Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.
As soon as a company does something that a chunk of people on the internet don’t agree with, there’s really no way out. They’re going to get bad press regardless of whether they retract, whether they apologize, and whether they say they’re taking actions to avoid the sequence that led to the action in question.
But alongside that, for every time the internet mob has risen up over a company’s action, very few companies seem to have experienced major long term effects. I bet everybody knows a few people who have quit Facebook/GitHub, or who rage about Oracle business practices or MongoDB stability, but these companies still manage to keep trucking along.
In light of this, I’m mostly surprised that Triplebyte bothered apologizing; it seems unlikely to do them any good, and it’s unclear to me whether continuing course would have actually done as much harm to their bottom line as the prior Hackernews thread appeared to indicate.
I mean I deleted my account. They probably realized they're getting a ton of account deletions and went back on it.
Probably which is mentioned in the email. “ Last Friday I lost a big chunk of that trust. ” which translates to account deletion
I also deleted my account and encouraged others to do so. I'd love to see their account metrics and to know whether the reason for the decision reversal was primarily driven by individual email responses, HN/reddit outrage, or mass account deletion.
> Probably which is _weasel-worded_ in the email. “ Last Friday I lost a big chunk of that trust. ” which translates to account deletion
FTFY...
He originally said they got around 2000 deletion requests since sending out the original message. That comment appears to be gone from this page now, but another commenter concurs with my recollection.
It's hard to gauge significance without knowing a number of total users, but I imagine it is a relatively strong hypothesis that there is significant correlation between regular browsing of HN and having an account on his service.
> That comment appears to be gone from this page now
I think you're running into the pagination problem: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20pagination&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you scroll to the bottom and click More you should find it. Edit: yes, it's there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304097.
I mean, I can accept an apology when I can somehow understand the initial intention. In the thread the CEO was answering "but stackoverflow also has public accounts!" to people explaining why this was a very bad move. The guy seemed completely clueless.
It was like trying to explain that hurting people is bad to someone who has just punched you in the face. And this guy justifies his move saying that he has watched a boxing match and that seems a normal thing to do. And then the day after that he finally understand for some reason? The apology is useless because the harm done is too great.
But no harm was done? It’s like he enthusiastically told you he was going to punch you in the face next week and you told him that’s a bad idea, so he stopped.
I was clueless. The posts I made Friday night were what I thought at the time (which was badly wrong). I was still focused on what I'd been thinking while we were developing the feature (still trying to make it "work"). What it took was a bunch of friends and mentors reaching out Saturday morning (and basically telling me I'd made a big mistake and betrayed the trust of our users). I wish I'd been able to understand this sooner based on the original HN thread. But it took me some time.
>As soon as a company does something that a chunk of people on the internet don’t agree with, there’s really no way out.
And yet, tons of companies had done that, and suffered very little. Heck, any company has done something that "a chunk of people on the internet don’t agree with"...
It's not about never doing anything wrong, or it being futile to apologize.
It's about, you don't do THIS kind of privacy affecting changes without publicly announcing it first, and without red flags raised internally that it might not be a good idea.
That's a good thing to instill in companies, whether this one apologized or not...
Given that there don’t seem to be actual business repercussions from the internet mob’s displeasure, and the internet mob’s displeasure, once roused, cannot be quieted by apologies, changes in behavior, or explanations, it’s unclear to me that we’re actually “instilling” anything in companies, other than the lesson that it’s not worth bothering to pay attention to the internet mob.
That's probably the greatest lesson companies could learn at this point.
> Given that there don’t seem to be actual business repercussions from the internet mob’s displeasure,
2000 account closures is an actual business repercussion.
> and the internet mob’s displeasure, once roused, cannot be quieted by apologies, changes in behavior, or explanations
It absolutely could. As a member of said "internet mob" (I deleted my account) I'll say that yes, an apology by itself is not enough, but an apology combined with a long-term change in behavior would absolutely cause me to stop criticizing them and maybe even create an account again. If, for example, they remove a bunch of dark patterns from their site and change their terms of use to give specific guarantees of data privacy, that would go a long way in my mind.
The current position is "sorry for breaking your trust, please trust us". It's hard to find it compelling.
> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.
To project my own opinion onto others: these comments are warranted because an apology has no actual value. The fact remains that Triplebytes can still do this if they wish to, and they are constrained only by what they can manage to slip past their users.
There's a stark asymmetry in the digital space, where service providers are protected by the legal language in their TOS or EULA, but the users have to trust that the service provider will not act outside their interests, and with no recourse. By contrast, in a normal contract negotiation, there will be an opportunity for both sides to ammend the contract to better serve their interests.
If Triplebytes wanted to show that they will not attempt to do this again, they could break this asymmetry and constrain themselves in their user contract, accepting all resulting liability or specifying concrete penalties if they do persue this route in the future. An apology is just a meaningless PR exercise.
> The current position is "sorry for breaking your trust, please trust us". It's hard to find it compelling.
Why is this a hard thing to do? It’s literally what everyone who ever messes something up is asking you to do.
Just because someone once committed a broken build, doesn’t mean I’ll never again trust them with access.
It’s argubly more like “sorry for being a moron, but I hear you. Please give us another chance”?
Just as with a person, you'd need them to also demonstrate a series of correct decisions, and moving to give greater accountability to their actions before trusting them again.
You offer an apology because it’s the right thing to do. You fucked up and you want to own it and recognise it. Once you realise what you’ve done, respecting yourself as a man/woman depends on doing it.
It shouldn’t be for gain. In fact if apologies always led to a positive outcome they would mean less and the world would be a worse place for it.
Check out the original HN topic.
It would be one thing if he apologized immediately after people pointed out the flaws in their plan.
But he didn’t.
He ignored all the objections, and defended his decision over and over again.
He clearly didn’t care.
There is huge difference between “whoops, we didn’t think things through, sorry about that” and “after seeing tons of people cancel their account, let’s pretend that I’m now truly sorry.” Especially when he had a history of building shitty social networks.
What's with all the apologizing lately. I don't pay for people to mess up. How many mess up does your employer tolerate before they find someone else to take your place?
This isn't kinder garden, we're not here to educate those companies, they run a business, you mess up, you're out, we give the competitor a chance. That's how it works.
In the interest of providing a counterpoint: I’ve definitely made many mistakes per job at multiple jobs, without the employer “find[ing] someone else to take [my] place”.
As a user, I’m also not dropping a company that provides me a useful service at the first (or likely second, or third) mistake.
Not everybody subscribes to this one-screwup-and-you’re-done mindset that you seem to be describing.
That's not really the mindset. The mindset is: what will serve me best. If you no longer qualify, you no longer qualify.
> that provides me a useful service
And what if the service stops being useful? What is an apology going to change? No longer useful, you'll move on.
That's where I find these apologies to be a sham. It's trying to play on people's emotions, to keep them around even once they've stopped providing value and utility, or in this case, actually causing you harm.
The only reason your employers have kept you around, is because your "mistakes" were within the expected range of what people in your position will be making as well. If you fall below that threshold, trust me, you will not be kept around for very long.
Your prior comment says “... you mess up, you're out, we give the competitor a chance. That's how it works.”
I’m saying that’s not how I approach my interactions with businesses. As you noted in your reply, employers expect an employee to make mistakes within a reasonable threshold. I have the same expectation for companies that provide me services. Making a mistake does not suddenly evaporate all their “usefulness” to me, as you seem to be suggesting.
Apologies maintain norms and standards. They define the lines we shouldn't cross by noting areas where they were crossed.
We should reward apologies and punish those who don't. Our failure to do so is creating a market incentive that will destroy or weaken valuable norms.
> We should reward apologies and punish those who don't.
We should expect rather than reward apologies, and we should punish both people who fail to apologise as well as people who apologies but fail to follow through on changing their behaviour.
Ammon so far has done no more that the minimum expected from someone in his position. Time will tell whether his actions reveal his apology to be genuine and behaviour changing, or empty lies.
Rewarding apologies that turn out to be empty lies is what gave us Facebook. I fear Ammon's ambitions are to be more like Zuckerbergs rather than less, so I'll be very judgemental and dubious as I watch future moves by Ammon and Triplebyte. Like he acknowledges, he's lost trust. You earn trust back by your future actions, not by the eloquence of your apology.
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Because screwing up and retracting is better than just screwing up.
Words have no value. Actions do. This apology changes nothing, so long as they don't follow it up with actions that prove their intent.
The one action they took is that they cancelled the feature. _That_ has value. Arguably not enough, but it's a good first step. I'm eager to hear what they follow it up with, but they _have to follow it up._
> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.
Correct. I don't want apologies or retractions from companies. I want postmortems.
This is really no different from a technical outage, e.g., "As a result of a bad deploy to prod on Friday, all Triplebyte profiles became public." Why was it not noticed in testing? What is the testing process? Is profile privacy part of the testing process or part of code reviews? What are the practices around making changes that affect user privacy - is there a culture of asking questions about it up front, etc.?
Most importantly, what changes are being made to prevent a similar outage from reoccurring in the future? I really couldn't care less about how bad the CEO feels about it - sure, the CEO probably should feel bad, but feeling bad is not a reliable mechanism. If the CEO said "Bwahaha, I wish to profit and I learned over the weekend that my profits were in danger, so I changed course" but then says that in order to maintain his profits in the future he added an external privacy council that reviewed all major new initiatives (or whatever), that would actually be a lot more useful than contrition.
Now, yes, it's true that basically no company does public postmortems of decisions that they needed to walk back (at best you get blameful postmortems that end with a key executive resigning, but most of the time that doesn't help anyway - either the executive wasn't the problem, or they were the problem and they already spread the bad culture to others). But I think it was pretty rare until a couple of years ago for tech companies to do detailed public postmortems of internal outages, and that expectation has slowly changed. I think we should push for the same change for non-technical incidents like this.
That sounds like an excellent idea.
And I absolutely agree that the feelings of the CEO matter less than putting in place some proper procedures.
Profit ain't bad.
You can’t install business processes to prevent unethical decisions. You can only hold the people making those decisions to high ethical standards, and replace them when they fall short of those standards.
Now, I suppose it may be possible that the CEO in this situation dramatically misunderstood the situation. It may even be possible that he had good faith even as he militantly defended those misunderstandings in previous threads. But from the perspective of trust, I can’t get past the suspicion that he’s just sorry that he got caught.
> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.
I wonder why anyone would ever place a non-zero value on an apology from an organization acting in its own interests. A company isn't a single person acting in isolation and ignorance. It's a profit-seeking entity organizing a whole number of people of various levels of conscientiousness and intelligence, and pointing them at a single profit-seeking goal.
When that many-limbed organism grabs at a profitable course of action, it's not an impulsive accident of blind flailing. If that turns out to be a problem and they have to reverse course, it's not because of remorse.
They did what was in their interest then; they did what's in their interest now. People confusing corporations for actual, you know, people absolutely baffles me. Their apologies mean absolutely nothing, good or bad, but how bad a hit their business appeared to take and how good their copy writer was. That is all.
As another poster said, and I agree wholeheartedly, I don't care for apologies, I care for post-mortems. The only thing that matters is what operations led to this action, and what change in those operations will prevent it happening again - if any such change can prevent it. A public mea culpa with an executive's signature on it means... well, nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's the cheapest possible way of reclaiming good will, and worth the paper it's written on.
> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.
Because the people running the company have a conscience which causes them to feel bad and want to apologize when they harm people? Are we really entertaining the idea that the only reason someone might apologize is if it benefits them?
It's disturbing to me how absolutely normal your comment is on Hacker News. There's a significant portion of HN whose entire concept of ethics seems to be, "if it's profitable, it's right" and who can't imagine any motivation except profit. Over and over again we see profitable corporations doing terrible things and people on HN defending them on no other grounds but the fact that what they are doing is profitable. And when people disagree, it's almost always because the profitable corporation's actions affect them directly. All I can conclude is that a significant number of HN users are just amoral, which is terrifying, because a lot of HN users hold positions with significant power.
And before you tell me that everyone acts selfishly--no, they don't. I've met hundreds of wonderful people in my life who were generous, honest, kind, and/or brave, at great personal cost and risk to themselves. The behavior you're engaging in isn't normal, and it's not okay.
> Because the people running the company have a conscience which causes them to feel bad and want to apologize when they harm people? Are we really entertaining the idea that the only reason someone might apologize is if it benefits them?
>... And before you tell me that everyone acts selfishly--no, they don't. I've met hundreds of wonderful people in my life who were generous, honest, kind, and/or brave, at great personal cost and risk to themselves. The behavior you're engaging in isn't normal, and it's not okay.
I can see that you’re trying to be charitable, so let me try and be charitable in return.
I actually kind of agree with the comment you’re responding to, but I don’t interpret it the same way you do. A normal, moral person like you or me will apologize out of genuine guilt. But then again, a normal, moral person like you or me doesn’t operate a business in a way that betrays the trust of its users.
I don’t think everyone acts selfishly. But I do think that some people do. And even a selfish person would want to try and convincingly feign remorse for their selfish actions once those actions backfired and were no longer in their own self-interest.
An apology is not a "get out of jail free card," it is a good first step on the road to repairing users' trust. They still screwed up and have a long way to go in my mind.
In the context you mention, the word mob is usually understood to mean: "a large crowd of people, especially one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence"
With this understanding of the word, using the phrase "the internet mob" seems quite negatively loaded. Consider the context of companies harming their users in ways that may not be obvious to everyday people: I, for one, want people organizing to get the word out.
It is still important to apologize so that potential or previous users can begin to form an opinion on whether or not a company can even attempt to earn their trust back. Of course an apology does not erase Triplebyte's actions, but I think that it is possible the CEO truly did lose sight of his goals and become removed from the user. The section about his experience job searching during the recession seems genuine.
Companies are becoming more sterile and calculated, and perhaps statistically issuing an apology has no impact on user retention, but I for one am glad there is still some humanity to be found even if it's a hollow gesture.
Publicly taking responsibility and acknowledging mistakes can be a powerful tool in changing. Because of this apology, I will at least monitor Triplebyte's progress to see if significant structural changes are made to keep a decision like this from being made, instead of not even giving them a chance to gain back my trust. Their actions will tell whether this apology is genuine or not.
Uh, you say this like an apology is always sufficient. It isn't. If you break the trust in a relationship and damage that relationship, saying "sorry" isn't enough. Trust should be hard to regain. Your comment reflects why companies keep getting away with being terrible to consumers. It's like an abusive relationship - some kind words, a "heartfelt" apology,and everything is back to normal so they can abuse you some more. It's not enough if they don't take any steps to improve themselves and prevent this behavior from happening again. Trust can be regained over time by repeatedly doing the right thing. "Sorry" just doesn't cut it.
The expectation is not receiving more apologies from companies, it is companies learning from screw-ups like this and not trying to pull off stunts like this in the first place.
I think what the company wants is to recognize their mistake.
Users can still see that... and be worried about how they came to the inital decision.
None of that should influence if you do or don't apologize.
An apology is a company's best shot at damage control after a PR disaster. A well crafted one has obvious benefits in that it might win some people back, as can be seen from the people defending Triplebyte in this very thread.
Just because it doesn't work for everybody doesn't make it not worth doing.
FWIW the apology doesn't do jack shit for me.