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Does anyone inside Twitter know who the executive was who pulled the trigger on this decision? There's no way this person knew the gravity of accepting the risk

Does anyone inside Twitter know who the executive was who pulled the trigger on this decision? There's no way this person knew the gravity of accepting the risk for blowing this many high-profile customers out of the water all at once. I'm pretty accustomed to executives making dreadful decisions without the approval/acceptance of other stakeholders within said person's firm. I'd rather know who made this error and not interact with that specific person's department rather than stop doing business (e.g. large ad-buys) with Twitter as a whole. I don't want this to be a witch-hunt so much as I want the person to just come forward and own the decision, because unless they have an exceptionally good reason for it, it comes off as absurdly high-risk to both Twitter-the-business as well as to all the clients who've likely written serious penalties into their contracts for events like this, which again brings that business risk back full-circle to... Twitter.

cosmicexplorer 8y ago
I work at twitter and wasn’t able to find out immediately, but have been collecting responses like these + the article and communicating with someone who knows what to do. I only found out about this over twitter and I am personally deeply frustrated and working to understand whatever led to this.
- kaeawc 8y ago
  Sorry to hear that, can imagine the frustration.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ta1357 8y ago
  I don't really think there's any polite way to put this: Your employers are simply assholes.
  - dang 8y ago
    This is the sort of informationless pile-on comment that damages HN regardless of what you're talking about. Please don't post those here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- philipov 8y ago
  To be honest, this reads less like an attempt to integrate anti-harassment measures and more like an attempt to completely destroy a business trying to offer them. It further solidifies Twitter management as complicit in aiding and abetting the harassers by using its capital to eliminate a threat from the market. After the speed with which Twitter went after the ICE employees list, the evidence is clear that Twitter only has a problem tackling harassment when it's against marginalized populations.
  - dang 8y ago
    That's a pretty extreme leap when virtually no information is available yet. The HN guidelines ask you to "assume good faith" for a reason: people are all too ready to take such charges as givens and then pile more on top of them. It's a behavior that harms the container here, and it's not hard to wait until actual evidence appears.
    - philipov 8y ago
      That's fair, I will suspend judgement until further evidence appears, but the well of beneficial doubt is running low. I think a long past history of suspicious behavior is a good reason to update our assumptions.
      - dang 8y ago
        I don't disagree. But the real reason for having an "assume good faith" rule is what it does to this community when people don't. Therefore it needs practicing even when it feels undeserved.
        tedivm 8y ago
        Here's the whole guideline you're talking about- > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. It's talking about how we all talk to each other. I think it's main purpose is not to lessen criticisms for corporations so much as to keep the discussion constructive.
- lightedman 8y ago
  "I work at twitter and wasn’t able to find out immediately" Sweet, please tell Jack I'm done with Twitter violating my copyright and it's game-on now.
- brongondwana 8y ago
  As someone down thread said - this smells like the long arm of GDPR unintending some consequences.
superflyguy 8y ago
Why would Twitter care? They make money from ads, right? APIs and legacy deals are going to be time consuming and boring for them. Stuff like filtering hate speech etc is something which can be done globally and in a way which doesn't require highly paid employees, APIs etc. Hasn't Twitter repeatedly show that third parties aren't really that interesting to them?
- stupidcar 8y ago
  All companies have suppliers and partners, including Twitter. Getting a reputation for this kind of toxic behaviour harms their ability to build relationships with them, as nobody will feel they can trust them. It could also hamper their ability to make further acquisitions. In future, a startup being linked with a possible Twitter acquisition is going to cause its customers to panic and start moving elsewhere. That'll make startups more reluctant to engage, and may turn some off entirely, if they're not comfortable with the prospect of totally screwing over the customers who've supported them during their early stages.
  - superflyguy 8y ago
    A startup's customers panicking? Not sure that's on twitter's radar. I think potential for reputation damage, on an activity they don't do very often, and where they will justify it, will be weighed up against the financial benefit now, and disregarded. I think it's possible to overstate the relevance and importance of people typing furiously on internet forums about things like this. Twitter is what it is - most people aren't using APIs, third party clients etc and will never notice this.
    - pmontra 8y ago
      They can shrug it off, still those companies that had contracts with Smyte are not one person businesses on the other side of the world. Those Twitter people are going to have lunch or dinner with other people and get to talk about this issue for a while. Not very pleasant, even for employees totally unrelated with this case like the one who answered the very first comment in this page (sorry.)
savanaly 8y ago
To a large degree, the responsibility is also on Smyte, right? Selling to a big corp is one thing, and once you are no longer owner of a company you've washed your hands of future decisions. But at the time when they agreed to the sale they were still owners of the company and their hands had not been washed and they could have and arguably should have stipulated some conditions for how the service would be wound down following the sale.
- eganist 8y ago
  Only if the acquisition hasn't closed yet. If it has, who's there to go after? But you're actually right -- if the acquisition hasn't closed yet, they're independent and independently responsible.
- CGamesPlay 8y ago
  Litigation aside, the founders of Smyte seem pretty culpable here. I would be wary of using another service that they created, given a demonstrated willingness to turn it off without any notice.
ballenf 8y ago
Another plausible scenario is the acquisition terms required Smyte to wind down the service over the past 6 months or build a replacement to fulfill contracts. Smyte didn't for whatever reason (either through negligence or negligence+hope to continue operations in a new capacity) and the deadline came to hand over the servers in the agreed condition (no externally accessible APIs available). Twitter could have stepped in and halted things, but that would have required Smyte to have acknowledged breaching the contract and forfeiting $$. This is all guess of what seems to me more likely than any Twitter exec pulling any triggers like this. Of course, it's still a screwup by Twitter to have not been tuned in and aware that fingers would point to them. But that's a very different kind of mistake than "I have an idea, let's hit the power button at 6:30. Team: you have 30 minutes to let all our customers know."
- mark-r 8y ago
  You never, ever agree to a change in your business before the acquisition is complete. The chances that an acquisition won't go through are just too high, and it could leave you completely f'ed over.
  - knodi123 8y ago
    Yeah, but if you're less experienced, or if you're more devoted to your potential profit than to your customers, you might agree to the term, and then realize what you just said, leaving you with the (immature but perhaps "seemed reasonable") situation we see here - doing nothing until the acquisition is complete and then immediately abiding by the terms.
mbesto 8y ago
This is one of those instances in which I think employees (developers) and companies working with Twitter need to have a "never forget" attitude. I actually know someone personally at Twitter corp dev (the group that usually manages M&A activity) and I hope that individual was not involved here, as it would be pretty out of character.
psb31 8y ago
Twitter’s VP of engineering has posted some additional information: https://twitter.com/michaelmontano/status/1010246307984769024?s=21 https://twitter.com/michaelmontano/status/101024630798476902...
- btown 8y ago
  "We couldn't operate their business and continue collecting data from their customers, while continuing to meet our own high standards as a global company." My hunch as an outsider is that Smyte wasn't GDPR compliant. Their leadership knew it, they knew they couldn't easily become so (for instance, they may have been using Kafka in a way where compaction wouldn't help, and didn't want to build an encryption-based monstrosity [0]), realized that they wouldn't increase in value as a business due to that risk, took an acquihire for cheap in order to give their employees a decent landing and give a return to their investors, and couldn't tell anyone about these plans in advance because it might jeopardize the transaction. EDIT: They were indeed using Kafka per [1], and due to the strict latency requirements on their business, that may have ruled out the type of encryption scheme in [0]. [0] https://danlebrero.com/2018/04/11/kafka-gdpr-event-sourcing/ https://danlebrero.com/2018/04/11/kafka-gdpr-event-sourcing/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ByXQfIq5uU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ByXQfIq5uU
  - mark-r 8y ago
    That's a good thought. The only good reason to shut them down so abruptly is if they posed an existential threat to Twitter itself. The threat of GDPR fines or sanctions might have done it.
    - tmpz22 8y ago
      I still don't get why they couldn't just come out and say that. Was incompetence and unprofessionalism really a better look then a understandable engineering challenge? Or was this another case of "being honest and doing the right thing would have created legal liability so we opted not to do it"?

cosmicexplorer 8y ago

I work at twitter and wasn’t able to find out immediately, but have been collecting responses like these + the article and communicating with someone who knows what to do. I only found out about this over twitter and I am personally deeply frustrated and working to understand whatever led to this.

kaeawc 8y ago
Sorry to hear that, can imagine the frustration.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ta1357 8y ago
I don't really think there's any polite way to put this: Your employers are simply assholes.
- dang 8y ago
  This is the sort of informationless pile-on comment that damages HN regardless of what you're talking about. Please don't post those here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
philipov 8y ago
To be honest, this reads less like an attempt to integrate anti-harassment measures and more like an attempt to completely destroy a business trying to offer them. It further solidifies Twitter management as complicit in aiding and abetting the harassers by using its capital to eliminate a threat from the market. After the speed with which Twitter went after the ICE employees list, the evidence is clear that Twitter only has a problem tackling harassment when it's against marginalized populations.
- dang 8y ago
  That's a pretty extreme leap when virtually no information is available yet. The HN guidelines ask you to "assume good faith" for a reason: people are all too ready to take such charges as givens and then pile more on top of them. It's a behavior that harms the container here, and it's not hard to wait until actual evidence appears.
  - philipov 8y ago
    That's fair, I will suspend judgement until further evidence appears, but the well of beneficial doubt is running low. I think a long past history of suspicious behavior is a good reason to update our assumptions.
    - dang 8y ago
      I don't disagree. But the real reason for having an "assume good faith" rule is what it does to this community when people don't. Therefore it needs practicing even when it feels undeserved.
      - tedivm 8y ago
        Here's the whole guideline you're talking about- > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. It's talking about how we all talk to each other. I think it's main purpose is not to lessen criticisms for corporations so much as to keep the discussion constructive.
lightedman 8y ago
"I work at twitter and wasn’t able to find out immediately" Sweet, please tell Jack I'm done with Twitter violating my copyright and it's game-on now.
brongondwana 8y ago
As someone down thread said - this smells like the long arm of GDPR unintending some consequences.

superflyguy 8y ago

Why would Twitter care? They make money from ads, right? APIs and legacy deals are going to be time consuming and boring for them. Stuff like filtering hate speech etc is something which can be done globally and in a way which doesn't require highly paid employees, APIs etc. Hasn't Twitter repeatedly show that third parties aren't really that interesting to them?

stupidcar 8y ago
All companies have suppliers and partners, including Twitter. Getting a reputation for this kind of toxic behaviour harms their ability to build relationships with them, as nobody will feel they can trust them. It could also hamper their ability to make further acquisitions. In future, a startup being linked with a possible Twitter acquisition is going to cause its customers to panic and start moving elsewhere. That'll make startups more reluctant to engage, and may turn some off entirely, if they're not comfortable with the prospect of totally screwing over the customers who've supported them during their early stages.
- superflyguy 8y ago
  A startup's customers panicking? Not sure that's on twitter's radar. I think potential for reputation damage, on an activity they don't do very often, and where they will justify it, will be weighed up against the financial benefit now, and disregarded. I think it's possible to overstate the relevance and importance of people typing furiously on internet forums about things like this. Twitter is what it is - most people aren't using APIs, third party clients etc and will never notice this.
  - pmontra 8y ago
    They can shrug it off, still those companies that had contracts with Smyte are not one person businesses on the other side of the world. Those Twitter people are going to have lunch or dinner with other people and get to talk about this issue for a while. Not very pleasant, even for employees totally unrelated with this case like the one who answered the very first comment in this page (sorry.)

savanaly 8y ago

To a large degree, the responsibility is also on Smyte, right? Selling to a big corp is one thing, and once you are no longer owner of a company you've washed your hands of future decisions. But at the time when they agreed to the sale they were still owners of the company and their hands had not been washed and they could have and arguably should have stipulated some conditions for how the service would be wound down following the sale.

eganist 8y ago
Only if the acquisition hasn't closed yet. If it has, who's there to go after? But you're actually right -- if the acquisition hasn't closed yet, they're independent and independently responsible.
CGamesPlay 8y ago
Litigation aside, the founders of Smyte seem pretty culpable here. I would be wary of using another service that they created, given a demonstrated willingness to turn it off without any notice.

ballenf 8y ago

Another plausible scenario is the acquisition terms required Smyte to wind down the service over the past 6 months or build a replacement to fulfill contracts. Smyte didn't for whatever reason (either through negligence or negligence+hope to continue operations in a new capacity) and the deadline came to hand over the servers in the agreed condition (no externally accessible APIs available). Twitter could have stepped in and halted things, but that would have required Smyte to have acknowledged breaching the contract and forfeiting $$. This is all guess of what seems to me more likely than any Twitter exec pulling any triggers like this. Of course, it's still a screwup by Twitter to have not been tuned in and aware that fingers would point to them. But that's a very different kind of mistake than "I have an idea, let's hit the power button at 6:30. Team: you have 30 minutes to let all our customers know."

mark-r 8y ago
You never, ever agree to a change in your business before the acquisition is complete. The chances that an acquisition won't go through are just too high, and it could leave you completely f'ed over.
- knodi123 8y ago
  Yeah, but if you're less experienced, or if you're more devoted to your potential profit than to your customers, you might agree to the term, and then realize what you just said, leaving you with the (immature but perhaps "seemed reasonable") situation we see here - doing nothing until the acquisition is complete and then immediately abiding by the terms.

mbesto 8y ago

This is one of those instances in which I think employees (developers) and companies working with Twitter need to have a "never forget" attitude. I actually know someone personally at Twitter corp dev (the group that usually manages M&A activity) and I hope that individual was not involved here, as it would be pretty out of character.

psb31 8y ago

Twitter’s VP of engineering has posted some additional information: https://twitter.com/michaelmontano/status/1010246307984769024?s=21 https://twitter.com/michaelmontano/status/101024630798476902...

btown 8y ago
"We couldn't operate their business and continue collecting data from their customers, while continuing to meet our own high standards as a global company." My hunch as an outsider is that Smyte wasn't GDPR compliant. Their leadership knew it, they knew they couldn't easily become so (for instance, they may have been using Kafka in a way where compaction wouldn't help, and didn't want to build an encryption-based monstrosity [0]), realized that they wouldn't increase in value as a business due to that risk, took an acquihire for cheap in order to give their employees a decent landing and give a return to their investors, and couldn't tell anyone about these plans in advance because it might jeopardize the transaction. EDIT: They were indeed using Kafka per [1], and due to the strict latency requirements on their business, that may have ruled out the type of encryption scheme in [0]. [0] https://danlebrero.com/2018/04/11/kafka-gdpr-event-sourcing/ https://danlebrero.com/2018/04/11/kafka-gdpr-event-sourcing/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ByXQfIq5uU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ByXQfIq5uU
- mark-r 8y ago
  That's a good thought. The only good reason to shut them down so abruptly is if they posed an existential threat to Twitter itself. The threat of GDPR fines or sanctions might have done it.
  - tmpz22 8y ago
    I still don't get why they couldn't just come out and say that. Was incompetence and unprofessionalism really a better look then a understandable engineering challenge? Or was this another case of "being honest and doing the right thing would have created legal liability so we opted not to do it"?