
A Message to Our Users - casca
https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/
======
Msurrow
I think thats fair. All of us who have written and deployed software know that
a change in the onboarding/new users rate like this would be a punch in the
face that would knock any SW team on its ass. And it would take anyone a few
days to get back up.

The important part is the leaderships reaction to the situation. Compare to
something like Boeing. Zoom acknowledges facts, takes responsibilty and starts
fixing things. Boeings reaction to its product killing hundreds of people was
“Lol user error. RTFM”. That is (apparently) what acceptable leadership can
look like..

Any sw product has issues. The question is what the company does about it

~~~
Nullabillity
Err, no. It would be understandable if their servers buckled under the load or
something. Zoom's blatant disregard for their users' security and privacy is
unacceptable regardless of whether they have 5 or 5 million users.

> Any sw product has issues. The question is what the company does about it

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20389812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20389812),
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20390755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20390755)

~~~
xenonite
And more recently, Zoom Is Leaking Peoples' Email Addresses and Photos to
Strangers

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753675)

~~~
ninkendo
I let out an audible “wow” upon reading this. This is absolutely bone-headed
and I have no idea how they thought automatically grouping members by their
email domain name was a good idea.

You gotta figure, as soon as you starting writing a blacklist of “common”
domains like gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc, your immediate thought should
probably be “wait, maybe we’re doing this wrong.”

~~~
planb
You’re right but I absolutely see why they are doing this. When I saw all my
colleagues in the company list I immediately figured they only have the email
domain and I found it extremely useful to see whom I can contact without
explaining how zoom works. Privacy isn’t our most important concern right now,
it’s keeping the world running, and this “feature” helped me/us (if only just
a little bit) communicate more effectively.

~~~
luckylion
I don't mean to be overly snarky, but removing authentication from all
computers and servers would also help everyone (if only just a little bit) be
more effective. It's still a bad idea, crisis or not.

~~~
shadowgovt
Yep. And at the other end of the spectrum, never having users is the easiest
way to maintain user privacy and security.

------
crazygringo
Key section:

> _Over the next 90 days, we are committed to... Enacting a feature freeze,
> effectively immediately, and shifting all our engineering resources to focus
> on our biggest trust, safety, and privacy issues._

I see a lot of comments here claiming that this blog post is bland corporate
apologia, doesn't take responsibility, doesn't change anything.

But this seems like a pretty legit turnaround. Overall, they seem to be
addressing pretty much everything that's been brought up. They removed the
Facebook SDK, they removed attention tracking, they've clarified their
encryption policies in detail.

One commenter here is asking for more, for _punishment_ , another demands
their security team be fired. And I mean, if someone wants to try to sue Zoom
for misusing the term E2EE then go for it, but obviously Zoom can't "punish
itself" in a blog post, and pinning it on a few bad engineers feels like a
scapegoat.

This seems to be positive steps, folks. Genuinely not sure what more you could
be asking for from a regular for-profit business.

~~~
gizmo385
> One commenter here is asking for more, for punishment, another demands their
> security team be fired. And I mean, if someone wants to try to sue Zoom for
> misusing the term E2EE then go for it, but obviously Zoom can't "punish
> itself" in a blog post, and pinning it on a few bad engineers feels like a
> scapegoat.

A portion of the development community loves to talk about blameless post-
mortems and a blame-free culture until a tech company like Zoom does something
they don't like.

~~~
tprynn
I think it's generally a poor assumption to assume that any two internet
"crowds" are the same people. Some commenters care about X and some about Y
and we can almost never tell what the overlap between those groups is. The
hivemind is not as uniform as that.

~~~
jolmg
Well said, and it applies beyond just "internet" crowds. Some people think
whole nationalities work as uniform hiveminds.

------
gchokov
I am tired of reading such statements. They are like a playbook when things
get wrong.

Zoom had privacy and user invading issues years back. They didn't learn their
lesson back then with the MacOS installers, and continued to assure us they
are taking the "right steps".

My company have stopped using Zoom and we'll never go back.

~~~
laegooose
They admitted problems and deployed fixes. All while massively scaling during
pandemic.

I'm honestly curious, what could CEO say differently?

~~~
Nullabillity
None of the actual issues are related to scaling at all.

~~~
AgloeDreams
Bingo, they straight up lied about E2E, bypassed security features, sold user
info and hacked their way into self installing.

Plus blaming all the issues on consumer use cases is hilarious. That might
work for like a company that makes fiber lines for commercial deployments or
something However, it's like they forgot that their core video might be B2B,
but the client is almost always B2C and always has been. The fact that you are
forced to use the Zoom client/plugins to attend a Zoom meeting may make the
business case enterprise, but they have always been taking these horrible
stances on the client and harming normal people who can't choose to use
something else.

------
ken
Zoom has had major security issues for years, and they've always brushed them
off as not a big deal. This isn't an isolated incident.

If their position is now that the Zoom software was designed for corporate
users, e.g., that you're expected to only run it on your own VPN where you can
guarantee there's no malicious network traffic, then it should have "NOT FOR
CONSUMER USE" plastered all over it.

To me, this reads _exactly_ like "Lol user error", except there's no "M" to
"RTF" that ever said, for example, that its local web server stayed running
after uninstallation and could take control of your camera, or that "E2E" in
the Zoom docs doesn't mean the same thing as it means to the rest of the
industry.

There's no responsibility being taken here. Taking responsibility would be "We
fired all our 'security' people who told us we had best-of-breed security, and
hired some actual security experts to re-architect our system to provide
actual security for our users." What they did here is indistinguishable from
"We're sorry we got caught!" except in verbosity.

~~~
shadowgovt
> Zoom has had major security issues for years, and they've always brushed
> them off as not a big deal. This isn't an isolated incident.

But here's the operative question: were they wrong to set their priorities the
way they did? In this crisis, they're wildly popular, and part of that
popularity comes from optimizing for usability and advertising to close the
deals that got their product in front of enough people to be a "household
name" when everyone suddenly needed videoconferencing.

If people want security, GChat is built on top of Google's infrastructure, has
almost no outstanding security issues, and years of engineering behind making
it a quality product. And users don't care enough about security for that to
be the tool people are reaching for right now.

Business is an art, and that art is the art of making tradeoffs to meet users
halfway. And time and again, the product that thinks users need to be met
halfway at "it's secure" gets trounced by the ones who meet users halfway at
"It's usable."

> We fired all our 'security' people who told us we had best-of-breed security

Why, in a crisis, would you _start_ by firing the people who already know the
inside of your application, warts and all?

~~~
bostik
> _here 's the operative question: were they wrong to set their priorities the
> way they did?_

Yes. Let me ask this the other way, in a different context.

Say your company builds rapid-assembly prefab building components. You have
built the business on being supposedly greener than the competition, by using
natural materials where possible. All of a sudden there is a massive surge in
demand, and you find out that certain cost-cutting optimisations that used to
be merely mildly beneficial, actually provide a marketing edge.

Does it matter that your fire-proofing is a naturally occurring material?
Namely, asbestos?

~~~
shadowgovt
1) Is there a better fire-proofing alternative available, one that will work
as well and be as cost-effective to deploy?

2) Are we talking about 1990 (when the public actually cared, legal torts were
likely, and it was a huge hassle to sell a property that was known to have
asbestos) or 1890 (when in spite of evidence that asbestos may pose a health
risk, industry was full-speed-ahead on it because, hey, everything poses a
health risk, and lung cancer was of lower concern to the public than dying in
a fire)?

------
tobr
I struggle to understand why the sudden influx of new users would affect these
security problems in any way. OK, more people are affected, but the problems
are surely the same regardless of how many users they have.

To me it just comes across as an attempt to deliberately confuse the issue.

~~~
organsnyder
They address this specifically in the article:

> Dedicated journalists and security researchers have also helped to identify
> pre-existing ones.

Sure, you could translate that as "more eyeballs have uncovered our sloppy
security" if you'd like, but it doesn't strike me as dishonest.

~~~
jtdev
This is cunning PR diversionary bullshit.

~~~
edoceo
Not cunning; it's a low effort hand wave. The rest is true.

~~~
EForEndeavour
If a team of career PR folks meticulously iterating on the precise wording of
this message to frame the narrative in their favour doesn't count as "cunning"
to you, I don't know what would.

~~~
NateEag
I believe "cunning" is not about intent, but the action's effectiveness.

As an attempt to mislead or imply that there are no problems here, this is
pretty much a failure, and thus not at all cunning.

~~~
EForEndeavour
That feels backwards. One can certainly intend to be cunning!

~~~
NateEag
If you can intend and fail to be cunning, then the word's meaning must not be
defined by the subject's intent.

------
Quanttek
> "On March 29th, we updated our privacy policy to be more clear and
> transparent around what data we collect and how it is used – explicitly
> clarifying that we do not sell our users’ data, we have never sold user data
> in the past, and have no intention of selling users’ data going forward."

That is such a dishonest way of framing it. No one was really concerned
whether they would "sell" data. The issue was with the exorbitant amount of
data they collect and its analysis for commercial purposes, be it ads (which
doesn't involve selling data), targeted pricing or providing access to
corporate admins.

~~~
amiga_500
Surely as this comes from the FB lib zoom are not an outlier here? Why the
sudden pearl clutching at zoom when everyone is using facebook, google and any
other site that has facebook tracking built in?

~~~
AlexandrB
I work very hard to keep Facebook out of my life. I run an ad-blocker and I
don't log into my (inert) Facebook account outside of privacy mode (or a VM).
Unfortunately, I don't have a choice about using Zoom. So it sucks that I'm
effectively getting backdoored with this nonsense. Why is it OK to expose my
information to an advertising company like Facebook without asking for
permission first? Because everyone else does it?

~~~
amiga_500
agreed, I'm the same except i have no FB account.

I can't help but feel this sudden Zoom "panic" is coming from large (and
incompetent) tech companies who are not happy with an upstart.

------
pjfunk
"We didn't design for for scaling overnight" is different from "we did care
for security until we got caught"

However small or big, a company shouldn't be selling data without user
consent, shouldn't use terms end-to-end encryption while make otherwise
claims.

This behaviour should be punishable

~~~
piokoch
Facebook did that (e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal),
funny stuff they did to circumvent GDPR). And Who cared? There was some noise
in the media and that's all. Was Mark Zuckerberg punished? For me all this
Zoom bashing looks a bit as if those guys stepped on someone's toe, who does
not like the idea of having another competitor in the social media/online
advertising area.

------
seemslegit
This is "we are sorry for getting caught" changes-nothing nonpology.

The use of "end to end encryption" designation was no confusion, it was
deception - it is implausible that this could have been done accidentally or
as a result of a misunderstanding without engineers warning managers that this
is not how zoom works and being overridden in their objections to communicate
it as such.

They also double down on data collection. Disclosure does not establish
consent and "we do not sell data" is a red herring because data can still be
shared with third parties for business purposes against the interests of the
users without being overtly sold (not to mention with governments under
various "compelled cooperation" arrangements) and the entire policy can be
subject to retroactive change without recourse.

The fact that they were targeting organizations with IT support is irrelevant
except maybe to discredit the people within those organizations who
greenlighted Zoom.

The saddest part is that it is unlikely any of the competing corporate offers
are any better in any of those respect, but then they are not being actively
pumped these days.

~~~
jwr
> This is "we are sorry for getting caught" changes-nothing nonpology.

True, but I am still happy to see it. It shows that they got burned and that
they noticed and felt the burn. It remains to be seen how they follow up — I
will be watching closely.

~~~
seemslegit
People who care and have the time to spare might, but this is standard PR
crisis mitigation technique and the goal is to have a large mass of the users
thinking "ah, this was just a mistake made under pressure in crazy times, zoom
is ok now, still convenient".

------
shadowgovt
Zoom seems to be another example of the repeating pattern we seem to see from
web service software: if the product has good UX, people don't care about the
technical issues that aren't in their faces. At least, they don't care in any
tangible way like "They stop using the product."

Remember when Twitter was incredibly unstable? That was fine when it had only
ten thousand users. They had to fix it fast when it had a million. But the
thing is: that seems to be viable software practice (rush on features, forget
about the robustness and the corner cases) because it keeps working.

------
Nullabillity
"Oh no, it used to be alright that we are shady as hell, because, you see, we
never thought anyone would actually use our service!"

Give me a break..

------
tyingq
_" Removed the attendee attention tracker feature."_

Oh, I missed that one. [https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-
us/articles/115000538083-Atten...](https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-
us/articles/115000538083-Attendee-attention-tracking)

------
oandrei
I want to share my solution for remote collaboration and teaching:
[https://github.com/amkhlv/mathpump3](https://github.com/amkhlv/mathpump3)

Professor uses Wacom and Inkscape to draw a picture, which is incrementally
transmitted to students' computers. Students, those who have Wacom, may
interact. Or just watch. Transmission happens every time the svg file is
saved. Transmission requires a RabbitMQ server, which can be easily set up.
Basically, a class needs one person who knows Linux, to set up the server.

It is intended for scientific collaboration or teaching in small groups of
people. I am now using it for teaching my QFT class, although it only has 5
students. In principle, it should scale, but I have not tried it for large
groups...

Drawing with Wacom in Inkscape is a pleasure, once you get used to it. In some
sense, it is more convenient than using a physical blackboard. Although, some
training is needed...

~~~
soared
Awesome idea! Is there much overlap in the area where a professor has a wacom
and also has a student that knows linux?

------
fvdessen
The moral of the story is once again that focusing on user acquisition at all
costs is an effective strategy. MongoDB disregarded reliability, Youtube
disregarded copyright, Reddit faked comments, Facebook disregarded privacy.
Yet they were all ultimately successful. Could it have happened differently ?
Not so sure.

~~~
BostonFern
"Move fast and break things." I'm afraid getting there first is pretty much
imperative.

~~~
Loughla
Honestly, I don't understand why this site seems to hate Zoom so much. They're
doing what all of the large players have done in the past. Why aren't they
being congratulated for their success?

This is not meant to be snarky. They are literally living by the move fast and
break things motto. Growth at the expense of everything else to win the market
first, fix it second.

How are they not the golden child of SV right now?

~~~
kkarakk
It's just 2020 speaking, people outraged on the behalf of users who honestly
don't care and just want easy to use videochatting.

This is just a symptom of ycombinator becoming a more widely known social
network. All the malaises of social networks like pointless discussions about
morality without any concrete solutions are coming along with that.

~~~
divbzero
> _pointless discussions about morality without any concrete solutions_

The correct response to many moral issues is not to create concrete solutions,
but simply to stop people from doing bad things.

------
whatok
For anyone excusing any of this, Zoom is currently a 34bn dollar company.
There really are no "whoops, didn't expect to get this popular" excuses that
are legitimate for all of these issues; especially when none of these things
have to do with scaling and are instead just boneheaded design decisions.

~~~
Waterluvian
"34 billion" is the fake Silicon Valley price tag. And they get there by
rushing like a bunch of idiots to a hollow Hoover Dam of a product that looks
great to everyone from the outside.

~~~
whatok
Zoom is a public company. The CEO owns 4% of it.

------
cmcd
> "We want to start by apologizing for the confusion we have caused by
> incorrectly suggesting that Zoom meetings were capable of using end-to-end
> encryption. Zoom has always strived to use encryption to protect content in
> as many scenarios as possible, and in that spirit, we used the term end-to-
> end encryption."

Excerpt from their previous release above, only a few hours earlier.

Glad to hear they are starting to make improvements but waiting for public
backlash to fix issues is a bad sign.

------
jefftk
While I think Zoom has a lot of work to do from a security perspective,
overall I think we should be supportive: facilitating -- mostly for free! --
very low friction video calls between an enormous number of isolated people is
an incredible service.

------
nelsonic
What is a security focussed open source / self-hosted alternative to Zoom with
comparable UX?

~~~
jannemann
[https://jitsi.org/](https://jitsi.org/)

~~~
fsflover
[https://meet.jit.si](https://meet.jit.si)

------
kmtrowbr
December 2019: 10M daily participants. March 2020: 200M daily participants. A
sustained 20x spike in usage. And it’s still working! I think that’s amazing.

Think through this situation — 90,000 schools suddenly using Zoom, children
doing their classes. What is most important: option 1) it just works option 2)
it’s 100% secure

Imagine you were a member of Zoom's team, would you not be justified in
feeling proud right now?

~~~
enriquto
> Imagine you were a member of Zoom's team, would you not be justified in
> feeling proud right now?

It has nothing to do with scaling. The problem is the numerous anti-privacy
and anti-safety measures that they actively partook in. Those were no
"features missed out" due to rapid development. Those were anti-user features
purposefully developed in. This is what people are complaining about; and this
is what the zoom manifesto is shamefully trying to brush off as if they were
related to rapid development or to rapid scaling. If I was a member of the
zoom team (who hadn't actively participated in these features), I would be
extremely ashamed of my company for spoiling our success with these damaging
practices.

~~~
kmtrowbr
I have to believe the aim of these features was to make it easier for Zoom to
be installed and to "just work." I'm inclined to give them the benefit of a
doubt right now.

------
juliend2
I don't know exactly what is the main security issue right now, but as I
understand it, it's mostly related to this:
[https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/zoom-lets-
att...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/zoom-lets-attackers-
steal-windows-credentials-run-programs-via-unc-links/) (on Windows).

The windows changelog[1] doesn't talk about a version released on April 1st,
like the press release says[2].

So is the only way to mitigate that issue for non-techie users is to
deactivate the chat feature for all conversations?

[1] [https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201361953-New-
Upda...](https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201361953-New-Updates-for-
Windows)

[2] [https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-
our-u...](https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/)

------
Nevada-Smith
"Thousands of enterprises around the world have done exhaustive security
reviews of our user, network, and data center layers and confidently selected
Zoom for complete deployment."

Interesting that he would point out the failure of thousands of IT departments
around the world.

~~~
rchaud
that jumped out to me as well. I'm in a large org that uses Zoom, not company-
wide, but certainly in several departments. We have a SaaS questionnaire that
vendors need to submit for review as part of the procurement process.

With everything that's come out since (not just the iOS client issue), I'm
wondering how deep that questionnaire goes with regards to security concerns.

------
talkingtab
Zoom added the Facebook SDK. When they got caught they removed it. Great! But
what about a statement that they will provide a user-focused third-party
security assessment on a regular basis so that users know there are no other
issues?

People need transparency.

------
hyko
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it” -Warren
Buffet

They didn’t even bother to build up a reputation; hard to see how they’re
going to build respect for people’s privacy and security into their culture
now.

------
_pmf_
I find the whole ganging up against Zoom disgusting. Mac-fanbois-cum-security-
experts blaming Zoom for the deficiencies of a) their platform not having a
working native teleconferencing solution and b) their platforms arbitrary
installer policies.

Then there's the issue that Zoom is now suddenly responsible for the complete
lack of security awareness of teachers and middle managers who have never
before held online classes, and are publicly posting meeting credentials so
that everyone can join.

All, of course, while the while world is free loading (yes, "you are the
product, hurr durr"; great contribution).

------
Dowwie
I think we need to acknowledge the fact that Zoom, and its use of cloud infra,
took on 20x peak volume of 2019 within just a few months.

------
jasonv
I think this is a necessary move on their part.

And they obviously have the business and engineering talent to make a good
product (it's better than their competition, I'll grant).

But how much of their market share came because of some nefarious business and
technical practices?

Forgive and forget, 'cause "correction"?

------
ivanfon
Off topic, but it would be nice to mention Zoom in the title, it's pretty
ambiguous otherwise

------
lxe
> On March 27th, we took action to remove the Facebook SDK in our iOS client
> and have reconfigured it to prevent it from collecting unnecessary device
> information from our users.

Sounds like folks at Zoom take privacy and security related feedback pretty
seriously.

------
xenocyon
I'm pretty new to Zoom. It always seems to take me a while to get to the
option of using the web browser instead of the executable. Is there an easy
way (e.g. URL structure) to force the web-browser-meeting and skip the
download dialog?

~~~
xenocyon
Answering my own question: the URL to use to force using the web browser
instead of the download is: [http://zoom.us/wc/join/{your-meeting-
id}](http://zoom.us/wc/join/{your-meeting-id})

------
yalogin
Through this I learnt, for the first time, that they also send data to
Linkedin.

~~~
tonyaiken
That’s a enterprise integration, you can view participants’ LinkedIn profile
which is very helpful if implemented right.

[https://marketplace.zoom.us/apps/ex1KIG08R3-ctKCi65YePA](https://marketplace.zoom.us/apps/ex1KIG08R3-ctKCi65YePA)

~~~
rjacksonm1
>With Zoom's LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration, you’ll build connections
and instantly gain insights about your meeting participants.

Sounds pretty creepy. I assume participants have to opt into this?

------
rado
BS

------
jbverschoor
What a load of crap...

First, some background: our platform was built primarily for enterprise
customers – large institutions with full IT support

These new, mostly consumer use cases have helped us uncover unforeseen issues
with our platform

Never ever gonna use zoom.. I got rid of it a long time ago when I found out
about the malware...

------
oliwarner
Maaaan, the /wordpress/ in the URL really knocks home how slapdash this whole
operation is.

And this wasn't anything but an acknowledgement that they're not qualified to
produce the software they're distributing. They still don't even know what
they don't know.

~~~
alexpetralia
Do you really think they're not "qualified" to produce video conferencing
software? Does that seem like a reasonable statement? I am genuinely curious
if you think a public company with millions of users and fairly reliable
quality is not "qualified" to deliver its own product.

~~~
oliwarner
I'm genuinely curious if you think that company status, bank balance or number
of users translates into software quality.

I posit that Zoom has been right place, right price. Simple as that. The
software is demonstrably hot trash. Not just at client endpoints but
structurally.

~~~
detaro
Right place, right price, pretty-much flawlessly working video chats. The
latter point is just as important (there's a bunch of free video chat
products), and suggests it's not completely trash.

------
empressplay
I know this is banal but f __k these guys.

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here. You may not owe "these guys" better, but you owe
this community better if you're posting to it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
NKosmatos
A message in the right direction, but they need to solve the recent macOS
security issues. Let’s give them the time to (transparently) correct all the
recently reported issues.

~~~
laumars
It's a template PR / sales pitch talking about how great they are and how
they've had to adapt during the COVID-19 crisis (all of which aren't relevant
to the security and privacy complaints being made) and there's only a
boilerplate message about how they care about their users....and it's such a
generic message it could have been ripped out of any other correspondence sent
from any other company.

Nothing about that message came across as sincere.

Also one of the biggest core issues (their installer) was widely reported and
condemned last year (or was it the year before?) so these aren't all new
issues coming to light. In fact blaming the visibility of these problems to an
influx of new users (re COVID-19) is just dishonest.

~~~
ornornor
Because we’re technical and can smell the BS miles away. But a lot of the
people deciding whether to keep using zoom at their corporation aren’t
technical and it might be reassuring enough for them to keep using it. Not
saying that’s ok but here we are.

~~~
floatingatoll
“We’re technical” is no excuse for a pitchfork mob. I’m technical and HN’s
reply feels more like echo-chamber than a reasoned consideration of what they
said. Almost every comment as of now is people reacting to the tone and
dialect. It’s like there’s nothing to object to technically and so the mob has
turned their rage onto speech patterns.

~~~
laumars
> _It’s like there’s nothing to object to technically and so the mob has
> turned their rage onto speech patterns._

I’m usually the first to roll my eyes at such mobs but this case is different.
When you have a company that has a documented past of privacy and security
violations and then releases a letter saying “sorry about the new reported
problems but you wouldn’t have known about it if we weren’t so popular
lately,” you can hardly blame us for getting ranty. It just demonstrates that
fixing those problems was never a priority and thus that press release is
really just meaningless platitudes.

~~~
floatingatoll
I absolutely blame us for pitchfork mob behavior in the initial reply, even if
there’s a risk that Zoom is misbehaving intentionally. Theories about their
motivations are no excuse for this. There is _never_ an excuse for this. This
behavior is unprofessional of us, disrespectful of us, and makes HN look no
better than 4chan or Reddit to anyone who sees us doing so.

~~~
laumars
Which initial replies are we talking about? The one I wrote was literally just
calling out their statement as being generic, templated and “hogwash”. I don’t
see what’s disrespectful nor unprofessional about that.

As for other people’s comments, if others took it too far (I haven’t read the
majority other other comments since I came to this early and haven’t ventured
outside of my thread since, so you’ll have to excuse my if ignorance here)
then perhaps you should be taking that up with them rather than me?

In any case, I don’t appreciate being lumped as part of a “mob mentality”! My
own opinions are my own and not the product others.

------
hc91
Translation: "We are _SO_ sorry that we got caught and that you _feel this
way_ about us. Let's see if we can react to this situation fast enough before
everyone will start replacing us with alternatives that at least have a better
reputation." ... yeah, give me a break!

