behavior you're engaging in isn't normal, and it's not okay.
I can see that you’re trying to be charitable, so let me try and be charitable in return.
I actually kind of agree with the comment you’re responding to, but I don’t interpret it the same way you do. A normal, moral person like you or me will apologize out of genuine guilt. But then again, a normal, moral person like you or me doesn’t operate a business in a way that betrays the trust of its users.
I don’t think everyone acts selfishly. But I do think that some people do. And even a selfish person would want to try and convincingly feign remorse for their selfish actions once those actions backfired and were no longer in their own self-interest.
I think akerl_ is saying that companies shouldn't bother apologizing when they do something wrong and get caught.
I think that's some "lizard person school of business" shit that has no place in a civilized society.
And sure, maybe the answer is that they’re not sociopathic in the first place. But that’s a very non-cynical answer. Credulous, perhaps.
Either just release the feature anyway, and maybe default it to opt-in for people with existing content, maybe make it “only content from $now forward is public”, something to that effect.
Halt the feature, but expend the minimum possible effort on the message out: “Hi all, we’ve reconsidered the feature in light of feedback. Thanks, CEO”.
It’s not clear to me that applying more time/effort to explaining themselves to the world has done them any benefit. There’s the bulk of people who didn’t notice / don’t care, there’s people who are permanently angry, and there’s people who are going to want to see actual changes before they revisit.
The people who work for a business are incentivized to live lives that let them sleep well at night, but it’s entirely possible for them to learn from this experience and behave differently in the future without bothering to respond to the mob.
You have accused me of misinterpreting your intent elsewhere, but really I don't know how you expect me to interpret this that would cast you in a more positive light. You're saying you would do unethical things, so I don't think I'm off-base to say you might be unethical.
As a customer, am I going to believe TripleByte is sincere when they apologize to me? Maybe, but probably not. The only way to be sure is to judge them by their actions.
And in this case in particular, there’s not technically anything to apologize for since they never actually rolled out the feature.
Any liar can make beautiful apologies without meaning a word of them. It takes an honest person to demonstrate conscience through their actions.
My point above is that I don’t think internet mobs incentivize businesses to behave that way, and in fact it seems that apologizing to the mob, or adjusting behavior in response to things the mob does not approve off, are counterproductive for the business. They continue to take heat for the wording of their apology, they get another wave of media coverage about the thing the mob is pissed about, there’s not really any visible upside.
Given that, I’m surprised more business don’t just ignore the angry people on the internet and just proceed as-is, continuing to rake in money from the people who aren’t outraged.
But maybe I’m just a lizard, unfit for your civilized society.
Okay, great, so we're in agreement.
The incentives applied by dissatisfied customers aren't about getting companies to apologize: it's about getting them to behave in a manner such that they don't have to apologize. If you want to discuss whether there are better strategies that dissatisfied customers might employ, that's something I'd be happy to discuss.
If you actually want businesses to apologize and adjust their behavior as you claim, then it makes sense to look at how customers can make that happen.
Point being: if your goal is to actually help people harmed by corporations, calling those people "internet mobs" who "ragequit" and then analyzing whether it's profitable to apologize to them is a pretty strange way of communicating that goal.
I’m not looking to debate whether or not you agree with my word choice for “the people on the internet who loudly protest companies who do stuff they disagree with, and stop using those companies’ services out of these disagreements”.
Neither do I, and I'd be interested to hear how you think people could do better.
It would be one thing if he apologized immediately after people pointed out the flaws in their plan.
But he didn’t.
He ignored all the objections, and defended his decision over and over again.
He clearly didn’t care.
There is huge difference between “whoops, we didn’t think things through, sorry about that” and “after seeing tons of people cancel their account, let’s pretend that I’m now truly sorry.” Especially when he had a history of building shitty social networks.
Two thousand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304097
It shouldn’t be for gain. In fact if apologies always led to a positive outcome they would mean less and the world would be a worse place for it.
Obviously is a bit harder if you hit-and-run someone’s pet dog.
FTFY...
It's hard to gauge significance without knowing a number of total users, but I imagine it is a relatively strong hypothesis that there is significant correlation between regular browsing of HN and having an account on his service.
I think you're running into the pagination problem: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you scroll to the bottom and click More you should find it. Edit: yes, it's there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304097.
I wonder why anyone would ever place a non-zero value on an apology from an organization acting in its own interests. A company isn't a single person acting in isolation and ignorance. It's a profit-seeking entity organizing a whole number of people of various levels of conscientiousness and intelligence, and pointing them at a single profit-seeking goal.
When that many-limbed organism grabs at a profitable course of action, it's not an impulsive accident of blind flailing. If that turns out to be a problem and they have to reverse course, it's not because of remorse.
They did what was in their interest then; they did what's in their interest now. People confusing corporations for actual, you know, people absolutely baffles me. Their apologies mean absolutely nothing, good or bad, but how bad a hit their business appeared to take and how good their copy writer was. That is all.
As another poster said, and I agree wholeheartedly, I don't care for apologies, I care for post-mortems. The only thing that matters is what operations led to this action, and what change in those operations will prevent it happening again - if any such change can prevent it. A public mea culpa with an executive's signature on it means... well, nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's the cheapest possible way of reclaiming good will, and worth the paper it's written on.
And yet, tons of companies had done that, and suffered very little. Heck, any company has done something that "a chunk of people on the internet don’t agree with"...
It's not about never doing anything wrong, or it being futile to apologize.
It's about, you don't do THIS kind of privacy affecting changes without publicly announcing it first, and without red flags raised internally that it might not be a good idea.
That's a good thing to instill in companies, whether this one apologized or not...
2000 account closures is an actual business repercussion.
> and the internet mob’s displeasure, once roused, cannot be quieted by apologies, changes in behavior, or explanations
It absolutely could. As a member of said "internet mob" (I deleted my account) I'll say that yes, an apology by itself is not enough, but an apology combined with a long-term change in behavior would absolutely cause me to stop criticizing them and maybe even create an account again. If, for example, they remove a bunch of dark patterns from their site and change their terms of use to give specific guarantees of data privacy, that would go a long way in my mind.
Additionally, even if the 2000 accounts were enough to cause business impact, the idea that they’d need to demonstrate long-term change to win back those users is effectively irrelevant. They may as well put their efforts into gaining new users to replace the 2000, rather than try to repair the burned bridges. The return-on-investment for making “long-term change” to win back people who ragequit their service is low, especially since those people self-select for “people likely to ragequit again if they disagree with future company decisions”.
But ultimately, you might be right--maybe the net effect of not apologizing would be negligibly different from the net effect of apologizing. I don't have numbers to say you're wrong, but you don't have numbers to say you're right.
But as I said elsewhere, why are we even talking about this? You seemingly have complete, disdain for users who are concerned about TripleByte using their data against them, calling them an "internet mob" and accusing them of "ragequitting". Are you capable of empathizing with users at all? Do you have a conscience? Why are we talking about this as a strategic problem when it's an ethical problem?
But to be clear: Triplebyte’s specific situation is a an ethical issue only in respect to the fact that they planned to enable by default for existing users. That’s a bad move. They’ve stopped the bad move.
I’m more interested in the overall pattern of “company does thing, people disagree with thing, people express outrage to company, company issues statement”. Which in many cases has zero ethical components.
Your reaction that perhaps corporations shouldn't apologize when they do something wrong if it have any selfish benefit, does lack conscience and is a wholly inappropriate reaction to this situation. Discussing the self-centered strategic merits of apologizing from the perspective of a sociopath isn't a productive conversation.
However, I'm not one to write people off based on one interaction. Just because you've reacted without conscience in one situation doesn't mean you would do so in all situations.
> But to be clear: Triplebyte’s specific situation is a an ethical issue only in respect to the fact that they planned to enable by default for existing users. That’s a bad move. They’ve stopped the bad move.
There are more ethical issues than that--they haven't stopped them all.
> I’m more interested in the overall pattern of “company does thing, people disagree with thing, people express outrage to company, company issues statement”. Which in many cases has zero ethical components.
Which is irrelevant in this case, because this case does have multiple ethical components.
And, more to the point, this is still an ethical question. Apologies are never about benefiting the person apologizing. Apologies are inherently an ethical action--if you claim that the company didn't do anything wrong, then they shouldn't apologize. Not because it doesn't benefit them, but because lying about being sorry isn't ethical.
"Should a company lie and pretend to be sorry when they haven't done anything wrong?" is still an ethical question, and you're looking at it from the perspective of selfish gain is still an inappropriate way to look at it.
I suspect, in light of that, that we’ve bottomed out the utility of this thread.
We should reward apologies and punish those who don't. Our failure to do so is creating a market incentive that will destroy or weaken valuable norms.
We should expect rather than reward apologies, and we should punish both people who fail to apologise as well as people who apologies but fail to follow through on changing their behaviour.
Ammon so far has done no more that the minimum expected from someone in his position. Time will tell whether his actions reveal his apology to be genuine and behaviour changing, or empty lies.
Rewarding apologies that turn out to be empty lies is what gave us Facebook. I fear Ammon's ambitions are to be more like Zuckerbergs rather than less, so I'll be very judgemental and dubious as I watch future moves by Ammon and Triplebyte. Like he acknowledges, he's lost trust. You earn trust back by your future actions, not by the eloquence of your apology.
The one action they took is that they cancelled the feature. _That_ has value. Arguably not enough, but it's a good first step. I'm eager to hear what they follow it up with, but they _have to follow it up._
Uttering (or publishing) words is an action.
Companies are becoming more sterile and calculated, and perhaps statistically issuing an apology has no impact on user retention, but I for one am glad there is still some humanity to be found even if it's a hollow gesture.
Publicly taking responsibility and acknowledging mistakes can be a powerful tool in changing. Because of this apology, I will at least monitor Triplebyte's progress to see if significant structural changes are made to keep a decision like this from being made, instead of not even giving them a chance to gain back my trust. Their actions will tell whether this apology is genuine or not.
With this understanding of the word, using the phrase "the internet mob" seems quite negatively loaded. Consider the context of companies harming their users in ways that may not be obvious to everyday people: I, for one, want people organizing to get the word out.
Just because it doesn't work for everybody doesn't make it not worth doing.
FWIW the apology doesn't do jack shit for me.
Users can still see that... and be worried about how they came to the inital decision.
None of that should influence if you do or don't apologize.
This isn't kinder garden, we're not here to educate those companies, they run a business, you mess up, you're out, we give the competitor a chance. That's how it works.
As a user, I’m also not dropping a company that provides me a useful service at the first (or likely second, or third) mistake.
Not everybody subscribes to this one-screwup-and-you’re-done mindset that you seem to be describing.
> that provides me a useful service
And what if the service stops being useful? What is an apology going to change? No longer useful, you'll move on.
That's where I find these apologies to be a sham. It's trying to play on people's emotions, to keep them around even once they've stopped providing value and utility, or in this case, actually causing you harm.
The only reason your employers have kept you around, is because your "mistakes" were within the expected range of what people in your position will be making as well. If you fall below that threshold, trust me, you will not be kept around for very long.
I’m saying that’s not how I approach my interactions with businesses. As you noted in your reply, employers expect an employee to make mistakes within a reasonable threshold. I have the same expectation for companies that provide me services. Making a mistake does not suddenly evaporate all their “usefulness” to me, as you seem to be suggesting.
When I say "mess up", I imply a quantity of mistake that is beyond acceptable for the value I get.
You seem to quantify "mess up" to a much smaller degree, like "mess up" implies a reasonable set of mistakes.
So we're not discussing the same scenario, due to us quantifying "mess up" to different degrees.
It seems if we normalize our quantity of "messing up", that we actually fundamentally agree. No amount of lack of or of providing an apology really affects the consequence. Mess up within reason, you don't even need to apologise, as long as I'm still getting good value I'll continue to be a customer. Mess up beyond reason, and an apology won't help, as soon as I'm no longer getting good value, or if you're actually providing me negative returns, I will begin to look for an alternative.
Personally, i appreciate the honesty from people, whether they mean it or not, it still takes some bit of honour and humbleness to openly admit your mistake. It's not an easy thing to do and i can appreciate the effort it takes to come out and just straight up say 'yeah i'm an idiot and i fucked up pretty bad.'
Plus, the way i look at it, you always have to remember, no matter how badly you fuck up, you're not that dude that fucked up the space station and caused a slow oxygen leak that had to be repaired with a risky space walk and even he was forgiven...probably.
ETA: Just to add to this as i've thought of it. Years ago, somebody i knew stole a few hundred dollars from me and disappeared. I thought i'd never hear from him again. A couple years later i got a random phonecall from him. He didn't have my money or anything, but he had the guts to call me and apologize and admit he'd just straight up ripped me off. I've never heard from him since and i'd never trust him again, but i respect the nerve it took for him to do that.
Do you suppose Ammon truely realises this plan was a totally unacceptable betrayal of his users, or that he admires and aspires to be Zuckerberg still?
No I doubt he truly realizes it. There's no way he can empathize or truly understand the needs and worries of people using his service. But, like I say, I respect and appreciate upfront admission of wrong doing. I don't think anyone should trust them.
Tryplebyte fucked up, anyone believing this shit wasn't intentional and planned to derive revenue from users during an obvious downtime is naive. The mistake was not realizing this was a horrible idea and continuing to such a ridiculous thing. They should be abandoned. But I respect the admission of the fuck upery.
Ammon has done this once. I think everyone deserves a second chance, and maybe even a third. Zuckerberg has had way more than that.
On one level I agree with this, in that I don't think 'heartfelt' is a fair metric. It's subjective, it's a ritual, and on some level the demand for performative contrition feels to me like something that doesn't have well defined parameters and past a certain point doesn't serve a purpose.
What is important to me are the statements that acknowledge error and recognize what made it a bad thing to do. Those seem on-point to me and, insofar as apologies go, I'm not sure what else should have to be said.
Lets wait and see what he, and the entire team who didn't stop this before they launched the idea to significant negative outcry, actually do in the future.
The dude has personally tried to pull fast ones on me. This is a fucked company since day one. I brushed it off, but when you keep up these patterns for years...jog on.
Can you clarify?
What holiday was that? I wasn't aware of any. In any case, I'd say Christmas is probably the biggest holiday, although it doesn't always fall on a weekend.
This past weekend was Memorial Day for those in the United States.
On the other hand, once shit hit the fan, you could argue that these people would be extra-careful about fucking it up again, as opposed to another company where everything seems silently OK.
It's a bit like the story of the engineer who did a 400.000 dollar mistake on his first job. Asking the manager if they were going to fire him, he was told that no way they were going to fire somebody that just cost them so much money to train!
In my experience with Facebook, Google, and a variety of smaller companies, this doesn't happen.
To people who think the way TripleByte apparently does, the fuck-up was getting caught, not violating trust in the first place. If they had no moral issues with betraying users, they won't have any in the future (unless executives and board are replaced).
Instead, they will pay more lip service to privacy concerns and be more secretive about violating user trust.
The primary reason not to fire this person is that if something like this can happen, it's a process failure.
This is another error in your thinking.
You can't solve failures in human understanding with technical solutions.
Your first instinct is going to be too try to cite counterexamples - but that only proves the point.
You're in a business that deals with people. You can't eliminate that with technology, and the fact that you think you can try is what makes you dangerous.
... have a decent crisis management or PR firm on retainer.
Which might be as much of a red flag as the initial fuckup...
On what basis do you say they have a firm on retainer?
I think many/most CEO's in this situation would make some calls to get advice on how to manage the situation -- I don't that is a red flag.
If they don't take strong, concrete steps to mitigate these kinds of problems in the future, I will have less confidence and trust in their company.
> Crew resource management formally began with a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommendation made during their investigation of the 1978 United Airlines Flight 173 crash. The issues surrounding that crash included a DC-8 crew running out of fuel over Portland, Oregon while troubleshooting a landing gear problem.
> The term "cockpit resource management" (later generalized to "crew resource management") was coined in 1979 by NASA psychologist John Lauber who had studied communication processes in cockpits for several years. While retaining a command hierarchy, the concept was intended to foster a less authoritarian cockpit culture, where co-pilots were encouraged to question captains if they observed them making mistakes.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
I certainly believe it. Projecting my own anecdotal bias, most surgeons I've met have been a special kind of arrogant.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140217220032-266437464-asia...
Book is... of oscillating quality.
I don't have any inside information but it seems that this could also be a case of the downsides of deadlines. They set a deadline and then all other considerations go out the window when trying to meet that.
Having said that, "sprint" is not a word I associate with thoughtful progress toward a reasonable goal. What it does say is "rush forward in a heedless manner" and "don't think, just run."
Another artificial deadline dressed up with terminology that encourages plunging ahead without due consideration.
golf clap
(One of the 2,000+)
It reeks of they-raised-too-much-money-and-now-have-to-do-BIG-things syndrome and would seriously discourage me as either a user or enterprise customer, as if the AI/machine-learning BULLSHIT didn't already do that. They're a recruiting company that took a sucker punch with CV-19 and effectively tried to sell their user data as a get out of jail free card.
The saving grace is that LI Recruiter is a trash product (for years...) and they could probably eek out a consumer net-good by bringing more competition to the market, if only they went about it the right way.
It can happen, but if it does maybe you are the wrong person for the job.
The question really is: in what kind of mode would you have to operate in order to forget that you users might want to have a say in the publication of their data? That is like a restaurant waiter forgetting to ask people what they want and bringing them a single random things instead.
Every company that can help me find work is flawed, and I don't wanna start my own company any time soon. Heck, I am flawed. The best I can do is better than nothing and worse than perfect.
It seems as if everything is considered “private” now. No, not everything is private. You interviewing for a job isn’t private unless both parties make it private with a legally binding contract. It is a mistake to wishfully label public information as private simply because we don’t want it to be public. It also makes it harder to talk about true violations of privacy and distracts from understanding the real issues at stake.
What people ought to say, and have often said here, is that it is a violation of trust. People trusted Triplebyte to find them a new job, not lose their current job. That trust was violated not by an invasion of privacy — it is their data as much as it is ours — but a violation of using that data in a harmful way.
Privacy isn’t the problem here. The problem is with whatever broken processes led to this bad product and poor decision.
I would gently suggest that you look into the idea of "reasonable expectation of privacy" which has a long history in the courts.
Perhaps he read that and took it to heart. Perhaps he read that and realized it would sound better if it seemed like he took it to heart. Perhaps after the monumental PR screw-up, they hired a PR professional that wrote the apology.
Who knows. Actions speak louder than words.
Indeed I've learned this the hard way.
Having said all that, the above apology goes even farther in accepting personal blame than I would have expected... so I'd be slightly torn on this one if the cynic in me didn't know he was likely coached heavily in crafting it.
This email is full of sincere I statements. Whether it comes from reading your comment or just reflecting on the whole situation, this is about the best response I could have imagined a few days ago. It accepts responsibility, and shares the thinking and feeling behind getting so far from where they should be heading.
I don't have a TripleByte account at the moment, but if I did I'd be open to what they do next. A CEO who has made a major mistake and taken sincere responsibility for it in my eyes is more trustworthy than many who just haven't made their first major public mistake yet. I know we need to watch them carefully for a while, but this is about the best statement I could imagine Ammon and TripleByte putting out right now.
Doesn’t it show that I’ve properly reflected on how I could screw up like this so O can adjust my behavior in the future to avoid it?
An apology 100% does not need explanation or justification of why mistakes were made.
And if you're going to put those in, you 100% need them not to be "Our company is doing it really hard due to COVID, so we though we'd just {{monetise user data provided under strict expectations of total privacy}} "
People who beat their partners regularly say "look what you made me do!". Ammon just said "but I was going broke, I had to try this!"
a) No one thought this was a bad idea, or
b) people who thought it was a bad idea didn't want to say it was a bad idea (why?), or
c) people who did say it was a bad idea were not listened to (feedback was not acted on).
That might be a good indicator that perhaps _they_ are the sort of people who might sensibly be trusted with job seeking personal information...
1. Actions speak louder than words. In this case, they are reversing what originally caused the outcry.
2. Did they look introspectively to try to really understand what made people mad in the first place. In this case I believe the CEO did.
If we don't ever accept sincere apologies, then we're left with a world where there is never an incentive to apologize and improve. Frankly, seeing a taste of this in US politics with politicians doubling down on their past mistakes even when confronted with all evidence to the contrary - this is not a path I'd prefer to go down further.
3. What steps the corporation took to prevent this issue from occurring in the future.
While a believe that the CEO is sorry, I can't consider the issue resolved without #3.
> They listened and that's what counts for me.
The fact is that they didn't listen. The ceo ammon was here on hn clearly not listening and clearly not apologising.
I would surmise that it's only due to a flood of account deletion requests that he started to notice... Add this proves one thing: on triplebyte you are the commodity and not the customer.
Although it's unlikely I'd have ever used them, because of this fiasco you can be sure I'll be warning people away from the platform entirely, heartfelt apology or no.
For my view to change he'll have to do a whole lot more than one email. He needs to change his way of thinking and one email is no way of proving that it's happened.
It is too early to put trust in Triplebyte. The classic Silicon Valley playbook is to do something that crosses a boundary, get pushback, apologize, and later try again. Eventually it succeeds.
Examples:
- sharing all you financial transactions and passwords with a third party
- suppressing posts for reasons
- sharing private conversations with powerful parties
Wait and let Triplebyte prove itself with real actions instead of just talk.
It's refreshing to see a real, detailed, apology. Just taking responsibility and owning each mistake of judgment or process along the way.
My opinion of these guys actually went up a notch over this debacle.
He made the feature opt-out. He sent out the email on a Friday before Memorial Day weekend hoping no one would notice. He made the opt out button hard to find. He made the process of deleting accounts very hard, saying they required government ID and it would take 30 days.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
He made preparations for the blowback. That’s a fact otherwise he wouldn’t have taken these dark measures ahead of time. What he didn’t anticipate was getting caught and the level of vitriol he would receive.
He honestly thinks he is smarter than us. I think a person can go to the well only so many times before we have to assume they are insincere and lying.
His actions and response are consistent with behavior. It sounds much better to say "I didn't think through it" than "I knew it was bad and wanted to try it anyway."
If they want to correct this mistake, turf the product manager or make a $25K donation to the EFF as an act of penance.
Welcome to the new world of Cancel Culture, where no can ever be forgiven, excused or allowed to personally grow
The second you make a mistake will that should mean your life is over...
Society today is in a sorry state and I see no end in sight
People would have gotten laid-off to this. The dark patterns are just cherry on top.
The negativity is well deserved.
Everyone makes mistakes and if nobody would be willing to look past that, then we'd never get anywhere.
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.
> 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.)
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
Most of us get through life without ever making that many people that unhappy all at once though. It's not like this outcry wasn't obvious and predictable to any reasonable person.
Empathy is unconditional. It says "wow, that must be really painful/terrible/scary". It carries no judgement around the accuracy of such feelings, only an understanding that they are real for the other person.
Disagreeing comes later after you have shown there are legitimate competing solutions.
"I'm sorry you feel that way" fails at the first so you haven't yet earned the right to disagree agreeably.
Any new feature that is announced can be met with some negativity. Sometimes it just ends up working despite that. It is not surprising to me that at first, they tried to defend their plans. It probably took a while for the backslash to sink in and their own opinions to change.
I wouldn't expect every company, even ones that target HN's primary audience to turn everything around right away because of an angry thread within a few hours. They turned around in 2-3 days. Quick enough if you ask me.
Disclaimer: I am really not in any way affiliated with Triplebyte. I am not even a user/customer. I just see a lot of negativity that I that I find unjustified.
And engaged in a host of dark patterns that made it difficult for people to effectively respond to that, for example by getting the data deleted and cancelling any account they had. The problem wasn't just the original error in judgement, serious as that was. It was the doubling down on it in both the implementation and the handling of the criticism when it was announced.
Calling it only a "feature" is just downright twisting the facts.
He's not sorry about what he did. He's sad he got caught.
Assuming good faith is not prudent when dealing with people who want your money or data. We have enough collective experience at this stage to say this conclusively.
Edit: Being cynical is the new normal when dealing with companies. Especially if they have your data, or want it.
How am I being taken advantage of if I read that letter and think "Well, good for them to finally realize things and take the right steps"? And I hope you're not speaking for everyone when you talk about good faith.
They've "stopped beating their wife". That's nothing to be proud of or rewarded for.
Everything else so far is just empty words. (Well written and convincing words, sure. But that guarantees nothing, any of us could find somebody to write a great apology if we're prepared to pay. Means nothing.)
So reversing and apologizing is still taking the wrong steps? Is this one of those situations where no positive descriptor must ever be uttered about someone?
> That's nothing to be proud of or rewarded for.
Good thing I never said that. I don't think we're speaking the same language here.
Well said. This ought to be taught in schools.
Being slightly pedantic I'd change it to "when dealing with companies that want your money or data" rather than "people" (though I've pretty sure that's the general meaning you intended anyhow).
Yes, we know they weren't doing it for the goodness in their hearts, but there's a huge leap between
- using what they know about me to sell services to others (classic Google)
- and outright selling/publishing my data to others
There's a reason why I still - despite all my dislike for Google - still respect them somewhat: they actually seems to try to guard their treasure chest of juicy customer data against both governments as well as everyone else, they seem to be in this for the long haul.
Edit: try to avoid being rude / abrasive
This confuses me. What big payout could they have gotten from making this public?
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
Why wouldn't another company first try to push privacy violating changes on a Friday, when people like you are so willing to turn a blind eye to it if they get caught?
They violated trust and it's going to take a lot more than an email apology to get it back from people who care.
Again, it will take a lot more than some words on the internet to gain back trust from people who care about the fact that they were tricked for financial gain.
Ammon got talked out of making all his user's sensitive job seeking intent public. He is still the guy who thought that was an OK thing to do. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe he was going broke. He didn't _actually_ beat his wife. This time.
Consider how you would feel if a credit card or a bank did this? Would you ever trust them again?
No, you would not.
You make it sound like they tried to hide this and got caught - that’s absurd given the facts.
And worse, who is to say they won't do this again later when no one is paying attention?
Do you have personal guarantees they won't?
This reaction seems way overblown. Its fine to criticize a feature but lets not pretend this is some nefarious plot that would have resulted in layoffs
> This reaction seems way overblown.
A badge on a user's now-public profile at a service that's used only when job hunting. Any company that noticed that one of their existing employees had a profile at Triplebyte could guess that the employee was looking for employment elsewhere. This would not be good for their career prospects, and could easily result in the job-hunting employee being chosen for a layoff or skipped for a promotion - most companies would rather keep or promote someone who's not about to leave.
-- Layoffs are happening around COVID, now who do you think a manager will feel more OK picking?
-- For luckier companies, bonuses/refreshers/promotions happen at different times, a candidate may want their manager thinking about their work vs. them exploring greener pastures
That's sensitive stuff! Some candidate may like being exposed (it's a threat!), some won't (shows disinterest! distracts!). Crucially, the question is of agency: folks entrusted TripleByte, expected privacy based on TripleByte's marketing and industry norms, and instead of having the decision, got into a world of dark patterns (opt-out, weak notification, difficult avoidance, long time delays, ...).
Edit: People are down-voting this. Consumer tech companies have been going through layoffs, generally one or more rounds of 20%. Many B2B's are on a delay, and are starting to see numbers around their b2c customers plummet: easy for more to happen as ripples continue. What could have been an opt-in feature to help folks maybe get better new positions was instead setup to add easily-avoidable risk.
This won't happen to everyone, but again, it's a matter of agency. Someone at a tiny startup may not care, but someone at a bigger or more political org might might feel risk differently. It's their career, not TripleByte's.
Right now? None. Because sensibly there is no such publicly available thing.
Any recruiter or hiring manager who doesn't at least look for a candidate's public LinkedIn page (and in those roles, they should also have LinkedIn premium or whatever it's called too) is not doing their job properly.
I have little doubt that this would have become "standard procedure" for managers when prepping for the "forward looking" section of a performance review and when making decisions about promotions/layoffs/payrises - if Ammon had got his way.
If a company would lay you off because you have a profile on a jobs network, they’re really a shit company you wouldn’t want to work for anyway.
Not that I agree with their actions - anything like this ought to be opt in only, but I can’t see people getting laid off. I have a profile on linked in with my boss and multiple people from my company as contacts, I’ve got profiles on multiple additional jobs board both locally and nationally. I’m not really looking for a job, but I have absolutely no reason to think I’d get fired for having a profile on triplebyte (which I do as well).
You have strong evidence Employee A is unsatisfied and looking to move on. Employee B has given no indication of such.
Which one do you lay off? Keep in mind that unsatisfied employees often have a detrimental effect on the morale of their (otherwise content) co-workers.
Answer: You lay off Employee A. And not because you are a bad CEO or bad person. You do it because it's legitimately in the best interest of the company.
Now take the same scenario and substitute a promotion in place of a termination. Which employee will get the promotion? Which employee is in your best interest to invest more money and time in? I think you know the answer.
So you're not going to point out any logical flaws in the scenario? You're not going to tell me why it's not a useful exercise? You're just going to avoid answering it because.... reasons.
> Firing someone because they have a profile on triplebyte is just silly.
Neither of the examples I gave were about firing.
>I ge that you all need to justify your rage over this, but this really makes no sense
I don't have any rage. My comment didn't express any rage. It gave two perfectly sound illustrations of why this information being public could put one at a disadvantage.
>The world doesn't work the way you want to believe it does.
Please elaborate. How does it work? And why is your experience about how it works more "correct" than the hundred of commenters here?
>I don't know, maybe you work somewhere that's normal, but if you want to call something toxic, that's toxic.
You can prove it by answering my question. What decision would a non-toxic, perfectly reasonable employer do? What would you do? I'm genuinely curious.
>No boss I've ever had would care less about my online profiles.
Same here. Aren't we lucky. Not everyone has had the same experience as evidenced by this thread.
You've now admitted you're not even in the situation, so why debate for it other than internet gotcha points?
You haven't given a _reason_ why it's "silly" and "not worth addressing", you just declared it so. That's not how civilized debate works and not how intelligent, honest, people disagree.
>You've now admitted you're not even in the situation, so why debate for it other than internet gotcha points?
Because I believe in privacy, ethics and get some enjoyment out of vigorous and fair debate. Sometimes my mind gets changed, sometimes I change other peoples minds. Other times, there are people who just aren't up to it intellectually and cover their ears and spew childish nonsense.
So let's cite some sources shall we?
1) According to a specialist in employment law at Dilworth Paxson LLP and author of the online law blog “The Employer Handbook” it is sometimes advisable for employers to terminate an employee looking for other work.[0]
2) According to hundreds of professionally employed developers on HN. "We feel at risk of this happening to us."
3) According to internet user jkl275. "That's silly because it doesn't match my experience. And if it is true, the company you work for is shit. Therefore your concerns are unfounded because.. well... I'm not sure. Why are you even arguing with me!?"
[0] https://blog.shrm.org/workforce/caught-in-the-act-employees-...
Sure, but you still have a mortgage to pay and would like to switch companies on your terms rather than on your employer's terms, right? Have enough time to find the right job you want, instead of the least-worst because you're really not comfortable with being out of work in what's looking to be a long economic crisis?
That would have been much easier to say a few months ago. But now, lots of startups and even large companies like Uber and Airbnb are laying off workers. Suddenly, for many, staying at that crappy company they currently work for is starting to seem like a much better option.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. While I have you, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is also in the site guidelines. You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I don't mind being flagged though. This is a [YC invested] company that just exhibited another example of the valley libertarian "the rules don't apply to me as long as I make money [or I get caught]" mentality. And hey, if that's what his priority is, more power to him! I personally think "sociopath" is an accurate label for that group of people, but sure, we can use a different term. How about objectivist? :)
Thanks for responding so nicely about the accounts thing.
Let's be real here. This guy's business went to shit because of the pandemic, and he's panicing that he's going to get kicked out of the cool kids VC club. Then he made a big strategic boo boo to try to stay in the club, and laid on a bunch of rationalizations why that wasn't the case last week. Now, he realizes he's doubly fucked, and got a PR firm to help him do damage control.
Which honestly is fine to me. I don't care one way or the other. It's just funny to see people contort to not see the obvious.
Not sure I agree with that. There's a very obvious example of clinical narcissism that we frequently hear about these days who seems to be a strong counterexample, in that they have never gone on record apologizing or taking responsibility for anything, even when doing so would be a clear, unambiguous winning move.
It's usually perilous to diagnose other people with psychiatric conditions over the Internet, and I don't think the case can be made for the Triplebyte CEO.
To put it much more politely than they deserve, this company is scum.
They want to make profiles pubic, like LinkedIn. The public profiles only contain subset of information from actual profile. Their FAQ page says that you can enable/disable sharing of your profile. They sent email to their users announcing the change and giving plenty of time to change settings.
I don't see how could they do better than that.
Synopsis IIRC: Dark paterns, requiring ID to close account, 30 days to close account (and they quietly cancel the request if you log in), only 7 days notice, no permanent opt-out.
So the real issue are those dark patterns, not that much making profiles public. If they would execute it right, I think majority of people wouldn't have problems with it.
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 deserve. They could've pushed through and ignored all the feedback they got. They didn't, and that's enough for to show the company and its CEO isn't utterly rotten.
@ammon Thanks for listening and participating in the discussions on HN. You made a mistake, but the fact that you responded is enough for me to put my trust in Triplebyte in the future if the need arises.