3 ms·
In the first place, it was an awful business decision to take the route of trusting a SaaS provider with such an important task. It is extremely irresponsible
by AndrewUnmuted 8y ago
In the first place, it was an awful business decision to take the route of trusting a SaaS provider with such an important task.
It is extremely irresponsible to forward sensitive user data and site interactions to a third party, even if it is in the name of spam/abuse/scam filtering. That its implementation brings down production websites in the case of service failure only adds insult to injury, originally caused by plain-awful product design.
If there's one thing that you should be doing in-house when you run a large online community of privacy-conscious users, it's the kind of service that Smyte provided. If sound business reasoning had prevailed, npm would have suffered no downtime.
- hluska 8y agoIt's easy to say that now that everything has gone to hell, but in business, we usually have to make decisions with imperfect knowledge. I don't agree that it's irresponsible to forward sensitive data to third parties. Rather, I believe that intelligent companies have intelligent policies around sharing data with third parties. Some third parties provide an amazing service that would be extremely expensive for companies to mimic in-house. And, you cannot convince me that the probability of a well vetted service shutting down as fast as Smyte did is high enough to justify bringing this in-house when you have other things to work on.