I'm going to point out that it's only because this is HN and someone here is much more likely to be able to cause PR problems than the average customer. Awesome companies don't harangue people who are already paying them and then make it harder than clicking "unsubscribe" to put a stop to it. I don't think anybody at Cloudflare is terrified that somebody's scorned mistress could wreak her revenge by punching their e-mail into an insecure Unsubscribe box and thus delaying their knowledge of having access to a new beta.

Yeah but you don't ever really see Google or Amazon or Facebook or Netflix or Spotify on here, except employees commenting unofficially. Cloudflare is on here quite frequently and meaningfully. I'd rather companies communicate, even if (and especially when) they fuck up.

It helps that cloudflare isn't too big to fail yet and still trying to get better.

Hopefully they'll fix this email situation.

I know a lot of companies where you can unsubscribe from the mailing lists easily, so their CTO doesn't have to do the PR damage control when they hit a social media front-page. Those companies are way ahead of those with CTO having a google alert setup.

Setting up Google alerts for when your company's name gets mentioned on an exceptionally popular discussion board is not special in the slightest.

He's been a HN user forever and he is active in threads that are unrelated to cloudflare too. You can just take a look at his profile

Indeed. He has previously mentioned that he set up an alerting system to notify him when Cloudflare is mentioned on HN, as well. So it's a mix of both.

His response here was perfectly adequate and beyond what the CTO of almost any other large tech company would ever do. Not that it deserves unbridled praise and admiration or something, but the immediate attacks and "weasel word" accusations from others are really weird. HN is way too cynical, sometimes.

In better companies, where legal blocks marketing from pulling stuff like that, this is not necesarry.

That sounds like a magical company.

If you like the sound of that you should consider a career in a regulated industry like banking or healthcare.

No, no and absolutely no they're not.