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I am not an active Triplebyte user, but I have an account and followed the thread(s). This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. They fucke

I am not an active Triplebyte user, but I have an account and followed the thread(s). This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. They fucked up, realized it and turned the ship around. They listened and that's what counts for me. They listened to the negative feedback and responded to it. Some comments around here are extremely negative of the whole situation. More negative than I think they deserve. They could've pushed through and ignored all the feedback they got. They didn't, and that's enough for to show the company and its CEO isn't utterly rotten. @ammon Thanks for listening and participating in the discussions on HN. You made a mistake, but the fact that you responded is enough for me to put my trust in Triplebyte in the future if the need arises.

willart4food 6y ago
> This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology Ever hang out with a sociopath/narcissist? They give the best heartfelt apologies, they almost make you feel guilty or something. And then, they do it again. And again. And then again some more. Only time will tell how "real" something is.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Do you have any evidence @ammon is a sociopath/narcissist?
- moreaccountspls 6y ago
  You're getting downvoted, but you're 100% correct. Let's be real here. This guy's business went to shit because of the pandemic, and he's panicing that he's going to get kicked out of the cool kids VC club. Then he made a big strategic boo boo to try to stay in the club, and laid on a bunch of rationalizations why that wasn't the case last week. Now, he realizes he's doubly fucked, and got a PR firm to help him do damage control. Which honestly is fine to me. I don't care one way or the other. It's just funny to see people contort to not see the obvious.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  Ever hang out with a sociopath/narcissist? They give the best heartfelt apologies, they almost make you feel guilty or something. Not sure I agree with that. There's a very obvious example of clinical narcissism that we frequently hear about these days who seems to be a strong counterexample, in that they have never gone on record apologizing or taking responsibility for anything, even when doing so would be a clear, unambiguous winning move. It's usually perilous to diagnose other people with psychiatric conditions over the Internet, and I don't think the case can be made for the Triplebyte CEO.
tmpz22 6y ago
Even the greatest of apologies is not a time machine that will completely undue what happened. A C-level/director-level team pushed out a massively privacy violating policy with zero feedback in an effort to compete against an incumbent company (LinkedIn) on a Friday afternoon. It reeks of they-raised-too-much-money-and-now-have-to-do-BIG-things syndrome and would seriously discourage me as either a user or enterprise customer, as if the AI/machine-learning BULLSHIT didn't already do that. They're a recruiting company that took a sucker punch with CV-19 and effectively tried to sell their user data as a get out of jail free card. The saving grace is that LI Recruiter is a trash product (for years...) and they could probably eek out a consumer net-good by bringing more competition to the market, if only they went about it the right way.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  People screw up. It happens. I accept the apology.
  - rammy1234 6y ago
    Really even if it’s a bank or a financial entity. Here it is privacy
  - atoav 6y ago
    You are right, and the apology sounds genuine, yet my feeling as someone working in IT myself is that their culture cannot be one that values privacy. If your users entrust you with their information deciding about what to throw away, what to keep, what needs to be anomyized, what private and what public is literally why people would trust you. It can happen, but if it does maybe you are the wrong person for the job. The question really is: in what kind of mode would you have to operate in order to forget that you users might want to have a say in the publication of their data? That is like a restaurant waiter forgetting to ask people what they want and bringing them a single random things instead.
    - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
      For myself, I don't expect corporations to be paragons of virtue. I just try support the ones that are less screwed up. Everything is flawed. If you don't accept that, honestly ask yourself if you could build something bigger than just yourself that didn't have to make compromises you'd rather not make. Every company that can help me find work is flawed, and I don't wanna start my own company any time soon. Heck, I am flawed. The best I can do is better than nothing and worse than perfect.
tikthot 6y ago
> Some comments around here are extremely negative of the whole situation. More negative than I think they deserve People would have gotten laid-off to this. The dark patterns are just cherry on top. The negativity is well deserved.
- photonios 6y ago
  The negativity towards to original announcement of making profiles public was deserved. For me, the negativity towards the CEO's apology and cancelling the feature is not. Everyone makes mistakes and if nobody would be willing to look past that, then we'd never get anywhere.
  - treis 6y ago
    It would have gone over a lot better if he didn't spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it. And it would have gone over a lot better if he was honest about what happened. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and he's all "was that wrong? Should I not have done that?". They knew exactly what they were doing and calculated that it was worth it.
    - photonios 6y ago
      I can see how that conclusion gets drawn. Any new feature that is announced can be met with some negativity. Sometimes it just ends up working despite that. It is not surprising to me that at first, they tried to defend their plans. It probably took a while for the backslash to sink in and their own opinions to change. I wouldn't expect every company, even ones that target HN's primary audience to turn everything around right away because of an angry thread within a few hours. They turned around in 2-3 days. Quick enough if you ask me. Disclaimer: I am really not in any way affiliated with Triplebyte. I am not even a user/customer. I just see a lot of negativity that I that I find unjustified.
      - treis 6y ago
        Nobody is mad about a "feature". They're mad because Triplebyte made sensitive private data public.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dnautics 6y ago
I was about to read this apology cynically but I think this is one of the best apologies I've ever read.
- bigiain 6y ago
  Sure. Great case study for the crisis management team who got it together over the long weekend. I wonder who they were? (And which other companies they work for that I should avoid?)
mosselman 6y ago
> This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. Even if it is heartfelt, I'd argue that if no alarm bells went off internally when they were discussing this feature, they are not the group of people to entrust with information such as this.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  They're undoubtedly going to have to do more to make things right in the future for those who have been following this issue, but it's at least refreshing to read what seems like a genuine apology. If we can take away anything from this, it's that Triplebyte actually understand why people were upset over this. I've read lots of apology emails where those in charge clearly either didn't understand the problem or they were dismissive towards their consumers.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    > If we can take away anything from this, it's that Triplebyte actually ... ... have a decent crisis management or PR firm on retainer. Which might be as much of a red flag as the initial fuckup...
    - xpe 6y ago
      > have a decent crisis management or PR firm on retainer. On what basis do you say they have a firm on retainer? I think many/most CEO's in this situation would make some calls to get advice on how to manage the situation -- I don't that is a red flag. If they don't take strong, concrete steps to mitigate these kinds of problems in the future, I will have less confidence and trust in their company.
  - ammon 6y ago
    We want to do something more concrete to guarantee user privacy going forward. A technical solution would be best. But short of that just a really strong, transparent commitment (that makes it easy to hold our feet to the fire if we screw it up again). But I could not get this together before the email today. I'm expecting to announce something in the next few weeks. I agree with people here when they say that actions are what really matter. I screwed up enough that I don't certainly don't think an apology alone makes it better.
dangerboysteve 6y ago
I disagree, the site is by developers for developers. Every developer on planet earth is well aware of privacy issues and the evil dark pattern of negative options. They knew this ahead of time, they took a gamble and shit hit the fan. The apology is not heartfelt or sincere, its just damage control. If they want to correct this mistake, turf the product manager or make a $25K donation to the EFF as an act of penance.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  If they make a $25k donation to the EFF, people will just ask “why not $50k?” or “why not pay me?” They can’t win against people who have their mind made up.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    You also can't win against companies/founders who have their mind made up about acceptable monetisation strategies and PII handling.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
Are you kidding? Pandering to covid-19 based urgency to release this feature? To put it much more politely than they deserve, this company is scum.
RandomBacon 6y ago
I'm in a different industry, but I read the HN thread about it a few days ago. In the CEO's comments, I saw a lot of 'I'm sorry you feel that way' type of apologies. I wrote that he should take responsibility for his own actions. Perhaps he read that and took it to heart. Perhaps he read that and realized it would sound better if it seemed like he took it to heart. Perhaps after the monumental PR screw-up, they hired a PR professional that wrote the apology. Who knows. Actions speak louder than words.
- mattm 6y ago
  They scrapped the feature so that's an action backing up his words.
  - rammy1234 6y ago
    Question is why was it there in the first place , so hideous, so late on Friday, one week time to update the profile. Why not more time when it concerns privacy.
    - RandomBacon 6y ago
      The fact that it got to this point I think would be concerning: a) No one thought this was a bad idea, or b) people who thought it was a bad idea didn't want to say it was a bad idea (why?), or c) people who did say it was a bad idea were not listened to (feedback was not acted on).
      - bigiain 6y ago
        I wonder if searching LinkedIn/Crunchbase might reveal a small team of people with experience in the technical recruiting space who've very recently left Triplebyte? That might be a good indicator that perhaps _they_ are the sort of people who might sensibly be trusted with job seeking personal information...
- japhyr 6y ago
  Your comment was the first thing I thought of when reading today's email. I hav worked most of my life as a secondary math and science teacher, and one of the things we teach all students about communication is "I statements." This email is full of sincere I statements. Whether it comes from reading your comment or just reflecting on the whole situation, this is about the best response I could have imagined a few days ago. It accepts responsibility, and shares the thinking and feeling behind getting so far from where they should be heading. I don't have a TripleByte account at the moment, but if I did I'd be open to what they do next. A CEO who has made a major mistake and taken sincere responsibility for it in my eyes is more trustworthy than many who just haven't made their first major public mistake yet. I know we need to watch them carefully for a while, but this is about the best statement I could imagine Ammon and TripleByte putting out right now.
moreaccountspls 6y ago
This is 100% a PR firm doing damage control. Go look at the other thread and tell me if this sounds like someone who's actually sorry, or sorry they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. edit: A lot of people in this thread are naive to the nature of sociapaths....
- dang 6y ago
  The cookie jar argument is fine, plenty of people are making it. The sociopath thing is over the line - you can't attack someone like that on HN. I'm happy to see that users rightly flagged it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. While I have you, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is also in the site guidelines. You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
  - moreaccountspls 6y ago
    Sure, I didn't realize the account thing was against the rules. I don't mind being flagged though. This is a [YC invested] company that just exhibited another example of the valley libertarian "the rules don't apply to me as long as I make money [or I get caught]" mentality. And hey, if that's what his priority is, more power to him! I personally think "sociopath" is an accurate label for that group of people, but sure, we can use a different term. How about objectivist? :)
    - dang 6y ago
      For me it falls into the IPD category (Internet Psychiatric Diagnosis), which is generally a no-go on HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20internet%20psychiatric%20diagnosis&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Thanks for responding so nicely about the accounts thing.
eloff 6y ago
So many companies issue an apology that's been composed by a PR team and edited by legal. It ends up being a wishy washy we admit nothing but care about our customers kind of statement. It's refreshing to see a real, detailed, apology. Just taking responsibility and owning each mistake of judgment or process along the way. My opinion of these guys actually went up a notch over this debacle.
737min 6y ago
I think what the critics are trying to say is that plenty of companies in the same space were not tempted to do this kind of stuff, despite all the pressures, and instead atayed committed to engineers’ privacy and putting candidates first.
cmroanirgo 6y ago
I'm like you, not actually a triplebyte customer, but have followed on hn. > They listened and that's what counts for me. The fact is that they didn't listen. The ceo ammon was here on hn clearly not listening and clearly not apologising. I would surmise that it's only due to a flood of account deletion requests that he started to notice... Add this proves one thing: on triplebyte you are the commodity and not the customer. Although it's unlikely I'd have ever used them, because of this fiasco you can be sure I'll be warning people away from the platform entirely, heartfelt apology or no. For my view to change he'll have to do a whole lot more than one email. He needs to change his way of thinking and one email is no way of proving that it's happened.
- talkingtab 6y ago
  +1 for "you are the commodity and not the customer"
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I totally agree with this. When I see corporate apologies I look for two things: 1. Actions speak louder than words. In this case, they are reversing what originally caused the outcry. 2. Did they look introspectively to try to really understand what made people mad in the first place. In this case I believe the CEO did. If we don't ever accept sincere apologies, then we're left with a world where there is never an incentive to apologize and improve. Frankly, seeing a taste of this in US politics with politicians doubling down on their past mistakes even when confronted with all evidence to the contrary - this is not a path I'd prefer to go down further.
- danieltillett 6y ago
  It is sad that you felt you had to use a throwaway account to post this totally reasonable opinion.
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    It’s a three year old account. Not everyone wants a HN account in their real name.
    - 9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
      Tell that to TripleByte, amirite?
    - danieltillett 6y ago
      This kind of missed my point. I know this is not something we are supposed to talk about, but I miss the old HN. The sad thing is these days I get more value reading the new post raw feed than the conversations on the front page.
      - lazyasciiart 6y ago
        I didn’t miss your point. Your point was not based in reality.
takeda 6y ago
I don't have an account there, and didn't even know about them a week ago, but based on what people posted I don't understand the drama. They want to make profiles pubic, like LinkedIn. The public profiles only contain subset of information from actual profile. Their FAQ page says that you can enable/disable sharing of your profile. They sent email to their users announcing the change and giving plenty of time to change settings. I don't see how could they do better than that.
- RandomBacon 6y ago
  Explanations in comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 Synopsis IIRC: Dark paterns, requiring ID to close account, 30 days to close account (and they quietly cancel the request if you log in), only 7 days notice, no permanent opt-out.
  - takeda 6y ago
    Ah, had no idea, thanks for explaining. So the real issue are those dark patterns, not that much making profiles public. If they would execute it right, I think majority of people wouldn't have problems with it.
remote_phone 6y ago
Ammon was also a cofounder of Socialcam, known for a ton of dark patterns. He employed similar techniques here. If he didn’t use so many dark patterns I could forgive him. He made the feature opt-out. He sent out the email on a Friday before Memorial Day weekend hoping no one would notice. He made the opt out button hard to find. He made the process of deleting accounts very hard, saying they required government ID and it would take 30 days. He knew exactly what he was doing. He made preparations for the blowback. That’s a fact otherwise he wouldn’t have taken these dark measures ahead of time. What he didn’t anticipate was getting caught and the level of vitriol he would receive. He honestly thinks he is smarter than us. I think a person can go to the well only so many times before we have to assume they are insincere and lying.
babesh 6y ago
That is foolish. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. It is too early to put trust in Triplebyte. The classic Silicon Valley playbook is to do something that crosses a boundary, get pushback, apologize, and later try again. Eventually it succeeds. Examples: - sharing all you financial transactions and passwords with a third party - suppressing posts for reasons - sharing private conversations with powerful parties Wait and let Triplebyte prove itself with real actions instead of just talk.
wendyshu 6y ago
If they're so sorry and they're listening to feedback why do they employ dark patterns such as requiring a government ID to delete an account?
9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
> They could've pushed through and ignored all the feedback they got. That’s a very charitable analysis of the situation. For all we know, this decision was motivated by internal KPIs that immediately reflected what a disaster this was. The whole situation reeks. Announcing on the Friday on a long weekend, the ceo defending it ardently in HN comments, the very deliberate decision to make it opt-in, the difficulty in disabling it. I mean, sure, this apology could be heartfelt. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a shady as hell thing to do, and a shady as hell way to do it. There are really only two ways this happened: A) The company’s culture and values are so maligned they actually, genuinely thought this was something that would excite users and go over well. B) They were 100% aware that this move was ethically dubious (at best), but were willing to take the risk. This is the much more likely path when you take into consideration how exactly they went about it. An apology can be heartfelt, but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether it undos the damage. And it can’t make people forget that TripleByte thought this was a good idea. That says so much more about the company and their integrity than any apology ever can.
- soared 6y ago
  Rofl chill out. There are a million shades of grey between your midnight black and Christian white. First, this was not shady as hell. Shady as hell would be selling your data to a 3rd party and never telling you. Not-shady is building a feature, seeing negative feedback, and cancelling that feature. It’s more than likely they had discussions and came to a decision through thoughtful discourse, rather than knowingly saying “fuck the user”.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  What's left me confused is one thing: if the significance of "default public" was missed, then what was the motivation for the previous warning email? It seems bizarre to suddenly email everyone "Hey folks, we're changing your default privacy settings next week" while simultaneously believing that it's... an insignificant thing?
  - syshum 6y ago
    My Guess, someone on the team understood the ramifications but others did not. They only thing they someone could get them to agree to is the email I have been in meetings where everyone in the meeting though "doing X will have no impact on anyone so there is not need to notify", where I knew 100% they were wrong but none of my arguments landed, my final statement was "well if it is not significant then the email should not matter either so why not just send it out just in case." These things do not happen in the vacuum, and while it is good the CEO is talking 100% of the blame, I can assure you the CEO had internal support and internal dissent for the feature.
toodles1628 6y ago
Do you believe the part where he said he didn't realize the consequences of being default public? That part is inconceivable to me. I believe he did know the issues and decided to proceed anyway to see how bad the public reaction would be. His actions and response are consistent with behavior. It sounds much better to say "I didn't think through it" than "I knew it was bad and wanted to try it anyway."
IanSanders 6y ago
Turning the ship around was just the only rational move from the business perspective. They thought they can pull it off, doubled down, found out they cannot. Too late now.
syshum 6y ago
>>Some comments around here are extremely negative of the whole situation. More negative than I think they deserve. Welcome to the new world of Cancel Culture, where no can ever be forgiven, excused or allowed to personally grow The second you make a mistake will that should mean your life is over... Society today is in a sorry state and I see no end in sight
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Do something shady, blows in your face, write heartfelt apology, repeat. Fine with you?

willart4food 6y ago

> This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology Ever hang out with a sociopath/narcissist? They give the best heartfelt apologies, they almost make you feel guilty or something. And then, they do it again. And again. And then again some more. Only time will tell how "real" something is.

colejohnson66 6y ago
Do you have any evidence @ammon is a sociopath/narcissist?
moreaccountspls 6y ago
You're getting downvoted, but you're 100% correct. Let's be real here. This guy's business went to shit because of the pandemic, and he's panicing that he's going to get kicked out of the cool kids VC club. Then he made a big strategic boo boo to try to stay in the club, and laid on a bunch of rationalizations why that wasn't the case last week. Now, he realizes he's doubly fucked, and got a PR firm to help him do damage control. Which honestly is fine to me. I don't care one way or the other. It's just funny to see people contort to not see the obvious.
CamperBob2 6y ago
Ever hang out with a sociopath/narcissist? They give the best heartfelt apologies, they almost make you feel guilty or something. Not sure I agree with that. There's a very obvious example of clinical narcissism that we frequently hear about these days who seems to be a strong counterexample, in that they have never gone on record apologizing or taking responsibility for anything, even when doing so would be a clear, unambiguous winning move. It's usually perilous to diagnose other people with psychiatric conditions over the Internet, and I don't think the case can be made for the Triplebyte CEO.

tmpz22 6y ago

Even the greatest of apologies is not a time machine that will completely undue what happened. A C-level/director-level team pushed out a massively privacy violating policy with zero feedback in an effort to compete against an incumbent company (LinkedIn) on a Friday afternoon. It reeks of they-raised-too-much-money-and-now-have-to-do-BIG-things syndrome and would seriously discourage me as either a user or enterprise customer, as if the AI/machine-learning BULLSHIT didn't already do that. They're a recruiting company that took a sucker punch with CV-19 and effectively tried to sell their user data as a get out of jail free card. The saving grace is that LI Recruiter is a trash product (for years...) and they could probably eek out a consumer net-good by bringing more competition to the market, if only they went about it the right way.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago
People screw up. It happens. I accept the apology.
- rammy1234 6y ago
  Really even if it’s a bank or a financial entity. Here it is privacy
- atoav 6y ago
  You are right, and the apology sounds genuine, yet my feeling as someone working in IT myself is that their culture cannot be one that values privacy. If your users entrust you with their information deciding about what to throw away, what to keep, what needs to be anomyized, what private and what public is literally why people would trust you. It can happen, but if it does maybe you are the wrong person for the job. The question really is: in what kind of mode would you have to operate in order to forget that you users might want to have a say in the publication of their data? That is like a restaurant waiter forgetting to ask people what they want and bringing them a single random things instead.
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    For myself, I don't expect corporations to be paragons of virtue. I just try support the ones that are less screwed up. Everything is flawed. If you don't accept that, honestly ask yourself if you could build something bigger than just yourself that didn't have to make compromises you'd rather not make. Every company that can help me find work is flawed, and I don't wanna start my own company any time soon. Heck, I am flawed. The best I can do is better than nothing and worse than perfect.

tikthot 6y ago

> Some comments around here are extremely negative of the whole situation. More negative than I think they deserve People would have gotten laid-off to this. The dark patterns are just cherry on top. The negativity is well deserved.

photonios 6y ago
The negativity towards to original announcement of making profiles public was deserved. For me, the negativity towards the CEO's apology and cancelling the feature is not. Everyone makes mistakes and if nobody would be willing to look past that, then we'd never get anywhere.
- treis 6y ago
  It would have gone over a lot better if he didn't spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it. And it would have gone over a lot better if he was honest about what happened. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and he's all "was that wrong? Should I not have done that?". They knew exactly what they were doing and calculated that it was worth it.
  - photonios 6y ago
    I can see how that conclusion gets drawn. Any new feature that is announced can be met with some negativity. Sometimes it just ends up working despite that. It is not surprising to me that at first, they tried to defend their plans. It probably took a while for the backslash to sink in and their own opinions to change. I wouldn't expect every company, even ones that target HN's primary audience to turn everything around right away because of an angry thread within a few hours. They turned around in 2-3 days. Quick enough if you ask me. Disclaimer: I am really not in any way affiliated with Triplebyte. I am not even a user/customer. I just see a lot of negativity that I that I find unjustified.
    - treis 6y ago
      Nobody is mad about a "feature". They're mad because Triplebyte made sensitive private data public.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dnautics 6y ago

I was about to read this apology cynically but I think this is one of the best apologies I've ever read.

bigiain 6y ago
Sure. Great case study for the crisis management team who got it together over the long weekend. I wonder who they were? (And which other companies they work for that I should avoid?)

mosselman 6y ago

> This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. Even if it is heartfelt, I'd argue that if no alarm bells went off internally when they were discussing this feature, they are not the group of people to entrust with information such as this.

ravenstine 6y ago
They're undoubtedly going to have to do more to make things right in the future for those who have been following this issue, but it's at least refreshing to read what seems like a genuine apology. If we can take away anything from this, it's that Triplebyte actually understand why people were upset over this. I've read lots of apology emails where those in charge clearly either didn't understand the problem or they were dismissive towards their consumers.
- bigiain 6y ago
  > If we can take away anything from this, it's that Triplebyte actually ... ... have a decent crisis management or PR firm on retainer. Which might be as much of a red flag as the initial fuckup...
  - xpe 6y ago
    > have a decent crisis management or PR firm on retainer. On what basis do you say they have a firm on retainer? I think many/most CEO's in this situation would make some calls to get advice on how to manage the situation -- I don't that is a red flag. If they don't take strong, concrete steps to mitigate these kinds of problems in the future, I will have less confidence and trust in their company.
- ammon 6y ago
  We want to do something more concrete to guarantee user privacy going forward. A technical solution would be best. But short of that just a really strong, transparent commitment (that makes it easy to hold our feet to the fire if we screw it up again). But I could not get this together before the email today. I'm expecting to announce something in the next few weeks. I agree with people here when they say that actions are what really matter. I screwed up enough that I don't certainly don't think an apology alone makes it better.

dangerboysteve 6y ago

I disagree, the site is by developers for developers. Every developer on planet earth is well aware of privacy issues and the evil dark pattern of negative options. They knew this ahead of time, they took a gamble and shit hit the fan. The apology is not heartfelt or sincere, its just damage control. If they want to correct this mistake, turf the product manager or make a $25K donation to the EFF as an act of penance.

colejohnson66 6y ago
If they make a $25k donation to the EFF, people will just ask “why not $50k?” or “why not pay me?” They can’t win against people who have their mind made up.
- bigiain 6y ago
  You also can't win against companies/founders who have their mind made up about acceptable monetisation strategies and PII handling.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

Are you kidding? Pandering to covid-19 based urgency to release this feature? To put it much more politely than they deserve, this company is scum.

RandomBacon 6y ago

I'm in a different industry, but I read the HN thread about it a few days ago. In the CEO's comments, I saw a lot of 'I'm sorry you feel that way' type of apologies. I wrote that he should take responsibility for his own actions. Perhaps he read that and took it to heart. Perhaps he read that and realized it would sound better if it seemed like he took it to heart. Perhaps after the monumental PR screw-up, they hired a PR professional that wrote the apology. Who knows. Actions speak louder than words.

mattm 6y ago
They scrapped the feature so that's an action backing up his words.
- rammy1234 6y ago
  Question is why was it there in the first place , so hideous, so late on Friday, one week time to update the profile. Why not more time when it concerns privacy.
  - RandomBacon 6y ago
    The fact that it got to this point I think would be concerning: a) No one thought this was a bad idea, or b) people who thought it was a bad idea didn't want to say it was a bad idea (why?), or c) people who did say it was a bad idea were not listened to (feedback was not acted on).
    - bigiain 6y ago
      I wonder if searching LinkedIn/Crunchbase might reveal a small team of people with experience in the technical recruiting space who've very recently left Triplebyte? That might be a good indicator that perhaps _they_ are the sort of people who might sensibly be trusted with job seeking personal information...
japhyr 6y ago
Your comment was the first thing I thought of when reading today's email. I hav worked most of my life as a secondary math and science teacher, and one of the things we teach all students about communication is "I statements." This email is full of sincere I statements. Whether it comes from reading your comment or just reflecting on the whole situation, this is about the best response I could have imagined a few days ago. It accepts responsibility, and shares the thinking and feeling behind getting so far from where they should be heading. I don't have a TripleByte account at the moment, but if I did I'd be open to what they do next. A CEO who has made a major mistake and taken sincere responsibility for it in my eyes is more trustworthy than many who just haven't made their first major public mistake yet. I know we need to watch them carefully for a while, but this is about the best statement I could imagine Ammon and TripleByte putting out right now.

moreaccountspls 6y ago

This is 100% a PR firm doing damage control. Go look at the other thread and tell me if this sounds like someone who's actually sorry, or sorry they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. edit: A lot of people in this thread are naive to the nature of sociapaths....

dang 6y ago
The cookie jar argument is fine, plenty of people are making it. The sociopath thing is over the line - you can't attack someone like that on HN. I'm happy to see that users rightly flagged it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. While I have you, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is also in the site guidelines. You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- moreaccountspls 6y ago
  Sure, I didn't realize the account thing was against the rules. I don't mind being flagged though. This is a [YC invested] company that just exhibited another example of the valley libertarian "the rules don't apply to me as long as I make money [or I get caught]" mentality. And hey, if that's what his priority is, more power to him! I personally think "sociopath" is an accurate label for that group of people, but sure, we can use a different term. How about objectivist? :)
  - dang 6y ago
    For me it falls into the IPD category (Internet Psychiatric Diagnosis), which is generally a no-go on HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20internet%20psychiatric%20diagnosis&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Thanks for responding so nicely about the accounts thing.

eloff 6y ago

So many companies issue an apology that's been composed by a PR team and edited by legal. It ends up being a wishy washy we admit nothing but care about our customers kind of statement. It's refreshing to see a real, detailed, apology. Just taking responsibility and owning each mistake of judgment or process along the way. My opinion of these guys actually went up a notch over this debacle.

737min 6y ago

I think what the critics are trying to say is that plenty of companies in the same space were not tempted to do this kind of stuff, despite all the pressures, and instead atayed committed to engineers’ privacy and putting candidates first.

cmroanirgo 6y ago

I'm like you, not actually a triplebyte customer, but have followed on hn. > They listened and that's what counts for me. The fact is that they didn't listen. The ceo ammon was here on hn clearly not listening and clearly not apologising. I would surmise that it's only due to a flood of account deletion requests that he started to notice... Add this proves one thing: on triplebyte you are the commodity and not the customer. Although it's unlikely I'd have ever used them, because of this fiasco you can be sure I'll be warning people away from the platform entirely, heartfelt apology or no. For my view to change he'll have to do a whole lot more than one email. He needs to change his way of thinking and one email is no way of proving that it's happened.

talkingtab 6y ago
+1 for "you are the commodity and not the customer"

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I totally agree with this. When I see corporate apologies I look for two things: 1. Actions speak louder than words. In this case, they are reversing what originally caused the outcry. 2. Did they look introspectively to try to really understand what made people mad in the first place. In this case I believe the CEO did. If we don't ever accept sincere apologies, then we're left with a world where there is never an incentive to apologize and improve. Frankly, seeing a taste of this in US politics with politicians doubling down on their past mistakes even when confronted with all evidence to the contrary - this is not a path I'd prefer to go down further.

danieltillett 6y ago
It is sad that you felt you had to use a throwaway account to post this totally reasonable opinion.
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  It’s a three year old account. Not everyone wants a HN account in their real name.
  - 9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
    Tell that to TripleByte, amirite?
  - danieltillett 6y ago
    This kind of missed my point. I know this is not something we are supposed to talk about, but I miss the old HN. The sad thing is these days I get more value reading the new post raw feed than the conversations on the front page.
    - lazyasciiart 6y ago
      I didn’t miss your point. Your point was not based in reality.

takeda 6y ago

I don't have an account there, and didn't even know about them a week ago, but based on what people posted I don't understand the drama. They want to make profiles pubic, like LinkedIn. The public profiles only contain subset of information from actual profile. Their FAQ page says that you can enable/disable sharing of your profile. They sent email to their users announcing the change and giving plenty of time to change settings. I don't see how could they do better than that.

RandomBacon 6y ago
Explanations in comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 Synopsis IIRC: Dark paterns, requiring ID to close account, 30 days to close account (and they quietly cancel the request if you log in), only 7 days notice, no permanent opt-out.
- takeda 6y ago
  Ah, had no idea, thanks for explaining. So the real issue are those dark patterns, not that much making profiles public. If they would execute it right, I think majority of people wouldn't have problems with it.

remote_phone 6y ago

Ammon was also a cofounder of Socialcam, known for a ton of dark patterns. He employed similar techniques here. If he didn’t use so many dark patterns I could forgive him. He made the feature opt-out. He sent out the email on a Friday before Memorial Day weekend hoping no one would notice. He made the opt out button hard to find. He made the process of deleting accounts very hard, saying they required government ID and it would take 30 days. He knew exactly what he was doing. He made preparations for the blowback. That’s a fact otherwise he wouldn’t have taken these dark measures ahead of time. What he didn’t anticipate was getting caught and the level of vitriol he would receive. He honestly thinks he is smarter than us. I think a person can go to the well only so many times before we have to assume they are insincere and lying.

babesh 6y ago

That is foolish. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. It is too early to put trust in Triplebyte. The classic Silicon Valley playbook is to do something that crosses a boundary, get pushback, apologize, and later try again. Eventually it succeeds. Examples: - sharing all you financial transactions and passwords with a third party - suppressing posts for reasons - sharing private conversations with powerful parties Wait and let Triplebyte prove itself with real actions instead of just talk.

wendyshu 6y ago

If they're so sorry and they're listening to feedback why do they employ dark patterns such as requiring a government ID to delete an account?

9935c101ab17a66 6y ago

> They could've pushed through and ignored all the feedback they got. That’s a very charitable analysis of the situation. For all we know, this decision was motivated by internal KPIs that immediately reflected what a disaster this was. The whole situation reeks. Announcing on the Friday on a long weekend, the ceo defending it ardently in HN comments, the very deliberate decision to make it opt-in, the difficulty in disabling it. I mean, sure, this apology could be heartfelt. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a shady as hell thing to do, and a shady as hell way to do it. There are really only two ways this happened: A) The company’s culture and values are so maligned they actually, genuinely thought this was something that would excite users and go over well. B) They were 100% aware that this move was ethically dubious (at best), but were willing to take the risk. This is the much more likely path when you take into consideration how exactly they went about it. An apology can be heartfelt, but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether it undos the damage. And it can’t make people forget that TripleByte thought this was a good idea. That says so much more about the company and their integrity than any apology ever can.

soared 6y ago
Rofl chill out. There are a million shades of grey between your midnight black and Christian white. First, this was not shady as hell. Shady as hell would be selling your data to a 3rd party and never telling you. Not-shady is building a feature, seeing negative feedback, and cancelling that feature. It’s more than likely they had discussions and came to a decision through thoughtful discourse, rather than knowingly saying “fuck the user”.
mehrdadn 6y ago
What's left me confused is one thing: if the significance of "default public" was missed, then what was the motivation for the previous warning email? It seems bizarre to suddenly email everyone "Hey folks, we're changing your default privacy settings next week" while simultaneously believing that it's... an insignificant thing?
- syshum 6y ago
  My Guess, someone on the team understood the ramifications but others did not. They only thing they someone could get them to agree to is the email I have been in meetings where everyone in the meeting though "doing X will have no impact on anyone so there is not need to notify", where I knew 100% they were wrong but none of my arguments landed, my final statement was "well if it is not significant then the email should not matter either so why not just send it out just in case." These things do not happen in the vacuum, and while it is good the CEO is talking 100% of the blame, I can assure you the CEO had internal support and internal dissent for the feature.

toodles1628 6y ago

Do you believe the part where he said he didn't realize the consequences of being default public? That part is inconceivable to me. I believe he did know the issues and decided to proceed anyway to see how bad the public reaction would be. His actions and response are consistent with behavior. It sounds much better to say "I didn't think through it" than "I knew it was bad and wanted to try it anyway."

IanSanders 6y ago

Turning the ship around was just the only rational move from the business perspective. They thought they can pull it off, doubled down, found out they cannot. Too late now.

syshum 6y ago

>>Some comments around here are extremely negative of the whole situation. More negative than I think they deserve. Welcome to the new world of Cancel Culture, where no can ever be forgiven, excused or allowed to personally grow The second you make a mistake will that should mean your life is over... Society today is in a sorry state and I see no end in sight

KingOfCoders 6y ago

Do something shady, blows in your face, write heartfelt apology, repeat. Fine with you?