What you wrote is that "the CEO’s strategy was to turn up here and criticise Google for not deindexing quickly enough".
The CEO replied to someone asking about the services they were working with and complained about Google taking longer than the others. Maybe we're reading his comment in a different way, but to me there's a big gap between what he did and having a "strategy" to blame Google.
Cloudflare's CTO (jgrahamc) was on that thread too and didn't spend his time criticising Google. He wasn't hiding or saying "look over there instead!".
So I don't see any strategy from the CEO, CTO or the company to criticise Google or to ignore the fact that CF had f'ed up. Pointing out that Google was slow to remove cached pages is, in my view, a valid criticism.
Now, if you said that they had a strategy to minimise the problem, then I'd agree with you.
What's the point of a strategy to criticise Google in that case? Are they criticising Google for no reason or to move some of the blame / direct people's anger at Google for keeping secrets online? In any case, you didn't use the word "blame" and it's my fault for interpreting your comment in this specific way.
I didn't see a "strategy" to criticise Google. There was ONE reply to someone asking about the "caches" they were working with. That reply listed the "caches" and complained about Google being too slow. That's it. I think we are stretching things a bit if we look at that comment and context, and conclude that the CEO's strategy was to criticise Google.
For someone getting very aggressive for words "being put in your mouth", you're not really paraphrasing that Cloudflare CEO very fairly.
He was specificity responding to someone complaining it's still in Google's cache, by stating that "The caches other than Google were quick to clear [..] I agree it's troubling that Google is taking so long.".
By leaving out this context, and phrasing it a "strategy", is not a fair paraphrasing. These bits matter. Two things can be true at the same time: 1) Cloudflare messed up, and 2) Google is very slow to deal with this, and also messed up. Indexing all of the web comes with some responsibilities.
Please apply the same standards to yourself that you impose on others with such aggression and hostility.
The context in which Cloudflare was saying it was that a team at Google was the one to discover the issue in the first place. That's why that particular comment was taken so uncharitably by many at the time.
That is all I wrote and all I meant.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752#13721644
I don't much care if words are being put in my mouth but I do point it out.
But then again as Maya Angelou said:
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."