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”.
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.