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HN is associated with a startup incubator, and every startup I've seen has engaged in some measure of shady growth hacking. Once you start blurring the lines, y
by chillacy 6y ago
HN is associated with a startup incubator, and every startup I've seen has engaged in some measure of shady growth hacking. Once you start blurring the lines, you open yourself to stuff like this.
That said though I can see how this specific case happened just looking at incentives. Startups are strapped for people, and offboarding is sadly one of the first things to get dropped, because it doesn't directly increase revenue (and may even decrease retention).
Even more cynically I wouldn't be surprised if there was a time where this warning wasn't even shown at all and presentations just went back to being public because the has_active_subscription field returned false.
- admax88q 6y agoThis is more malicious than just not focusing on offboarding. The easiest implementation would be to just delete the user account and abandon the data, slightly more effort would be to delete the data. Making it public with the legal disclaimers and all that takes effort and commitment.
- chillacy 6y agoCould very well be, I wasn't there so I can't say. I have seen good people do bad things out of negligence that later gets attributed to malice on the internet when it gets discussed. People always drift towards malicious intent but I think it's uniquely terrifying that "good" people can do bad things when the incentives are misaligned, or they aren't thinking end to end, if only because it's an opportunity to admit that we ourselves might make a similar mistake, so we should be vigilant.