Nah man, I won't criticize too hard. There but for the grace of god goes I, you know?

I've had flakey dependencies. I've thought "maybe fail open is okay in this one case". You're growth hacking your company and you don't want to be held back because a dependency can't handle your scale. And hey, if a few fraudulent accounts get in, we'll just clean them up later. Cost benefit analysis here, right?

But the road to hell is paved with trying to improve user experience.

“The road to hell is paved with trying to improve user experience.”

A thousand engineers just got PTSD from reading that!

Isn't that exactly what the above comment is saying?

So, you agree with what I said.

Yeah, but you said it with what looked like a lot of sarcasm and criticism.

I said it with a tone of "Oh shit, I could have done exactly the same thing". Empathy.

But it's a fun point of the nuances of language, isn't it? Maybe I misunderstood you.

Maybe your takeaway there should be, "oh shit, I would have exactly the same thing, I need to rearrange my priorities so that I don't hurt people".

It sounds like that was his takeaway, except that for him it was coming from a place of empathy and not anger.

I did not hear that.

You're exactly right. I love your attitude. But for the grace of God there go I.

Well, here's the thing. I don't go there. I do my best to have morals and principles that stop me from putting users at risk. I would push back at anyone telling me to do this.

If you go there but for the grace of God, that is a bad thing. You should not. You should figure out how not to do that.

Well, having empathy with growth hackers is reprehensible and worth critiquing. The idea of growing a business for the sake of having a big business is horrifying; it's the desire to explicitly build a large social institution and use it to damage and oppress people.

From that perspective, you're the one lacking in empathy; you would like us to have our sympathies lie with the few who build businesses, rather than the many who are harmed by the business.

I think you are allowed to have empathy for both.

But only one was displayed here.

Extreme growth hacking

Yeah, just open the flood gates to bots. Twitter would be 100x as large now.

Wasn't it something like 99% of e-mail was spam? The downsides of an open / decentralized platform.

Maybe we should stop idolizing free speech, and instead work towards inexpensive speech :)

Of course, they couldn't compete in the competently run micro blogging market because mastodon instances are free and have no ads. Instead they competed with twitter in the incompetently run micro blogging market.