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.

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

> What I've come to observe is that you can never make everyone happy

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.

There are plenty of ways to respond. "I'm sorry you feel that way" is never one of them.

I interpret such a statement as expressing sympathy with someone's point of view, but also disagreeing with it.

It's pretty well understood by people far less experienced than the CEO (i.e. me) that you need to split those messages up.

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.

What makes it complicated, though, is that some people interpret "I'm sorry" as an admission of guilt or agreement, so conservative lawyers and others recommend specifying what you feel sorry for so as to not give away the farm.