It looks like Livecoding have now updated my profile for me, to claim I am "spamming them":
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
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).
CTRL+V, RETURN, RETURN,
CTRL+V, RETURN, RETURN, CTRL+V and then accidentally hitting + together with RETURN....
Which, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
The vitriol was spelt LIIVECODING now it has been corrected to LIVECODING - wow, just wow.
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.
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.
Is that legally irresponsible naming someone in full and directly implying they were responsible for a negative action?
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.
They're investors, not chaperons.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for getting in touch. I would love to just have my account deleted and move on. No need for Michael to contact me.
This is unacceptable behavior from any business.
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.
this is too good, it could only get better if you could somehow manage to slip "soon" in your reply.
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.)
customer‑focused ... and professional
Might want to re-think that too.
Mishandling personal information is a big deal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/timferriss/comments/3g2mjg/tim_ferr...
"Startup L. Jackson @StartupLJackson Sep 4
[Startup L. Jackson Retweeted Ced]
How to make your team completely ineffective.
Treat communication & collaboration w hostility.
Done."
It seems a little strange that that was the course of action taken here.
So far everything you and your cofounders have done has made this problem worse and larger.
You are untrustworthy and incompetent.
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.
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?
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.
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.
TBH most of this is basic competence. YC can't ensure that all of the companies are competent in all aspects.
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.
Well, if it's not a YC problem, it should very well become one.
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.