My Livecoding.tv account deletion saga | Hacker News Reader

My Livecoding.tv account deletion saga

liza.io

667 pointsdrakonka420 comments

This has gone beyond PR disaster theater and become an outlier. I've temporarily banned Michael's account until it is resolved.

Commenters here should be considering scenarios in which glee would not be a humane response to all this.

> Commenters here should be considering scenarios in which glee would not be a humane response.

Maybe I'm just having a brainfart, but I simply don't understand this sentence at all, and I really would like to. I'm really not trying to troll you, I just feel like this is an interesting statement that could use some clarification :)

I think they're suggesting that there's an explanation for Michael's errant behaviour that we should be more sympathetic toward. I don't buy it, though.

Ah, okay. So, there are possible scenarios that are going on in his life that we should be considering before laying certain gleefully harsh judgments on him. Gotcha.

I read it as, commenters should not resort to gleeful uproars following said comment.

As in, let's not turn this:

I've temporarily banned Michael's account

Into a plethora of snarky/glee comments like "yay, finally" (contributing nothing but a lynch mob)

I could be wrong though, but that's how I understood it.

I meant glee about the whole thing. I added "to all this" to try to make that clearer.

The mental illness hypothesis seems disturbingly close to home here. Nothing justifies egregious behavior but we could be more compassionate for the people involved.

Sorry, I don't usually go in for circumlocution but this is a tough one. Let me try again. There may be factors beyond 'obvious bad behavior deserving of mob wrath', which (if they knew what they were) would make some commenters here ashamed of what they've posted. For example, I think most people would be ashamed to publicly express glee over something that turned out to be, say, a health issue.

Sometimes in cases like this, there's an information vaccuum for a reason. Unfortunately, since the Internet abhors a vaccuum, Schadenfreude rushes in, which brings out the ugliness in people and leads to frenzy.

Normally we penalize such threads, but HN's policy is to intervene less when a bad story is YC-related, so we held off. But this morning, when I saw the dozens of comments that Michael had posted overnight, and the condemning and goading responses, it was dismayingly clear that this is something other than the usual trainwreck that people find so entertaining.

The line between righteous indignation and cruelty is not obvious, and worse, is a line that feels great to cross. If we're not mindful of that, cruelty is the default, so let's be mindful of that.

I had absolutely no idea this was happening, I caught it on page 8 of the index long after everything that happened had gone down.

This does to me look like something problematic might be going on health-wise. I can relate to a tiny extent: I sometimes have a harder time processing life than average due to high-functioning autism, and I reckon there are certainly circumstances and situations that might well overload my system and provoke Undefined Behavior due to the stress, but not nearly like this.

I have showdead turned on, and DrMJG_HN's posts show a truly impressive level of paranoia that I don't think I've ever seen before. My reaction is an unobjective sort of pity (for want of a better way to say it; maybe I'm referring to empathy): there's a person behind those posts, and they deserve a better frame of mind than they seem to have right now.

I reckon HN's reaction to this - and your explanation, for those who needed it - has been really great.

Besides enabling showdead in Arc's settings (for objective purposes only, I should reiterate!), I thought the most informative post in this thread was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10489225, which mentioned https://www.reddit.com/r/timferriss/comments/3g2mjg/tim_ferr... written by livecoding.tv's cofounder.

It is sad that this was necessary, and we can just hope that Michael will be able to post a serious answer to this debacle.

Not really. http://imgur.com/zfaI3SA

> This has gone beyond PR disaster theater

I'm not sure this is a PR disaster. Googling, I only see major coverage in this HN thread, and on /r/technology on Reddit. There was a big thread on /r/programming but the mods there deleted that. There are another several discussions on assorted minor subreddits.

None of the major tech news sites or blogs seem to be picking it up. /r/technology can be enough of a cesspool that many tech people don't bother with it. Unless the news sites and blogs are just waiting for more information before running their stories, it looks like this might blow over with little damage to livecoding.tv.

"Might" is quite a stretch here. A search for "livecoding" now ranks this thread in the #2 spot, just after the site in question. The damage has already been done, I think.

I think the public here is the Hacker News/SV SWE community. As others have said, a good portion of livecoding's target demographic now has a negative view of their management.

I'm not very fond of the admins on there (but not really in the same sense). I signed up maybe the first week that the website was up and found a bug. I reported it to the admins, who then criticized me of trying to hack their website and insisted that I was the same person as another user who had spammed their site. They told me that our IPs were the same (and when I asked them to tell my what my IP supposedly was they simply refused). They banned my account after that and I was forced to make a new one (because at the time it was impossible to watch without an account). The next account I made worked for about a week, but then they banned it as well, I guess because it was from the same IP. I don't think I even used that account once after signing up. Finally, I signed up on a VPN because I wanted to watch a friend who was going to stream on there, and that's the account that I've been using since. I think that they tried to ban that one as well after I logged in from my actual IP because it would log out all the time and I couldn't use any of the available account integrations to log in (having to do so directly by the username/password).

This is what happens when you're overly defensive; you think any bad news is an attack on you, even if it's constructive and in good faith.

Please send me a personal message and I'll track your case and see what happened.

Dude, honestly, you just need to stop.

So it really looks like the new profile _was_ deleted by Livecoding and then registered by someone else, who initially put a modified version of the libel back onto it and has now linked to their own video. I would like to stress that this really does _not seem_ to be Michael's doing this time, but a third party who saw this and grabbed my previous username.

On a slightly different note - I have seen some people express some sort of satisfaction in Michael's poor handling of this, specifically on this thread. To me it does not feel right to post these sorts of reactions to what seem to be unwell, possibly almost delusional comments on the part of this person. In fact it seems to be potentially dangerous and irresponsible. This person seems genuinely confused and is going through some possibly serious mental or emotional issues. Something just seems very off about these responses. I am the last person to defend his unprofessional business tactics or communication skills and of course this whole thing seems to have been grossly mishandled, but at this point I don't think a person in their right rational mind would react in the way he has and I would think very hard before making personal comments that might push him further into turmoil right now.

Of course nobody has to listen to me, but I feel it needed to be said. I didn't write this post or post these screenshots to make a joke out of a person or be cruel to someone who seems to be unwell. I just wanted my account deleted.

> I just wanted my account deleted.

Totally fair.

It looks like Livecoding have now updated my profile for me, to claim I am "spamming them":

https://www.livecoding.tv/lazer/

   DICE.COM EMPLOYEE SPAMMING LIVECODING.TV
   Liza Shulyayeva banned for spamming. WORKS FOR DICE.com and is just spamming Livecoding.tv

   BANNED FROM LIIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING

   BANNED FROM LIIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING+

   BANNED FROM LIIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING

...did they mispell their own startup in their vandalism?

Also, per her LinkedIn, the OP works for DICE the game-development studio (subsidiary of EA, made Battlefield, etc.), not Dice.com (job hunting site).

It is also interesting that only the second line has a plus sign at the end. I'll have to infer the meaning of that.

I have a mental image of an angry person mashing

CTRL+V, RETURN, RETURN,

CTRL+V, RETURN, RETURN, CTRL+V and then accidentally hitting + together with RETURN....

I can imagine that too. Rational people would of course use ctrl-y.

Wow, that is insane. These guys are a YC backed company?!

If it is they need to pull funding immediately.

As far as I know, Y Combinator invests a lump sum and then contributes mentorship. Their only real recourse is to say, "Sorry, we've decided that you're not worth our time" and to terminate all work with the company.

Which, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they do.

> To maintain our community, if a founder behaves unethically during or after YC, we will revoke their YC founder status. This includes access to all Y Combinator spaces, software, lists and events. All founders in a company may be held responsible for the unethical actions of a single co-founder or a company employee, depending on the circumstances.

https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/

If she didn't provide her name and employer as part of registration, this isn't just vandalism -- it's stalking and harassment.

In the last 30 minutes they fixed the misspelling but kept the text as it is. This means someone is currently following this problem and thinks they are in the right by doing this.

This behaviour is absolutely incredible, probably the most tone-deaf response I've ever seen.

Good catch.

The vitriol was spelt LIIVECODING now it has been corrected to LIVECODING - wow, just wow.

It's like watching sourceforge implode all over again.

This is incredible. I've never seen anything like this in my entire life.

A company blatantly pissing off much of its would-be userbase and sticking to its grossly incompetent guns, obviously not caring at all.

I literally cannot imagine a way they could handle this more poorly.

This has to be mental illness or drugs. Completely bizarre.

Another possibility, but not a likely one, is that the site has been hacked by someone that is trying to make them look as bad as possible.

Yeah, their CEO. cymbal

Unless this hacker was able to get the COO's HN account as well that seems unlikely. And even then a call to someone at YC to jump into the thread and let everyone know it was a hack wouldn't be too hard.

Bit frustrating that you see poor behaviour that's hard to understand and leap to "mentally ill", rather than "scumbag".

That's just trying desperately to give the benefit of the doubt. "Surely no one would be this bad on purpose."

As austenallred mentioned, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But by linking mental illness to scumbag behaviour you're making life worse for all the people with mental illness who aren't scumbags - which is most of them.

A group that I am a member of. Perhaps I'm biased but I don't feel like my life is particularly worsened.

I've had the misfortune of bearing witness to paranoia fueled by both mental illness and drug abuse (and a combination of both). I've also worked with and for unapologetic assholes. There are things about this case and his communications that have me leaning toward the former.

I wonder why they didn't fix the plus sign.

Liza Shulyayeva banned for spamming. WORKS FOR DICE.com and is just spamming Livecoding.tv

Is that legally irresponsible naming someone in full and directly implying they were responsible for a negative action?

Yes, LiveCoding.tv can be sued for libel.

What on earth is this? Is this something like a joke?

In all seriousness I think their founder is still quite immature and possibly has some temper issues, at least judging by these past interactions and now this immature act. You can see this was written hastily, probably in anger - they didn't even spell the name of their own website right here. They don't really seem to care about maintaining the least bit of professionalism.

But... but... they are YC-funded. People with such a childish attitude should have been filtered earlier. :(

Anyways, I don't think I would sign in to their site anymore. It is unfortunate that one of the YC companies doesn't feel "cool" anymore.

I don't quite understand this idea of YC companies being somehow immune to idiocy. I've been approached by multiple YC companies about early-stage roles and been stunningly unimpressed by each. That it's publicly foolish now is maybe a little funnier, but I don't get the surprise of it.

This is insanity. This startup should be immediately dropped from YC.

right? Thats not only dis-tasteful. but also what the fuck are you thinking doing that to a client? Now I'm never going to that website.

Can anyone please explain to me why a YC company is making such a terrible name for themselves at a website which is literally FULL with people, who they should aim at building positive image with. I am pretty sure that over 70% of their users have at least a username in this community. I hardly have ever seen a worse way to respond to a marketing crisis.

edit: Now the answer of the co-founder(you can find it below) is way better and it should have been the first reaction to this post. Hopefully there can be a happy result to both sides.

Because the founders suck at dealing with users. YC doesn't run your company for you.

I really did not wanted to blame YC. My mention of them is mostly because they are the biggest incubator, so people who get in should have at least minimum amount of marketing skills. They literally make fool of themselves in front of their main "customers" and apparantly we are still talking about one of the cofounders. You are trying to run companies worth millions and do such stupid mistakes, it is just beyond understanding for me.

I think it's because that doesn't scale to seventy companies without being a hinderance. I'm sure the skills are there, the problem is unless the founders ask UC doesn't know where to deploy them.

Founders of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Linux, Oracle, Tesla and probably many more have been famous for childish or angry stuff. It's not very uncommon.

Jeff Bezos is allegedly a sometimes difficult person to work for, but Amazon treats its customers extremely well.

Yes, but I had the same thought; along the lines of "does YC really have to do a dinner where someone comes in and tell the batch's founders not to try to make examples of customers/users that are annoying them, because they will look ridiculous at best and, as in cases like this, actively malignant at worst"? Is that really a lesson YC needs to teach?

At the very least, I would expect Y Combinator to try to invest in founders who don't need to be told that.

People have crazy unrealistic expectations of YC in this regard. They invest in 30-40 teams per batch, based on an application and a very short interview. That's a good thing for founders, and whatever else you might think of them, YC is the probably the most founder-positive force in the entire technology industry.

They're investors, not chaperons.

It doesn't need to be a dinner, but a nice blog post would possibly help. It's not as if this is the first boneheaded response from a YC funded company, and it's YC's name that gets linked to this sub-optimal behaviour.

That "break the rules" post got around. Maybe there needs to be a "but don't be a massive jerk to ex customers" follow up post.

I thought there was already a "no asshole" rule? But maybe it's one of the rules you're supposed to break.

YC doesn't run your company for you, but a big point of YC is that they provide advice and guidance. As they say in an article [1] linked from the YC FAQ:

   Most people don’t do YC for the financial investment—they
   do it because they want the advice, the help of the
   network, the benefits of the program.

Heck, for a long time YC only invested something like $20k and got something like 7% of your company. From a money point of view, only a complete idiot would have taken that deal. What made it worthwhile was getting access to the YC people for advice.

Now YC gives $120k for 7%, so it is no longer completely idiotic from a purely monetary point of view, but even at $120k most of the value is in the access it gives you to the YC staff and the other people YC puts you in contact with.

Because of this a lot of people have higher expectations for YC companies.

[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal

Are you suggesting YC can run your company for you? YC can exert pressure but that's it. They don't have any legal or corporate control whatsoever.

Hi drakonka, I have only just found out about this, and was until now not aware of what happened. I don't know why my cofounder Michael marked you as spam, and I will ask him to contact you. I can only apologise for the handling of your account deletion, it really is not acceptable that it took so long, so we will make it a priority to improve this.

Do you really think drakonka would want your cofounder to contact her after all this stalking?

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for getting in touch. I would love to just have my account deleted and move on. No need for Michael to contact me.

Idle curiosity: Are you aware that you have zero believability at the moment now unless you can demonstrate results or at least your commitment usefully?

You read the article and see the updated profile on your site, right? I think being slow to respond is the least of your worries.

Any response on the weird comments such as "DICE.COM EMPLOYEE SPAMMING LIVECODING.TV" that were put on the profile?

Do you have any explanation as to why you are running a page with her name, publicizing her employment and calling her a spammer? That requires both a deliberate effort to research her, and then the poor judgment to actually post the text, presumably in an effort to shame her.

If this is how you usually "mark spammers" her account issue is the least of your problems. It makes it look like the site is run by a paranoid schizophrenic. Most unprofessional thing I've ever seen from a YC company, even if the allegations would be true.

You're joking, but a quick Google search of [site:livecoding.tv banned] shows that's exactly what is happening.

https://www.livecoding.tv/2pointoh/

https://www.livecoding.tv/hekton/

Wow, this behavior is pathetic. Just delete the accounts and move on.

I can't believe this is real.

Why is the page still up with the spamming accusations on it? If you're a co-founder, please take care of it ASAP instead of wasting drakonka's time 'contacting' them.

Amazing, a response including even more stall tactics.

You can do more than apologise. You can stop calling her a spammer, delete her profile entirely, apologise profusely, and make sure this kind of utter ridiculousness never happens again! I suggest making sure your cofounder never has anything to do with user relations.

Looks like you guys just corrected the spelling of your website name on my profile (previously "LIIVECODING.TV"), which is still accusing me of spamming. Is this the kind of improvement you had in mind?

"like watching a train wreck in slow motion" is an expression I've never felt the need to use. Until now.

This is unacceptable behavior from any business.

It's painful to watch.

Are you technical? If you are, this should really be a "take care of it then talk to my cofounder about it" type of thing.

Founder Comment was over 1 hour ago and the seeming libel and doxxing of Lazer's full name, and employer are still up - an apology in words but not actions - messing with someones employment is egregious.

As minimaxir pointed out, she's not even an employee of Dice.com, she's works at the similarly named video game studio DICE. A legal minefield for Livecoding.tv for sure...

And she’s in the EU, and the company is headquartered in London, meaning this is going to have serious legal consequences.

If I had stocks in the company, I’d have sold by now. It’d be a miracle if the company would still be up and running by next week.

OMG. If they're headquartered in London I assume she can sue them under British libel law.

As I mentioned here[1] they at least mention this address on their site. Might not be headquarters, but at least means they are operating under british law.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487394

Uh, you should be acting a lot more decisively than that, considering that your co-founder is currently torpedoing your company's reputation in front of a large part of your potential userbase.

With this being on HN top (and with the word spreading), this story has potential to kill livecoding.tv.

2 hours and only a spellfix (which is even more insulting than nothing). Still no clue about priorities it seems. I guess after Twitch Creative all press is good press... Let's hope for some press.

"Hey, I just learned my cofounder Michael assaulted you. I will ask him to contact you again!"

this is too good, it could only get better if you could somehow manage to slip "soon" in your reply.

If I may allow myself a guess, possibly the line of thought at livecoding.tv, given the other examples of banned users on your site, and given the lie about the cron job, is that these are merely moronic, worthless customers you're alienating that you wouldn't want on your site anyway. Perhaps you think (thought?) that this is another such instance. This is not the case. You've created a huge leak in your potential enthusiastic user base, which now consists of "programmers willing to stream their content who also happen not to be HN readers."

Mistakes happen. Many startups have survived bad publicity on HN. Your actions have not ensured you a spot in this roster. Even generously overlooking the juvenile behavior of your cofounder and ban messages, the narrative of livecoding.tv stored in the collective brain of HN is now "fails to respond to user and petulantly refuses to apologize for seven hours."

The best thing you can do right now is to identify the responsible individual in your company, apologize specifically, and abjectly, as a company, on behalf of this individual, remove all the ban messages, delete OP's account, explain how a cron job came to enter the story, and both explain and apologize for why this took two hours to resolve after you heard about it.

(Disclaimer: I was about to sign up for livecoding.tv for similar reasons as OP just yesterday. I'm disappointed to know this might've happened to me.)

I'd also add that this is probably the worst time for them to do sit like this, considering twitch is launching twitch creative

On the about page Michael is described as

customer‑focused ... and professional

Might want to re-think that too.

Two hours later her profile still has the "Dice.com employee" (which is false) and "banned for spamming" (which I think is false.)

Mishandling personal information is a big deal.

What's wrong with you? Take the page down. There's a whole HN thread sitting here hitting fucking refresh on it over and over again waiting to see how much more drama your insane team can generate over this. Are you running a company, or a very elaborate piece of nerd performance art?

I may be jumping to conclusions, but this reddit comment by Jamie Green may shed some light over his situation...

https://www.reddit.com/r/timferriss/comments/3g2mjg/tim_ferr...

Feel sorry for Jamie. See also the latest twitter comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10488919

This? https://twitter.com/StartupLJackson/status/63963265474104115...

"Startup L. Jackson ‏@StartupLJackson Sep 4

[Startup L. Jackson Retweeted Ced]

How to make your team completely ineffective.

Treat communication & collaboration w hostility.

Done."

Normally I'm not a fan of comments like this but this guy is running a company, a YC backed one in fact, and I think the application of a clue stick might be just what's needed.

Wow, is there any recovering from this? Usually I'm against the internet machine latching onto people that have stuffed up. But you're trying to publicly humiliate a user that just wants to delete her account. I'll be surprised if you last much longer.

Could you elaborate on why her page was edited after your comment to correct the typo on your website's name?

It seems a little strange that that was the course of action taken here.

Hi, how is your company such an absolute colossal failure? Reading the replies of this thread, it keeps getting worse and worse. You should be doing a hell of a lot more than "ask him to contact you". DELETE THE FUCKING ACCOUNT!

Wow, this is unbelievable. More than two hours have passed and the page is still live. Someone even fixed the typo, which is even more insulting.

It's been three hours; and their account is still just filled with libel that you put there.

So far everything you and your cofounders have done has made this problem worse and larger.

You are untrustworthy and incompetent.

So, since its 3 hours since you said this and the page is still up, the charitable interpretation is that you don't have the technical know-how to take it down yourself and are frantically trying to get in touch with Michael, who does. Or, you've gotten in touch with Michael, and he's just being a stubborn dick and is refusing to take it down. If that's the case, I feel kind of sorry for you. Sucks the fate of your company seems to have hinged on an apparently unhinged individual.

As part of cleaning this mess up you need to also institute an inviolable policy that you will never edit a user's profile without the user's permission unless legally required to. If there is something in a profile that you cannot allow to remain on your site then you should delete the profile content. If you want to name and shame spammers it should be done somewhere other than the profile.

This is important because it never occurs to most users that you might edit their profile, and so it never occurs to them that you might edit other users' profiles. Thus, when people see something on someone else's profile they assume the person put it there.

Maybe they should change their name to LiveDoxxing dot tv...

Enjoy getting sued for libel.

In all seriousness, you need to remove your co-founder's ability to do anything on your site. If that's not practical, you should seriously think about making an exit yourself. For one, your business is now effectively dead in its primary market, it's going to be a long hard road back, if it's even remotely possible; for a second thing, you've just had your name and personal and professional reputation completely tarnished by what appear to be Michael's actions, and made worse by the childish retaliation on OPs profile (regardless of who did that).

The loss of your own reputation is going to be harder to come back from. Reputable VCs doing even basic due diligence are going to see this incident and aren't going to want to have anything to do with you, unless you show swift and decisive action, one way or another. So far your response has been neither swift nor decisive.

For what it's worth, asking Michael to contact OP seems like a really bad idea. He's hardly shown good customer services skills so far, do you really think he's going to do a better job suddenly?

I actually didn't think the issue in the OP was that bad but this just escalated it to insane levels.

Does YC not provide any kind of guidance or coaching around customer support and PR to founders during the program? Seems like that should be a really important topic, given how situations like this impact not only the reputation of the startup, but also YC itself.

YC isn't going to run your company for you. This isn't a YC problem.

The entire premise of participating in YC is to learn from other founders about how to build a successful startup. You're saying that YC doesn't have any reason to try and help founders do better at running their companies?

It's up to the founders to reach out and try to figure out how to solve the problem. If they don't do that YC isn't going to perform an audit or hold a bunch of seminars or something.

TBH most of this is basic competence. YC can't ensure that all of the companies are competent in all aspects.

They can't ensure, but they have an interest in assisting.

They don't need to perform an audit to find this issue when it's plastered across the front page of their news aggregator.

Will it will become a YC problem with all the bad PR.

Remember, pg has defended a YC company's sleazy tactics for bundling unwanted software in installers (including disguising the choice to install them as an ordinary EULA acceptance scheme, which he whitewashed as confirming that they wanted to install the software) and even that didn't do them any real damage.

Which company, which software?

InstallMonetizer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711

I expect pg to defend profitable sociopathic behavior; but this destroys value. If he's not providing any coaching, it's probably because he already wrote the entire team down to zero and thus doesn't want to invest 14 seconds in a text message telling them to 'fix this ASAP'

He also defended AirBnBs founders when they were publicly blaming-the-victim: customer whose house had been trashed by meth heads after renting it out on AirBnB.

Eventually the company seemed to hire a crisis consultant and started acting better.

But in the early days the founders were being extremely douchy and PG wrote an article that I was astounded to receive, defending the douchiness.

That was the point that I started to think YC isn't better than the average level of Silicon Valley.

BTW, many YC companies engage in fake traction tactics sometimes ones that cross the line into dishonesty-- for example AirBnBs "we'll spam people listing their places on craigslist while pretending to be someone else" marketing scheme.

A YC startup annoyed, failed to follow an account deletion request of, lied to, wrongfully accused of spamming, and doxxed a female user.

Well, if it's not a YC problem, it should very well become one.

If I'm YC and I have invested in a company, I'm going to step in and give a bit of coaching in a situation like this. Especially when the solution is completely obvious and the core action required (deleting the account, sending a quick apology) would be minimal.

We're assuming they won't. It's a Sunday afternoon.

I would think it is just a good use of YC resources towards protecting capital investment to remind founders not to invite public ridicule when none needs to have occurred.

This is crazy. Can these people be any more unprofessional?

This is a ridiculous thing for a company to do. It makes them look unprofessional and immature, and probably could form the basis of a libel claim.

I think that they just gave you some ground for some legal action.

This is an almost unbelievably stupid and upsetting thing for them to have done.

This is straight up trashy.

I had started using Livecoding.TV about 4 months ago, but had to take a break to move house. I got spammed by them quite a bit to start streaming again. I'm sorry I'm not helping you build a revenue stream, but seriously, get off my case.

What is the narrative you think these emails are fulfilling? Did anyone ever stop using a site because they just forgot? "Oh yeah, I think I remember that site I had been using for a month but stopped two days ago. Must have slipped my mind."

I had even bought a t-shirt from them and it took longer to show up than I remembered I had an account there. Then they decided they fucked up the t-shirt and at least two months later another one showed up at my old address. No warning. Luckily, I still own the place but had gone to show it to a new tenant.

I was willing to chalk my experience up to operational growing pains, but this story here is just inexcusable. Clearly, reasonable people with a love of engineering and a passion for their product aren't running the show there. Now I want my account deleted.

Ah I remember them pushing t-shirts fairly hard in email at some point a few months ago. I think I got some sort of email or internal Livecoding message about having won a t-shirt or _something_ of the sort. I would have to give them my address to receive the item and considered it but never went through with it I think. From memory they claimed to have made the offer based on some sort of user criteria, like a "You did this so we are giving you a free x!"

A few days later I get another message saying the first message offering the free item was a mistake, and that I wasn't invited to have one after all. Can't say I was too torn up.

Just a quick update - I can no longer reset my password, so either they have actually deleted my account now (great!) or just changed the email address. Either way there is no use speculating now as my profile page is a 404 and there is no way to tell with certainty one way or the other whether my account has actually been removed (I suppose one could try to register the username "Lazer", but I am way too sick of this to go near their registration form again).

I filed an ICO report early this morning when the libel on their website stayed there overnight with no sign of changing hours after the cofounder's and Y Combinator president's replies; I simply didn't know what else to try and someone suggested looking into the ICO. So I guess it will just be in their hands now and I'll see what comes out of it, if anything. For now I think this is the end of the road in terms of getting the best possible outcome with a company like this. They are clearly not going to admit their mistake and they seem to still be in (seemingly really bad) damage control mode. I think any further interaction with them would just be a waste of time at this point.

Thanks for this. It was really fun to watch a CEO completely torpedo his startup in less than 24 hours by publicly flipping the bird to a message board filled with its would-be users for some reason I cannot begin to fathom.

We should do this again sometime.

EDIT: After reading through a bunch of the CEO's comments, I'm now seriously concerned there may be a mental illness at play. I probably shouldn't have made light of the situation; calling out several users such as minimaxir as Alex from LiveCoding honestly seems delusional.

The CEO is not even trying to do the damage control.

They're tweeting that most of the comments on here are coming from competitors. I think the problem is they're so overly defensive they're completely in denial.

Claiming that everyone criticizing them is a competitor or a banned user seems to cross the line from overly defensive to paranoid.

But in reality, Hacker News doesn't merely represent a large potential user base... there is almost a hardcoded, "#include <HackerNews.h>" kind of dependency for anything that claims to be a platform for sharing the development of software products.

> We should do this again sometime.

I completely understand the glee to be had watching a clueless CEO bumblefuck their customer relations, but I really do not wish for this to happen to anyone else.

Lazer is shown as 'Available' on their registration form, FYI.

Thanks for sharing your story - I think a lot of people who have been following this thread can't believe what's unfolded.

I hope your feline friend continues to get better.

Thanks very much for confirming. Glad to hear it may really be gone!

"00:12drmjgoh no. #1 we can but as you know is not like we go and delete each account instantly as 80% of users who requests account deletion come back after two weeks to requests their account back and are mad we deleted it 00:12drmjg#2 people who requested account deletion in pasts used the accounts for credit card fraud and then re-create new ones"

I'm not sure they will have that problem (80% of users requesting deletes returning) again.

Update to the update...my profile is now back, again with accusations of spam: https://www.livecoding.tv/lazer/

Since the username was available again, probably someone else could have created a new profile with the username lazer.

You're right, very possible it's just a troll at this point.

What's funny is the message now has a different typo: a missing B in BANNED.

The other profile details are different, though. I am inclined to believe it's a troll as well.

I'm amazed. Michael, if you're reading this - get someone else to handle this situation. Anyone, even it's just the guy who does SEO.

Your company has appeared on HN before, and as a YC-backed company you should probably have some idea of the type of people who are part of this community. It amazes me that you believe you can respond to this story by attempting to doxx trusted long-term users (or rather, just plain lying about their identities) and claim that the people here are attacking your company.

Even more so that you believe you can claim that a "majority of the comments [in this HN thread] come from competitors and banned users" (@livecodingtv). Most of the people in this thread have never used your products (myself included) - and in response to this story, many who may have never will.

You are the one attacking your company. Stop lying on Twitter. Stop trying to avoid criticism by claiming that your (outraged) potential customers are competitors or spammers. Stop trying to remove pseudonymity from HN commenters (especially the ones trying to be at least slightly sympathetic to your company).

Consider the fact that you may be facing legal action for some of your behavior. The way you respond to these accusations will undoubtedly be reflected in any proceedings, and at at the moment I don't think you're helping your case. (IANAL)

I'm not going to make jabs at your psychological state like a few of the comments here have, but it would be in your interest to visit a mental healthcare professional (if only to check you're capable of handling the pressure caused by this story).

I've been unimpressed with LiveCoding.tv's spammy tactics as well.

The decided to enable email notification of video streams for users who have already signed up by using an opt-out system rather than opt-in system.

I created an account out of casual interest and then weeks later got slammed with dozens of spammy "stream is starting" emails every day.

I did actually try to delete my account as well but gave up when it appeared that they didn't allow for that option. Instead I've just been training Google that all the email from them is Spam.

They are super spammy, I've unsubscribed several times and still get emails. Sticking with Twitch.

I was about to sign up, with about the same reason and interest level as the post author. How's Twitch for this?

Twitch officially doesnt allow non-gaming related (game-dev is ok) streams. As long as you dont stream anything explicit you should be ok though

Their new Creative branch might cover more branches of coding.

As of last week they expanded the definition of what they allow, explicitly mentioning coding

http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/2176641-creat... Q. What if my creative broadcast is gaming-related art, game development, programming, or involves creation of music? A. You are free to choose whatever you think is the most appropriate category for your creative broadcast, so long as you adhere to the Rules of Conduct for the category when doing so.

Q. Does all Creative category content have to be gaming related? A. No, you’re free to broadcast your creative process for any genre!

You can set the game you're playing to "Programming", which they explicitly allow.

Well I can't speak for general dev, but it's perfectly fine for Game Dev (code and art).

Youtube Live is great for live coding.

Uuuh, this is really factually wrong. 1. You activated stream notifications by yourself. 2. Every stream notfiication has in the footer an unsubscribe link or information on how to unsubscribe from your user dashboard. Our support answered you with screenshots on even how to click on the link.

Just checking: Do your emails have a link that will unsubscribe the user after one (or at most two) clicks?

Or does the link require the user to log in and adjust settings on a dashboard?

So, 12 hours on and the account still hasn't been deleted...

I mean, at this point you have to assume none of the co-founders has the ability to delete it (because common sense would suggest they would have by now, if they could have, to mitigate the on-going public-relations disaster) probably because they outsourced all of their development and really have no clue about how their website actually works.

Under normal circumstances, this could be understandable, but I think there's an obvious irony when the site in question streams people, well, coding!

Now, I suppose it's fair to argue you don't need to know rocket science to make a space game either, but in this case, I'd think there'd be an expectation the people running the site actually at least kinda-sorta know how to code themselves.

Or at least be able to delete some records from a database.

> at this point you have to assume none of the co-founders has the ability to delete it

Perhaps they were hoping that OP would stream a how-to.

If deleting some rows is not feasible, I would even suggest special-casing the page and making it redirect to the 404 page, even though the user data would be still there. I mean, do somethimg. Seeing the issue not resolved even after the founder recognized the problem is utterly painful.

I think it's hilarious. Maybe they aren't taking it down because it's getting so many hits.

edit: They'll be marketing it as "look at this huge spike in traffic we got this month" when talking to advertisers and content creators.

Or maybe they think any PR is good PR

> So, 12 hours on and the account still hasn't been deleted...

... and the creepy, libel-ful* profile still stands:

    DICE.COM EMPLOYEE SPAMMING LIVECODING.TV
    Liza Shulyayeva banned for spamming. WORKS FOR DICE.com and is just spamming Livecoding.tv
    
    BANNED FROM LIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING
    
    BANNED FROM LIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING+
    
    BANNED FROM LIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING

* Apologies, I hit the wall of my vocabulary.

Libelous.

Maybe are you looking for the word "libelous"? https://www.wordnik.com/words/libelous

Yeah, see a lawyer and sue these idiots for libel. People who do stuff like this deserve to lose their company.

Wouldn't it be fabulous if they live streamed someone writing the code for an account deletion feature?

YC is an investor in the company. We've been trying all day to reach the CEO and we've been unsuccessful so far.

Obviously, this is very bad and we hope the company will fix it quickly.

Thanks, I hope you guys can get somewhere. I'm preparing a complaint to file with the ICO and looking into other options since nothing else seems to have worked and I have no idea what else to do, but really I just want to have my account deleted and move on. I can't believe a simple support ticket spun out into this debacle.

Please sue them for libel.

This is really odd, though it may reveal the dynamic between the founders. Wonder what the conversations have been, and if any even occurred.

Take a look at the original archive.is image which the author posted. You'll notice that the company spelled its own name wrong:

https://archive.is/T3Ms7

I just loaded up her page a few minutes ago and they fixed the spelling. An image is here:

http://imgur.com/pqW4tbC

Pardon my language, but it's fucked up that someone with access changed the spelling but didn't have enough sense to just remove the whole 'banned for spamming'. Especially in light of the fact that one of the founders replied on this thread eight hours ago.

This doesn't seem like the typical bad customer service incident. I'm not trying to excuse this behaviour (because it's wrong on every level), but I really hope that everyone in that company is mentally healthy and safe.

I'm concerned that many comments on this suggest that the problem is that the CEO needs better PR. It's scarier to me that this sort of behavior could hide behind PR. For tech in general I think ethics needs to be considered more than PR, as that's the heart of the matter. Clearly, those who've signed up for Livecoding are somewhat scared that this team has their data. I understand YC can't run these companies, but I think we do look at YC investment as a sort of assurance that this sort of thing won't happen.

I have never 'spammed' livecoding.tv nor have I ever been warned or banned by their support team (or by any online company for that matter). I don't have a website. I'm not in Indiana, either. (I decided to reply to my own comment, as I don't want to agitate the situation by directly replying to the other comment).

Given that they already edited the user's profile to say their full name and supposed placed of work, this means that they could've just blanked out the user profile with junk placeholder data.

Since the user has done nothing offensive or distasteful, but merely asked for account deletion, I'm surprised at livecoding.tv's vindictive response.

Is it wrong to assume that at least one co-founder in a YC funded startup knows how to write code?

From their About page, neither of the founders is technical. One has a PhD in Finance but doesn't list any banks or hedge funds amongst his previous employers, that seems odd. The other is a business bro.

This is incredible! Also, just noticed their homepage: https://www.livecoding.tv/

http://imgur.com/ryBikOY

Just noticed that the text on my profile has now been changed to "Marked for removal from database". Perhaps they fixed their "cron job".

mumphster mentioned on Twitter that that he just got banned also and actually managed to have an exchange with the CEO:

https://twitter.com/elgruntox/status/661063421283012608

https://twitter.com/elgruntox/status/661063608302866432

I'm not sure where the first line is coming from about any kind of information that they were "doing migrations" (I have had no such communication). My videos were already deleted because I deleted them one by one before they changed my password, put in a redirect back to home on my account, and updated my profile for me.

Anyway, at least they're not referencing dice.com, which I have nothing to do with, anymore. I guess we're just back at square one now.

hes still chatting by the way. https://www.livecoding.tv/ell/ if anyone would like to ask the CEO of the site any questions while I wait for my account to really be deleted.

Can't view the transcript without an account.

A good hilight: http://pastie.org/10523598

> even going extra miles and telling users not to use misogynistic words on their channels.

That's... that's... wow. Just wow.

This is a part of the transcript: http://pastie.org/10523576

Very immature CEO.

Wow, the title of profile page is now

* Marked for removal from database - in PHP programming language *

Curious what they're doing right now..

I'm not sure, but whatever it is, it's in PHP programming language!

Could their support "team" be an automated agent proof of concept gone terribly, terribly wrong? /s

Did they outsource all of their dev and administration to some cheap outfit?

From mumphster's transcripts linked in the children (drmjg is the Livecoding.tv CEO):

   slateytv: you look childish and irresponsible for releasing her full name and company
   drmjg: As mentioned above her account really has nothing interesting on it. so there is no reason not to even delete it.
   [...]
   ellbot: also why the hell would you edit her profile to show her work and personal information to the public
   slateytv: are you unable to delete accounts?
   ellbot: do you not get how childish and evil that is
   drmjg: oh no. #1 we can but as you know is not like we go and delete each account instantly as 80% of users who requests account deletion come back after two weeks to requests their account back and are mad we deleted it
   drmjg: #2 people who requested account deletion in pasts used the accounts for credit card fraud and then re-create new ones.

This is the weirdest attempt at a runaround I've seen in awhile.

Man, if I were an investor I'd be doing anything I possibly could to eject this guy.

Sad. This person has obviously divorced reality. Shocking that a simple account deletion request could reveal so much. Whether his reaction was a product of pent-up frustration over normal growth challenges or a singular (now ongoing) display of gross immaturity, he has irreparably damaged his company.

It's getting weirder. They've just responded to everyone who mentioned this debacle on twitter, saying that it's all resolved and all the posters on HN are spammers, banned users, and competitors.

I'm none of the above.

Go on guys, dig yourselves a deeper hole, you'll hit bedrock soon.

The twitter account needs to STOP POSTING.

https://twitter.com/livecodingtv

It's honestly baffling how they think that keeping on posting is in anyway a good idea, especially when they say things like "most people are banned users or competitors" - demonstrably untrue - most people are not users of livestreaming, and are not competitors, and a couple of people they've "identified" (doxxed, really) have been incorrectly identified.

Watching their exchanges - they (Michael, clearly) are acutely insane.

I feel for the guy, as his world-view is so incredibly warped he seems to be unable to even conceive of the fact that he might be mishandling this grievously.

If I were him, I'd step away from the keyboard, and hire a PR firm NOW to try to sort out this mess.

If I were PG, I'd be kicking his ass from here 'til next Tuesday for being mindblowingly irresponsible with both the investment given and his employees' livelihoods, and I'd be pushing for a strong customer-facing hire.

Time for a dramatic "drop the microphone and walk off stage" moment, I agree. If only to put a period on the entire conversation and attempt to stop the bleeding.

Yeah. Apparently he doesn't understand you can build a system that soft-deletes accounts then hard-deletes them in N days.

Looks like it's finally a 404.

Wow, it is! After all this time, I've never been so happy to see a 404.

Not sure if someone recreated your account for laughs but it's up again with the same spamming accusation in the profile.

That's a good point, I suppose it's possible someone just recreated it as a joke. At this point I wouldn't put it past either the CEO _or_ some random internet troll.

Yeah, once you're at the point where someone can't distinguish your behavior from that of a troll, well...

At any rate, they should have done something to prevent anyone from registering with your username. Even if it's just a one off redirect on their reverse proxy/gateway.

And I was able to just send myself a password reset request, so looks like they just put in a rewrite or something.

Hi Liza – This is Michael from Livecoding.tv. I hope the tension has calmed down a bit. Am traveling in Europe and thus not always reading emails. Apology for how our support handled your account deletion request and the emails back and forth. It was not really nice and needed given that your account had no content on it, we even deleted all your videos, and disabled your account. They thought you were a troll and just playing funny pranks on them with your friends.

Sorry that it took 11 days to get it resolved. We are a small team and as such if one team member is traveling or on holidays some work/emails get delayed. We are also in the middle of a big migration to v2.0 and thus we have some backlog pending. Again I apologize!

Let me know if you want to talk on the phone and I’ll apologize again. We will send you an Amazon gift card to soothe things a bit.

Thanks!

Was it you personally or the "support team" that dealt with this case? I expect you to implement a delete-feature today. This is a marketing disaster.

Thanks for copy and pasting your email to me. Here is a copy-paste of my response to you:

"Hi Michael,

I wish you would stop trying to mislead me, to be honest.

"we even deleted all your videos, and disabled your account" - no you did not. I deleted all of my videos myself, one by one, when I asked for my account to be deleted (before you changed my password and put in a redirect to home on login). I did this just in case there was any problem, and now I'm glad I did.

Second, it took much more than 11 days to get it resolved, I'm not sure what time frame you are counting from? In addition it is not even resolved - I was again able to reset my password under an hour ago (or have you deleted my account since then? My apologies if so, I can test again although I have to say with everything that's happened at this point it seems more likely you would just change my email so I can't send myself a password reset instead of deleting my account)

I really don't want to talk on the phone, nor an Amazon gift card. I just want you to stop trying to lie to me, libel my profile, and acting so unprofessionally. The one thing I wanted was to just have my account deleted, I do not know why this is so hard for you guys.

Kind regards,

Liza"

There are so many questions that are unanswered. "We are a small team" is not an excuse for what has happened.

Considering that your support person original said "I would be happy to delete your account", considering that someone at Livecoding.tv vandalized the profile page, and considering that the only thing the user has ever requested is for the account to be deleted - can you really say with a straight face at this point that deleting the account is "not needed"?

"We are a small team so we changed the text on your account multiple times throughout the day, falsely claiming you were a spammer and worked for Dice.com instead of deleting your account."

You didn't address the most concerning issue: the fact that you put that psychotic outrage on her profile. Explain yourself.

Your cofounder specifically mentioned that you made those comments, not your presumably fictional support team. Are you lying or is your cofounder?

Michael, you're acting like a man-child, and you're now in the process of offending twitter.

Where do you think this is going to end?

If I were your investor (and I am an investor in startups, as well as a founder of a now decade old company), I would be moving for a vote of no confidence in you, and fast.

"We will send you an Amazon gift card to soothe things a bit." Now that goes to show how serious you're in solving this saga. This is comedy gold according to my dictionary.

grabs popcorn Yup, some good entertainment. Also, what was the amount on the Amazon gift card? We _must_ know.

I declined the gift card offer in my reply, so we will never know.

Slightly unrelated note, but I received a spam email from Michael@Livecoding.tv on Saturday. I will NEVER EVER use a site that spams like this:

> Hey Luke,

> I've been searching code repos and found that you also love coding. Would be cool to see your awesome code and projects on Livecoding.tv

> Livecoding.tv is a livestreaming platform for coders to share their code and hang out. We have users from 194 countries and 3,000 products are being built live using over 35 different programming languages and frameworks. Come and complete your first 10 stream hours on Livecoding.tv and get a chance to win a cool Livecoding.tv T-shirt :)

> If you love your friends, also forward this email to them.

> Michael > Founder, Livecoding.tv > Livechannel: https://www.livecoding.tv/drmjg

Weirdly on that page you can hire the CEO, Dr Micheal Garbade, for $35 / hr.

https://www.livecoding.tv/drmjg HIRE ME

>Python, Django, Sencha Touch :

>platform architecture feedback

>code review

>solving technical issues

>preparation for exams

>help on homework

>fixing bugs in code

Hmm... I don't find it particularly weird for the CEO of the next Twitch to be in the business of helping kids out with their programming assignments. I mean, how much does Larry Page get for his services... I would assume at least $50/hr!

I'd argue that is one of the few things live coding is doing right. Trying to get people in the habit of using the platform to exchange cash for help.

Perhaps a faster strategy would have been for the OP to just hire him to delete the account.

This isn't real. Livecoding.tv is Frog Fractions 2.

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST.

This reminded me of Eli the Computer Guy's rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h66PNIUtaaE

I beat you on that one... see below :)!

That was posted in July. They clearly haven't changed their approach or tactics. It's unbelievably short-sighted and damaging.

"If you love your friends, also forward this email to them."

Yuck.

Are there enough people out there that go for that sort of messaging that make it successful enough to cover any of us who are seriously turned off?

Do they really have 3,000 projects being built live at different times? When I've checked out the site there seems to be an average of 8-10 livestreams and around 20 on a busy evening. Right now there are 6. I know they aren't implying they have 3,000 concurrent streamers, but based on what I've seen I have to question this claim. I wonder if they count a single streaming as a project being built live, even if it is never repeated. Even then, I wonder about the 3,000 number.

It's worth noting that when Livecoding.tv first launched, you were forced to register and log-in to watch any videos. It took an entire thread on Hacker News to force the founders to backpeddle once they were caught: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9800321

This isn't the first YC startup I've seen with such blatant "growth hacking" tactics, and it's disappointing.

What does "caught" mean in this context?

If you can't use the site without registering, it probably isn't a secret that you can't use the site without registering.

I can see using a phrase like 'called out' or 'called on their bullshit' or whatever, but I don't see how they were 'caught'.

Looks like it still requires a signup, but lets you watch a few streams before it blocks you with the signup modal.

I'd think the requirement for Flash would undo any growth hacking.

what do you mean were? I cant watch anything without creating account.

So the cron job turned out to be an invented lie told to a user they essentially assumed would be too stupid to think about it. Which is it then, that they e.g. have a tired support team using a canned response that includes a lie? Or is it the founders themselves thinking their audience are fools?

Sure, separate business policy from code, but it seems unwise to assume your users are technically ignorant when your site is about inviting programmers to stream their work.

could be a monthly cron job. Principle of charity right?

Of course, assuming that it is a monthly cron job and the account actually is scheduled for deletion then, the question would be: Why in gods name would you not just say that?! "Your account is scheduled for deletion at so and so time", and if at that point you're complaining that it's not fast enough, no one would really have much sympathy for that.

It's still possible this isn't an example of a vindictive and petty individual lying through their teeth. It may still be an example of someone who with poor PR skills, and is not coping with the situation those poor PR skills created.

I hope Liza comes up with a follow-up post: "the saga continues"

They continue to deny any wrongdoing, and continue in their favorite game of copy-and-paste-replys on Twitter. https://twitter.com/livecodingtv/with_replies

Here's one directed at me (and 2 other people, since I guess in this instance they were too lazy to copy and past the reply 2 extra times: https://twitter.com/livecodingtv/status/661153102750425088

This deep in a hole and they're still convinced they are the victims... Unbelievable.

Hm. All my critics are competitors or bad actors we had to ban. Convenient. Or paranoia.

In all seriousness though, I worry about the co-founder(s) mental health. It's all fun to poke at people and say they've lost it, but running a startup is a highly stressful endeavour and it shouldn't be ignored when people break, which I suspect has happened in this case.

It's a tough situation. They'll want to defend what they have, tooth and nail, because it means everything to them. We'll want to counter against what they say, because we feel it's wrong to let that sort of thing go unchallenged. But who wins?

Aye. There's a lesson here to be had for all of us, which is that sometimes you've got to step back and let someone who isn't as emotionally invested in the company as you take the reins, as you can end up doing extraordinary damage to yourself by acting rashly.

I speak from experience - I've been at this lark for a decade now, and have on more than a few occasions found myself sincerely regretting how I've responded to a situation, as I've ended up emotional and escalating the matter, rather than responding rationally and calmly. I recall literally pounding my head on the office wall - in front of an investor - painfully to this day. Childish.

We all mistakes, but we also have to learn when to admit our fault, and when to step away from a situation because we aren't the right person to handle it.

I have noticed a recurring theme with YC companies. Many of them....let's just say that they weren't selected for the strength of their technical implementation or people skills. A good example of this is Magic. This is a site that few people probably remember, but they raised $12M at a $40M valuation after 2 weeks in existence back in March. More than 7 months after raising this money, the company, whose entire business model is dependent upon people sending them SMS messages detailing the things that they need or want, has yet to place a tappable SMS link on its home page.

The simple fact of the matter is that money from VCs and/or an endorsement by YC speaks only to the potential of the idea and the pedigree of at least one founder. Nothing else seems to even be considered, even when writing eight figure checks. Given this situation, no one should be surprised that YC companies sometimes go off the rails like this.

You might dislike Ycombinator because of whatever reason from the past, but Ycombinator is overall by any objective measure very successful in building companies. Am not saying this just because I was in Ycombinator - if you are honest to yourself you will agree.

Would you mind elaborating on "because I was in Ycombinator"? Typo or did something change during today?

I said nothing about disliking YC. I said their selection criteria very obviously does not include technical ability or people skills.

Here is my interaction with livecoding.tv's support about removing videos, they don't seem to like removing stuff from their website!

https://www.livecoding.tv/video/designing-a-touch-screen-int... @ 20:37

can you submit DMCA claim to them?

Doubt it. Their T&C probably protects them from that kind of thing, but I can't even find it on their site right now.

2.Except for Broadcaster Content already downloaded by users, the foregoing license granted by you terminates regarding a specific piece of Broadcaster Content once you remove or delete that Broadcaster Content from the Livecoding.tv Service.

-- From Livecoding T&C https://www.livecoding.tv/terms/

seems from the T&C you should be able to remove or delete videos

I don't need to since my request was a simple way to remove multiple videos at once, or have an option to not save my stream as videos.

I can delete the videos one by one though, it's just a lot of work, especially when the connection is flaky (it produces a ton of videos in that case)

Just got another email from Michael trying to convince me that they did the right thing and deleted my videos from my account for me. I just cannot understand why they keep acting like this - did they think I'd forget that I deleted my own videos earlier in this process?

http://i.imgur.com/Ea55D6G.png

"I hope the tension has calmed down a bit". That doesn't come across very well.

In the span of a just a few days we have YC-backed companies being publically outed for engaging in behavior which most of us consider pretty egregious and would certainly warrant any rights as YC founders to be revoked. The tone of commenters (here and w.r.t the Homejoy) can be described as mild shock. This particular example is perhaps even worse than the Homejoy issue, as it seems the founders have taken to personally attacking an individual user for, as far as we can see, are pretty legitimate claims.

But I think probably the least shocked people are the YC partners. If you are Paul G./YC, what do you do about this? By far the biggest question that YC must confront as it expands into research, bigger and bigger classes, new types of involvement through fellows, etc., is how to retain their ability to suss out, deal with, or prevent things like these. I think they are fully aware that they can't.

If anyone hasn't figured it out already, YC is becoming the first 21st century university. In order to get there, they have to become significantly bigger, and just like the startups they fund, that's the metric that's on their radar.

I don't think these events are a sign of YC's negligence. Instead, I think YC is slowly transitioning to a new era in the company. Paul G and the gang are incredibly brilliant. They knew the odds when they decided to continue this incredibly rapid growth of batches and outreach. They aren't surprised by these events; they are just moving to a stage where things like this are unfortunately the cost of doing business. If Paul G is cooking dinner for you and your few buddies over the summer every night, you aren't getting away with this. If you are now one of thousands of people fighting for (or trying to avoid) their attention, you certainly can.

Go around to any top school, and you see the same. Out of your couple thousand bright-eyed, brilliant freshmen, there inevitably are a couple bad apples. But none of them would think that a solution to this is to shrink class sizes.

> If anyone hasn't figured it out already, YC is becoming the first 21st century university

This is a ridiculous statement, it is nothing like a university.

YC - Research - https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-research (clearly universities have nothing like this)

Over 700 companies have gone on through YC, so they now have a few thousand alums and actively maintain an Alumni network -- really wish universities had something like this!

The companies go through the program in cohorts for a set amount of time -- they call these "classes". Not sure if universities have anything of the sort.

Sam Altman himself said that soon he "we will have to do something" with respect to housing. Again, nothing like I've seen any university do.

My personal favorite, though, is the part where they get everyone to come to dinner together to exchange experiences and whatnot. If only Harvard figured out that they could use their beautiful dining hall for this sort of thing...

The things you're describing here are common to many large organisations - is Google a university?

Tellingly, you don't mention the primary reason universities exist - to educate, regardless of the profitability of the subject. This is exactly the opposite of YC's primary goal, which is to make money and avoid unprofitable investments.

If you are Paul G./YC, what do you do about this?

Nothing unless it gets bad press. Why do you think they care about "egregious" behavior?

Quote From: What We Look For In Founders - Paul Graham - October 2010

    [...] 
    Naughtiness
    Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they
    tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody 
    Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions 
    right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word
    naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules
    that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by
    imagination. [...]

This is a fair point. It's just that in this particular instance, I feel that their actions crossed into the "evil" category -- they dig up PPI on one of their users and plaster it on the site, slandering her in the process. This is different than "creatively" interpreting some piece of regulation or something of the sort. I take your point, though.

I don't think that's fair. I strongly doubt PG considers spamming, or (falsely) naming & shaming customers, as "naughtiness". That's something very different.

"The culture of any organisation is shaped by the worst behaviour the leader is prepared to tolerate".

By stating that rules breaking is desirable, but not stating clearly where the lines are, companies are not given clear enough guidance to avoid scumbag behaviour.

Shameful.

Since both her and a part of Livecoding are in the EU, EU data protection laws probaby make the situation fairly clear (and give her tools do deal with it, but it shouldn't be necessary)

I don't really get the appeal of Livecoding.tv. I've streamed a few times on the service and it's not as good as any other live streaming service. Their email marketing is borderline spammy, their tactics are questionable, and they don't offer a particularly solid feature set, or anything specifically helpful for live streaming coding that you couldn't get with YouTube or Twitch (categories, I suppose?). The argument might be made they have audience specifically looking to watch people write code, but I've never seen more than ~40 people at a time on one stream. You'll probably see more traffic on Twitch in the Programming category.

This is a terrible practice for consumers, but a huge strategy win for startups(AOL zombie account trick .. hope they forget about wanting to delete or cancel).

I ran into this awful practice with Uber after a hack they know about lets your account be hacked by London drivers who rip you off for rides in London (im in the states). I went to my forgotten Uber account to cancel and found out I have to email support and further I cant remove all payment options from my account either. WTF ... as a consumer any company who follows such a practice needs their ass handed to them.

On the other hand as startup person I can see the slimey merit in following said practices.

I've been contemplating streaming my work for the same reason as the author of the post, but now I'm having second thoughts about choosing livecoding.tv. The merits will be there only until people realize that they're being tricked.

The type of value Uber provides is different from the value livecoding is trying to provide. People will continue to use Uber as long as it provides convenience because that's the value. As for livecoding, it's a different story.

Hmm, i don't know how you bring Uber in this conversation, but we are really not in the same space or sharing any information with them.

You along with other startups make it incredibly hard to cancel ones account. It's a trick to keep your user base numbers high vs. offering an easy way for the user to delete their own account themselves, as most startups use to allow.

It's also funny given the cofunders last tweet: https://twitter.com/jcbgreen

Wow. I did one stream there a month or so ago, and an admin showed up in my chat. They didnt do anything too out of tge ordinary, but I found their attitude to be a little too controlling. It seems like they're trying to build an educational platform and expect all their users to be on board with that. The admin interaction lift a bit of a sour taste in my mouth so I didn't log in again.

Their business model and their management competency are just too poor. They will not be able to compete with twitch.

I'm shocked this is a YC-backed startup. It seems standards have fallen substantially.

I made an account to see how their system worked after thinking about doing a stream myself a few months ago. After I signed up and poked around their platform, I was none too pleased with the features or way their application worked. They emailed me too many times (almost every day) in the first week and I just marked them as spam and went along with my life.

Glad to hear about what's going on here, I will be sure to never stream or give a website with this type of management my business :)

At the beginning of her post, with her explaining why she got into streaming, she almost convinced me to start an account myself; needless to say, by the end of the post and judging from the comments here, there is no way in hell I'd sign up.

Good news! Many other livestreaming sites allow this!

If livecoding keeps acting like this they are gonna lose whatever foothold they currently have of coding live streaming. With twitch.tv's recent announcment to open up streaming to creatives it is only a matter of time until they capture this audience too.

I can't speak for everyone, but unless some extraordinary new information comes to light I personally would never use livecoding.tv after observing this incident. It seems from the comments on this thread that a lot of HN readers agree with me.

And since livecoding.tv is targeted at programmers and a lot of programmers read HN, this is the end of livecoding.tv. It's surreal to watch it happen in real time.

Huh, I saw this livecoding site advertised here by the founders, seemed like a great idea and I hoped it would kick off. Sad to see the administration is unprofessional. I wonder how people can fail so hard at public relations. If they didn't want to delete her account all it would have taken is a "Sorry, accounts can't be deleted from livecoding.tv". Instead they had to turn this into something that destroys the reputation of their new site.

It's really amazing how poor it is. There really isn't any possible reason that would make it reasonable.

To be frank, there were only a few videos on the account and the account was not even visited by any other user last 30 days. It was just pending on our tasklist.

I think if it were only a matter of taking a long time to delete the account, we wouldn't be so unhappy. To me, the reason your team's behavior seems extremely unprofessional are

1. Not telling Liza when her account would be deleted

2. Telling her her account was deleted but not actually deleting it

3. Sending the "Do you and your friends want to disturb us with this" email

4. Editing Liza's account to claim that she was banned for spamming

Wow! This is the worst excuse for not completing the task that you have promised. It doesn't matter whether she had videos or not, it doesn't matter if anyone visited her profile or not. The only thing that matters is that your customer asked you to delete your account. And all you have done is lie, give excuses and edit her profile page with a vengeance that I (and others) cannot comprehend.

I don't understand how a company this small doesn't get the public opinion matters. I am will to bet they are not going to be around much longer.

Can you change the gender on your account? Switch it over to male and set up a couple dozen pseudonyms to throw off their count.

If Livecoding has aligned their interests with the gender ratio of their users to the extent that they're treating you like this, makes sense to speak back to them on their own terms. IMHO.

Unfortunately at this point that redirect back to home on login that I discovered after changing my password is still there, so I doubt I can change any part of my account details now; it's just going to sit there until they decide to actually delete it (if ever). But I did manage to change the profile description and stream title to make it clear that I am waiting for the account to be deleted before the redirect was put in place.

I didn't actually connect their shadiness about deleting my account with gender and am honestly not convinced that this is it. Sure, they were kind of pushy about promoting the site to women, but there is actually no gender identification on my profile other than my profile picture. I can't remember if gender was specified somewhere in my account settings but then not publicly displayed at this point.

Suggestion:

Write a Cease and Desist letter to

    Livecoding.tv (Livecoding Ltd)
    20-22 Wenlock Road
    London, N1 7GU
    England

That should get them to stop.

A letter such as this costs less than a Euro, and means they have no excuse not to act on it.

Otherwise you can try sending them a fax, that usually also has better chances at success with businesses.

    ----------------

I kinda want to move my twitch streams over to livecoding just to be able to get into this deletion mess and send lawyers after them now...

That's odd, their domain name suggests they are based in the small island nation of Tuvalu.

By that logic, Libya probably has the most active startup scene of any country right now.

You do know that's what the top level domains were actually for, right?

I don't disagree! Most countries' registries don't have requirements around geographical presence, so here we are.

There are more oddities like that:

The government of the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany uses for most official websites the domain .sh, which actually belongs to Saint Helena.

At this point almost all domains on .sh actually belong to companies or governmental entities in Schleswig-Holstein, the remaining domains mostly belong to geeks using it due to the similarity to the file ending .sh for shell files.

Examples:

- http://www.nah.sh/ (Official transit agency)

- http://www.studentenwerk.sh/ (Official Student Service Agency, operates dormitories, etc)

- https://www.wir-bewegen.sh/ (Kickstarter for public projects, operated by the government; one example is "a 3D model of the city for blind people as map, publicly accessible next to the train station")

Many more such cases exist all around the world, it is... weird.

Also: .nu is owned by Niue, but is mostly used by Swedish companies (nu is swedish for now). It was even taken over by IIS/.SE in 2013.

.nu is common in the Netherlands as well, it means the same thing in Dutch.

> Many more such cases exist all around the world

Yep. The Minnesota House of Representatives and Senate use http://www.house.mn/ and http://www.senate.mn/ respectively. It's really strange to see a government agency use a TLD belonging to a foreign country.

Rule #1: spammers lie.

Wait what, they're in the UK?

This is clearly data protection stuff. I've taken screen shots and poked the information commissioner.

People really need to read all of DrMJG_HN's comments in this thread. I can't believe what I'm seeing. Completely delusional.

And for a laugh, they need to check out how much karma he hasn't got...

Well, it looks like my profile is back again...again with accusations of spam...

https://www.livecoding.tv/lazer/

Wow

It looks like they _removed_ my username and profile, then _recreated_ it just for the sole purpose of this. This is pretty amazing.

This is the weirdest sequence of events I've ever seen from a company. At this point, from the point of view from someone that's not involved in this, it's more intriguing than it is frustrating.

Someone else pointed out elsewhere that maybe it was just a troll recreating the profile and not Livecoding themselves. I suppose that's possible, too.

And, for those still watching the drama, they've actually updated your profile again, so the first "banned" line now reads

    ANNED FROM LIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING
    BANNED FROM LIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING+
    BANNED FROM LIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING

The bizarre "+" is still there, but you've lost a "B" in "BANNED", so it looks like another by-hand update of your profile.

Wow. This could be another user re-creating the account to create drama, though. Is the rest of the profile info (favorite line of code, etc.) the same?

I wouldn't call it impossible, but this seems like such a deliberately bad move that I can't even believe it was done by livecoding.tv

No, the rest of the profile info is totally different. I agree, this is probably some troll recreating the account.

I had initially considered streaming on livecoding.tv for the same reasons as yours. Definitely won't do it now.

I'd guess this sort of thing results from the obsession over growth. They are desperate to make their user aquisition/retention numbers look good so they do scammy things to keep accounts. It's sad to see the aggressive behaviour though.

It's probably more likely that acquisition or retention isn't good, and this is done out of desperation.

It's probably this. I've livestreamed on Twitch + LiveCoding and have no clue why you would ever use LiveCoding. Twitch and Youtube seem like they're better in every capacity.

No, is not the case and is not warranted to spread wrong information. Please see main reply.

I understand you are under a lot of stress here but your defensive behaviour is making your situation worse rather than better. You are going through the comments on this story and adding posts trying to defend your mistake instead of apologising for it. This will not solve your problem.

They don't deserve you! You had the full right to ask them to delete your account!

Even if you where "an unreasonable user" they should never treat their users like that (just for their own sake)!

Livecoding.tv should immediately admit this huge mistake and apologize to prevent any further damage to their public image!

Calling your user a spammer?? Shame on you!!!

Just asked for my account to be deleted, their whole response to this situation is insane.

I think actual deletion of accounts is not a functionality that is high on any startups list - disabling is probably the usual course of action? However, to lie about it is another matter entirely.

It is a legal requirement in the EU under Data Protection Laws.

Outright deletion of data, especially anything used in financial calculations, might run afoul of Sarbanes-Oxley in the United States.

I say "might" because it's not exactly spelled out that way in the regulation. Basically, any sort of reports that are used to make financial decisions must be replicable. You have to be able to show an auditor how you came to your numbers. You have to show how the report would have looked at the time it was made, and what data it would have contained.

I could potentially see raw count of users, or counts of users combined with popularity of videos (and growth of popularity across those videos) be a part of plans on how to monetize such a site. If Livecoding.TV had made revenue projections based on some future monetization plan and had started circulating this plan amongst potential investors, it becomes a serious landmine to hard-delete data.

Most places assume this just means "keep backups", but I don't know anyone who is operationally prepared to restore year-old backups of databases and running application code to be able to appease such an auditor. Full compliance is really hard, so I almost always advise people to go for soft-delete instead. There are any number of technical and business reasons why soft-delete is better, too. If this report that a 3rd party registered a new account with the same name just to be able to troll everyone involved turns out to be true, that would be one of those reasons.

That said, that's a completely different issue than privacy compliance. Any sane authorization system should make it easy to de-authorize specific sets of data for everyone. No data request meant to go out into the world should ever lack an authorization check. Given the difficulties of keeping tabs on internal- versus external data, I just generally believe all data requests should come along with an authorization check, regardless of whether or not it's required, because you can't ever really predict what code a jr. programmer is going to reuse some day.

Deletion of accounts is a very low bar that should be met for anything to be qualified as a minimum viable product. It shouldn't be that hard, especially if you take 5 minutes to think about your assumptions and how you could handle it, right at the start.

This is a service that ends up running on the internet and can have international people using it. That means you need to be very conscious of international laws. EU citizens have a legal right to have their data deleted by sites.

Shame. I was really enjoying streaming while I coded. Not so much the livecoding platform (very buggy from my experience), but the activity itself.

I don't think I'll stream on their site again after this. Can't stand to support founders who treat their users like this.

Twitch.tv it is.

It was just a backlog we had. Her account and the multiple accounts her friends created days ago never had any big content on them. There is really no incentive for her request not to be fulfilled. You can contact awakekat on Livecoding.tv to hear her feedback on how we treat women: https://www.livecoding.tv/awakekat/

Her friends just created multiple accounts within a short time frame and thus our support thought they were just trolling together.

I don't know of any friends creating multiple accounts at all. If anything my friends learned to _never_ create an account with your site. I would also appreciate it if you did not "play dumb" in your communications with me. To be honest I can't believe this is actually still happening: http://i.imgur.com/NT6xH5X.png

Near the bottom on the imgur link:

``` I think it is just a complete misunderstanding you have ```

I might be wrong. But this is almost border line delusional!

It seems to be a go-to phrase for him. From a video linked elsewhere on this page: https://youtu.be/h66PNIUtaaE?t=17m38s

That video was posted in July...

I hope your cat gets better soon!

Thank you very much! He is better now (knock wood), but needs medication 3 times a day and may have a permanently damaged bladder. But as long as he's happy and peeing I'm happy.

when twitter bots go bad: https://twitter.com/livecodingtv/status/661046865488580610

Thank you for this post. I've been looking into using Livecoding in the exact same way the author has, and now know that it is not the platform for me.

Maybe there is space for a competitor?

Yeah, a competitor where users can easily fork the code and send a pull request (maybe even with support for a webIDE?) sounds like it could easily make profit in this situation...

I'm going to look into it.

They've also been spamming reddit pretty hard. As a mod of a programming sub, I've had to add their domain to the automod spam list for post spam, and then report a user or two to /r/spam for comment spam (and are now shadowbanned) . Kind of surprised to learn that they were YC.

I put in a deletion request for my account as well (https://www.livecoding.tv/wmoxam/).

The handling of this situation has completely nuked any trust I ever had in this service.

A word of advice to founders from the US: ignoring user requests to delete accounts or personally identifying information is a crime in some countries. (I'm only familiar with French and Canadian law.)

Thanks for the heads up. Gonna try to get my account deleted.

http://livecoding.tv/ell hopefully they get the message.

This happened to me too!!!!! It took so long, and was so annoying, and i'm still not even sure why they stopped coming.

Sounds like livecoding.tv is run by a bunch of jerks.

hm. livecoding.tv seems to be built on top of some version of mesh-app.io (which doesn't seem to be publicly available yet.) I wonder if this has something to do with their inability to delete accounts...

So they not only use Flash but every ugly trick in the book.

Some users prefer flash other HTML5. We are just testing HTML5 on staging server and will release HTML5 streams soon.

Nobody prefers flash for video streaming. Not one person on the planet.

The issue here is not that Livecoding.tv isn't removing this individual's account, but that individuals sign up for things with the expectation they have rights to their data. Here's a gem from Livecoding.tv's TOS which clearly indicates their intent with other people's data:

> All Materials contained on the Livecoding.tv Service are the proprietary property of Livecoding.tv or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies and/or third-party licensors. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names are proprietary to Livecoding.tv or its affiliates and/or third-party licensors. Livecoding.tv reserves all rights not expressly granted in these Terms of Service. Unless otherwise expressly stated in writing by Livecoding.tv, you are granted a limited, non-sublicensable license (i.e. a personal and limited right) to access and use the Livecoding.tv Service for your personal or internal business use only.

In short, if you sign up for an account on their site, they own EVERYTHING. They don't have to delete your account because all of their users agreed to these terms by using the site. Looking through the TOS, there is nothing mentioned about canceling accounts.

I'm empathetic to the author of the article, but I will point out that expecting ownership of your content after giving up ownership of your content is logically unsound.

Shaming aside, not signing up for a centralized service with limited rights like this in the first place would have resulted in less suffering for everyone involved.

I think you are quoting the part the protects their( livecoding.tv's ) intellectual property and , and not the streamer.

The license for the streamers stars at 11.Broadcasters.

It seems you are allowed to cancel the license:

11. Broadcasters

a.License from Livecoding.tv.

If you sign up for an account as a Streamer, subject to your compliance with these Terms of Service, Livecoding.tv hereby grants to you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, freely revocable license to use the Livecoding.tv Service for the uploading and distributing of authorized digital content, including videos (" Broadcaster Content ").

and:

I read through that, but that last part basically says "if someone hasn't watched your content, you can revoke the license from the content by deleting it". If anyone has seen any of the other content, the company owns a perpetual license for it. Regarding their site content, it would appear they think they own everything on the site, including user content:

> Unless otherwise indicated, all Content and other materials on the Livecoding.tv Services, including, without limitation...

That goes on to list all types of content, that the content is trademarked, copyrighted, etc. and then states they own all of the licenses to it, as I mention in my comments above.

In comparison, here's Github's statement on the rights to content:

> We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.

>Regarding their site content, it would appear they think they own everything on the site, including user content:

> Unless otherwise indicated, all Content and other materials on the Livecoding.tv Services, including, without limitation...

... are protected by United States copyright, trade dress, patent, and trademark laws, international conventions, and all other relevant intellectual property and proprietary rights, and applicable laws (including in your country of residence).

Where does it say that they own everything?? You are interpreting this whole contract incorrectly.

I read that as "if someone is watching a video, they don't suddenly lose their license just because the author removed the video from the platform". Which is reasonable, IMO.

That goes on to list all types of content, that the content is trademarked, copyrighted, etc. and then states they own all of the licenses to it, as I mention in my comment above.

Yes, but then they "otherwise indicate" that you license your content to them, ie., you own it.

> expecting ownership of your content after giving up ownership of your content is logically unsound.

...which is why the OP is only really concerned about account deletion, not content deletion (the second half of the article). I am surprised Livecoding has not figured a way to have even a "shell" account with no personal data left but still have the content left untouched, considering the stringent EU laws surrounding personal data.

Indeed. Even removing all personal data, putting "deleted account" in the account description and setting it to a company owned email addres would probably work as "deletion" and keep the content visible.

Maybe we didn't read the same story, but the issue I see is the way Livecoding treat their users. For example, saying that the account would be deleted on the next cron run seems to be one blatant lie among several.

Trying to shift blame with a "it's your own fault, you signed up" may satisfy a lawyer, but it doesn't really do much for customer relations.

Let me put on my EU-citizen glasses

That the latter is an issue does not make the former not an issue. The actions of Livecoding.tv here are reprehensible; if they didn't plan to remove the account—be the reason lack of technical capability or legal obligation—why tell the user otherwise? This is a marked display of carelessness.

https://www.livecoding.tv/terms/

http://www.twitch.tv/user/legal?page=terms_of_service

https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=GB&template=terms

> They don't have to delete your account

I haven't read the full document, so can't say if they HAVE to delete the account or not, but the last line of the privacy policy definitely implies you can remove any personal information they hold:

> If you would like to: access, correct, amend or delete any personal information we have about you, register a complaint, or simply want more information contact our Privacy Compliance Officer at support@Livecoding.tv

The user in question here is in the EU, the startup has their HQ in the EU, so EU data laws apply, and the user has to be able to delete their account and all data stored.

I don't think there is a need to discuss where legal headquarters is. We just had a backlog of backend tasks pending. It was just a matter of time.

It is necessary to discuss where legal headquarters is for the purpose of suing the site for libel, slander and violation of data laws.

The site has already been reported by an affected user to the local EU data protection officer, so the legal fallout has already started.

If you still have shares in the company, sell.

Is there an equivalent to livecoding.tv that I can use?

Did anyone else see "Eli the Computer Guy" slamming YC on his channel about an email exchange he had with the founder of Livecoding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h66PNIUtaaE

I found it to be fairly entertaining...

> "You are scheduled to be deleted on our next cron job. Nothing complex."

Is this serious? What's a cron job have to do with knocking out information from a rdbms?

I imagine a cron job could be useful if there was a script to clear out any static files - but you can also invoke the script manually. "Nothing complex" :)

Perhaps it's a manual cronjob - developer wakes up every morning at 9:00am, SSHs onto the production system, starts up MySQL, runs all of today's DELETEs.

It's a devops world, nobody needs DBAs or Sysadmins anymore.

Maybe their sysadmin got replaced by a cron job.

I’ll quote another comment from minimaxir:

> You're joking, but a quick Google search of [site:livecoding.tv banned] shows that's exactly what is happening.

> https://www.livecoding.tv/2pointoh/

> https://www.livecoding.tv/hekton/

Which shows their usual procedure for deleting or banning is... vandalism.

E Nervous system singa.e

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