This is not a weird edge case or a nobody-could-have-caught this. This should have been obvious and come up immediately in the "how are we thoroughly addressing this dark pattern" root-cause.
Calling out poor engineering is not prohibiting them from fixing it. It's calling the bluff on "oopsie woopsie a privacy issue again, silly us," for a company whose primary KPI is public profile engagement. The more things like this happen, the less they look like mistakes.
As pointed out earlier, we do need to let people make mistakes, and often their paths will appear to be non-linear. I struggle with this too, but a world that doesn't understand that is much worse.
That's a fallacy and being kind to humans is hard.
either you've never worked at a company or you've only worked at one or two places, and they had astoundingly high standards for successful collaboration. what were they, because now i want to apply to work there.
I stand by my point that this is a symptom of amateur hour engineering.
I note that you seem to have ignored my question entirely, in what I can only characterize as mean-spirited discourtesy.
(Nothing against this PM, btw. But what a bunch of incompetence from the CEO)
If you think the former is uniquely horrible, you've not run into the latter :)
He's since walked that back a bit (see other comments in his profile) , but personally I tend not to give someone the benefit of the doubt after they get shit on for such a terrible response.
(As a somewhat related note, people I know who have tried sourcing through Triplebyte were unimpressed with their candidates. No personal experience myself. I'm also told their cringey reddit ads had really good conversion, which feeds a narrative I'd be happy to believe.)
If that’s not the case, can you share the percentage of profiles that will be turned public as of now?
After last year's snafu, we had a company-wide retro to discuss what had happened. It lasted a couple of hours, during which several people (including myself) were pretty blunt about what we thought. I don't want to get into a complete postmortem here, if only because it would make this post require ten paragraphs of niche internal culture context, but the biggest problem was that we had an internal communication breakdown. Many people who were uncomfortable with what we were doing, and who could have predicted the public response, did not feel empowered to speak up about it. Not in the sense that they'd face backlash for doing so, but in the sense that they felt they'd be ignored. This was less true than they thought - had they all spoken up at once, it probably would have made a difference - but more true than it should have been.
Since then, a number of people within Triplebyte (including Ammon, but also myself and various others) have made an effort to create space for those kinds of concerns.
One of our defining traits as an organization is that we're very good at creating coherent internal narratives. Everyone knows what we're doing and why. But the flip side of that is that in the effort to create clarity, we sometimes run over inconvenient details like "wait isn't that a terrible idea". That means that to avoid problems like last year's, we need to be explicit and deliberate in actively seeking out dissent about what we're doing, especially from people who are not the very assertive strong personalities that tend to show up in leadership. That doesn't mean that dissent is always right - strategic decisions are difficult and complicated, people do sometimes lack the visibility to see why they're made, and in a room of fifty people there's always going to be some disagreement - but it costs us very little to listen to it and (as we learned last year) can cost us dearly when we don't.
(Actually, as I was preparing to submit this post, one of our engineering leads pinged me on Slack to suggest ways we could avoid mistakes of the kind that spawned this thread - TLDR, build less automated shit that we can forget about until it bites us.)
I realize this reply is a little bit nonspecific ("make space for"? what does that even mean?), but that's the nature of solving a culture problem. You're necessarily wrestling with subtle cues and unspoken assumptions rather than with a thing where you can go "ah, yes, we just need to change step 2a of our product development process". But for what it's worth, I think we've gotten better about making sure we consider how people feel about what we're doing, and we've avoided some potential bad decisions in the year since then as a result.
IMO this is why it's vital to have Core Principles at a company (in this case, "user trust" might be a reasonable wording), both at a product level and a meta level, about how the world needs to see the company and the company needs to see itself. And when any employee, no matter where, feels something might breach Core Principles, it should be a five alarm fire that the C suite should know about and react to (or delegate said reaction), and if it turns out to be a misunderstanding, that employee should not feel they expended any political capital in escalating their concerns - at worst they might just require more context about why something is either a non-issue or necessary (which in this specific case doesn't apply), and leadership should be excited to see them growing by asking those questions. Ideally, it's as easy and low-risk as submitting an internal bug report.
Of course, I can imagine this stops scaling at some point. FAANG need very different approaches to this problem, and that's probably an entire business school class to answer. But I feel any smaller organization with a focused product can move in this direction!
You're absolutely right that this is a dark pattern, but it's not a current one - it's the echo of the dark pattern we screwed up on last year. If you hid your profile at the time, prior to last year's thread and our response to it, the maximum duration was one year (and yes, this was a really terrible idea among the other really-terrible-ideas that were called out at the time). But we changed that last year during our internal response. Hiding your profile indefinitely on our current site does in fact hide it indefinitely, and has ever since it was added as an option. (see https://imgur.com/n5e4CMB - and just to be clear this is my personal prod-testing account, not an actual person whose profile I screenshotted)
What happened here is that if you had hidden your profile just before we added the indefinite option, you were caught by the old dark pattern, which only let you hide it for up to a year. (And so, a year later, we're correctly informing you that it is now visible again.) We fixed the site at the time so that no one would newly be caught in this pattern, but what we failed to do was retroactively change the setting for people who'd selected 'one year' prior to that point.
This was a genuine oversight, and we'll fix it. I need to speak to our engineering team to make sure we can actually do so, but my immediate plan is to effectively just make the indefinite hiding retroactive by assuming anyone who set it to the max last year wanted that. In any case, it will get fixed one way or another - I was as pissed as anyone here by last year's events and have no intention of leaving y'all high and dry.