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Hi folks - I'm a PM at Triplebyte who recently inherited this part of our site. You're absolutely right that this is a dark pattern, but it's not a current one

Hi folks - I'm a PM at Triplebyte who recently inherited this part of our site. You're absolutely right that this is a dark pattern, but it's not a current one - it's the echo of the dark pattern we screwed up on last year. If you hid your profile at the time, prior to last year's thread and our response to it, the maximum duration was one year (and yes, this was a really terrible idea among the other really-terrible-ideas that were called out at the time). But we changed that last year during our internal response. Hiding your profile indefinitely on our current site does in fact hide it indefinitely, and has ever since it was added as an option. (see https://imgur.com/n5e4CMB https://imgur.com/n5e4CMB - and just to be clear this is my personal prod-testing account, not an actual person whose profile I screenshotted) What happened here is that if you had hidden your profile just before we added the indefinite option, you were caught by the old dark pattern, which only let you hide it for up to a year. (And so, a year later, we're correctly informing you that it is now visible again.) We fixed the site at the time so that no one would newly be caught in this pattern, but what we failed to do was retroactively change the setting for people who'd selected 'one year' prior to that point. This was a genuine oversight, and we'll fix it. I need to speak to our engineering team to make sure we can actually do so, but my immediate plan is to effectively just make the indefinite hiding retroactive by assuming anyone who set it to the max last year wanted that. In any case, it will get fixed one way or another - I was as pissed as anyone here by last year's events and have no intention of leaving y'all high and dry.

mgsouth 5y ago
This has got to be one of the best mea culpas I've seen in a long, long time. If anyone internal gives you heat, you can tell them that, for this current non-client, it's actually moved Tripplebyte from "never in a million years" to "hmm, maybe I'll look into them." Being brutally honest makes the difference.
- akersten 5y ago
  This actually definitely moved it to "not in a million years" for me. What kind of clown show engineering team makes this kind of oversight? They knew there were profiles that would be part of the old 12-month delay feature (and if they didn't know about this feature that also speaks volumes about their internal knowledge of their own product) and neglected to fix it or notify them about their new options. What else are they neglecting? This is not a weird edge case or a nobody-could-have-caught this. This should have been obvious and come up immediately in the "how are we thoroughly addressing this dark pattern" root-cause.
  - hvdijk 5y ago
    This is something that can happen even if everybody is aware of the problem. We don't know what their internal structure looks like, but in enough places I've worked, if something like this would happen, it would be clear that something needs to be done, but it would also be everybody thinking it's someone else's responsibility to do it, so the end result is that it doesn't get done until someone notices the problem again after it should have already been addressed. That's bad, but not "not in a million years" bad, in my opinion.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    The question is more like 'clown show, or evil clown show?' If you think the former is uniquely horrible, you've not run into the latter :)
  - javajosh 5y ago
    The world is much worse if we don't let people correct their mistakes.
    - akersten 5y ago
      This now marks the 2nd time we are "letting" this company fix the same mistake, and it gets harder to assume good faith when the same issue crops up repeatedly. Calling out poor engineering is not prohibiting them from fixing it. It's calling the bluff on "oopsie woopsie a privacy issue again, silly us," for a company whose primary KPI is public profile engagement. The more things like this happen, the less they look like mistakes.
      - kordlessagain 5y ago
        > The more things like this happen, the less they look like mistakes. That's a fallacy and being kind to humans is hard.
      - kodah 5y ago
        It's taken me a long time to understand this, but sometimes the single mistake is something that leads to a cavalcade of mistakes. That could be putting a burned out person in the review pipeline who greenlights everything, it could be an overzealous engineer trying to make a name for themselves with retention and engagement, etc... As pointed out earlier, we do need to let people make mistakes, and often their paths will appear to be non-linear. I struggle with this too, but a world that doesn't understand that is much worse.
ratherbefuddled 5y ago
This is a good response. Your CEO should read it and learn from it - as far as I recall his handling of the response to the incident last year was nothing short of abysmal.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- splonk 5y ago
  After this reminder, I remembered his initial response. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280137 He's since walked that back a bit (see other comments in his profile) , but personally I tend not to give someone the benefit of the doubt after they get shit on for such a terrible response. (As a somewhat related note, people I know who have tried sourcing through Triplebyte were unimpressed with their candidates. No personal experience myself. I'm also told their cringey reddit ads had really good conversion, which feeds a narrative I'd be happy to believe.)
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Having been sourced through Triplebyte (or rather, not sourced through Triplebyte by any company at all), I’m inclined to agree.
miclill 5y ago
What is your plan to prevent things similar to this of happening in the future?
- rachofsunshine 5y ago
  Well, in this case it mostly didn't happen in the future - most of it happened last May. Our failure to catch it recently was a mistake, but the root error was building it that way in the first place. Still, I take your point. After last year's snafu, we had a company-wide retro to discuss what had happened. It lasted a couple of hours, during which several people (including myself) were pretty blunt about what we thought. I don't want to get into a complete postmortem here, if only because it would make this post require ten paragraphs of niche internal culture context, but the biggest problem was that we had an internal communication breakdown. Many people who were uncomfortable with what we were doing, and who could have predicted the public response, did not feel empowered to speak up about it. Not in the sense that they'd face backlash for doing so, but in the sense that they felt they'd be ignored. This was less true than they thought - had they all spoken up at once, it probably would have made a difference - but more true than it should have been. Since then, a number of people within Triplebyte (including Ammon, but also myself and various others) have made an effort to create space for those kinds of concerns. One of our defining traits as an organization is that we're very good at creating coherent internal narratives. Everyone knows what we're doing and why. But the flip side of that is that in the effort to create clarity, we sometimes run over inconvenient details like "wait isn't that a terrible idea". That means that to avoid problems like last year's, we need to be explicit and deliberate in actively seeking out dissent about what we're doing, especially from people who are not the very assertive strong personalities that tend to show up in leadership. That doesn't mean that dissent is always right - strategic decisions are difficult and complicated, people do sometimes lack the visibility to see why they're made, and in a room of fifty people there's always going to be some disagreement - but it costs us very little to listen to it and (as we learned last year) can cost us dearly when we don't. (Actually, as I was preparing to submit this post, one of our engineering leads pinged me on Slack to suggest ways we could avoid mistakes of the kind that spawned this thread - TLDR, build less automated shit that we can forget about until it bites us.) I realize this reply is a little bit nonspecific ("make space for"? what does that even mean?), but that's the nature of solving a culture problem. You're necessarily wrestling with subtle cues and unspoken assumptions rather than with a thing where you can go "ah, yes, we just need to change step 2a of our product development process". But for what it's worth, I think we've gotten better about making sure we consider how people feel about what we're doing, and we've avoided some potential bad decisions in the year since then as a result.
jiofih 5y ago
If the feature was only added after the backlash when everyone scrambled to hide their profiles, it amounts to nothing more than a “let’s try again next year”. A very convenient “honest mistake”. If that’s not the case, can you share the percentage of profiles that will be turned public as of now?
- rachofsunshine 5y ago
  As of now, none. We disabled the job that would re-enable profiles at the end of that snooze period until we have a more permanent fix.

mgsouth 5y ago

This has got to be one of the best mea culpas I've seen in a long, long time. If anyone internal gives you heat, you can tell them that, for this current non-client, it's actually moved Tripplebyte from "never in a million years" to "hmm, maybe I'll look into them." Being brutally honest makes the difference.

akersten 5y ago
This actually definitely moved it to "not in a million years" for me. What kind of clown show engineering team makes this kind of oversight? They knew there were profiles that would be part of the old 12-month delay feature (and if they didn't know about this feature that also speaks volumes about their internal knowledge of their own product) and neglected to fix it or notify them about their new options. What else are they neglecting? This is not a weird edge case or a nobody-could-have-caught this. This should have been obvious and come up immediately in the "how are we thoroughly addressing this dark pattern" root-cause.
- hvdijk 5y ago
  This is something that can happen even if everybody is aware of the problem. We don't know what their internal structure looks like, but in enough places I've worked, if something like this would happen, it would be clear that something needs to be done, but it would also be everybody thinking it's someone else's responsibility to do it, so the end result is that it doesn't get done until someone notices the problem again after it should have already been addressed. That's bad, but not "not in a million years" bad, in my opinion.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  The question is more like 'clown show, or evil clown show?' If you think the former is uniquely horrible, you've not run into the latter :)
- javajosh 5y ago
  The world is much worse if we don't let people correct their mistakes.
  - akersten 5y ago
    This now marks the 2nd time we are "letting" this company fix the same mistake, and it gets harder to assume good faith when the same issue crops up repeatedly. Calling out poor engineering is not prohibiting them from fixing it. It's calling the bluff on "oopsie woopsie a privacy issue again, silly us," for a company whose primary KPI is public profile engagement. The more things like this happen, the less they look like mistakes.
    - kordlessagain 5y ago
      > The more things like this happen, the less they look like mistakes. That's a fallacy and being kind to humans is hard.
    - kodah 5y ago
      It's taken me a long time to understand this, but sometimes the single mistake is something that leads to a cavalcade of mistakes. That could be putting a burned out person in the review pipeline who greenlights everything, it could be an overzealous engineer trying to make a name for themselves with retention and engagement, etc... As pointed out earlier, we do need to let people make mistakes, and often their paths will appear to be non-linear. I struggle with this too, but a world that doesn't understand that is much worse.

ratherbefuddled 5y ago

This is a good response. Your CEO should read it and learn from it - as far as I recall his handling of the response to the incident last year was nothing short of abysmal.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
splonk 5y ago
After this reminder, I remembered his initial response. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280137 He's since walked that back a bit (see other comments in his profile) , but personally I tend not to give someone the benefit of the doubt after they get shit on for such a terrible response. (As a somewhat related note, people I know who have tried sourcing through Triplebyte were unimpressed with their candidates. No personal experience myself. I'm also told their cringey reddit ads had really good conversion, which feeds a narrative I'd be happy to believe.)
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Having been sourced through Triplebyte (or rather, not sourced through Triplebyte by any company at all), I’m inclined to agree.

miclill 5y ago

What is your plan to prevent things similar to this of happening in the future?

rachofsunshine 5y ago
Well, in this case it mostly didn't happen in the future - most of it happened last May. Our failure to catch it recently was a mistake, but the root error was building it that way in the first place. Still, I take your point. After last year's snafu, we had a company-wide retro to discuss what had happened. It lasted a couple of hours, during which several people (including myself) were pretty blunt about what we thought. I don't want to get into a complete postmortem here, if only because it would make this post require ten paragraphs of niche internal culture context, but the biggest problem was that we had an internal communication breakdown. Many people who were uncomfortable with what we were doing, and who could have predicted the public response, did not feel empowered to speak up about it. Not in the sense that they'd face backlash for doing so, but in the sense that they felt they'd be ignored. This was less true than they thought - had they all spoken up at once, it probably would have made a difference - but more true than it should have been. Since then, a number of people within Triplebyte (including Ammon, but also myself and various others) have made an effort to create space for those kinds of concerns. One of our defining traits as an organization is that we're very good at creating coherent internal narratives. Everyone knows what we're doing and why. But the flip side of that is that in the effort to create clarity, we sometimes run over inconvenient details like "wait isn't that a terrible idea". That means that to avoid problems like last year's, we need to be explicit and deliberate in actively seeking out dissent about what we're doing, especially from people who are not the very assertive strong personalities that tend to show up in leadership. That doesn't mean that dissent is always right - strategic decisions are difficult and complicated, people do sometimes lack the visibility to see why they're made, and in a room of fifty people there's always going to be some disagreement - but it costs us very little to listen to it and (as we learned last year) can cost us dearly when we don't. (Actually, as I was preparing to submit this post, one of our engineering leads pinged me on Slack to suggest ways we could avoid mistakes of the kind that spawned this thread - TLDR, build less automated shit that we can forget about until it bites us.) I realize this reply is a little bit nonspecific ("make space for"? what does that even mean?), but that's the nature of solving a culture problem. You're necessarily wrestling with subtle cues and unspoken assumptions rather than with a thing where you can go "ah, yes, we just need to change step 2a of our product development process". But for what it's worth, I think we've gotten better about making sure we consider how people feel about what we're doing, and we've avoided some potential bad decisions in the year since then as a result.

jiofih 5y ago

If the feature was only added after the backlash when everyone scrambled to hide their profiles, it amounts to nothing more than a “let’s try again next year”. A very convenient “honest mistake”. If that’s not the case, can you share the percentage of profiles that will be turned public as of now?

rachofsunshine 5y ago
As of now, none. We disabled the job that would re-enable profiles at the end of that snooze period until we have a more permanent fix.