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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

I'm not defending Uber, but there seems to be a pattern of startups that at first everybody is in love with. The startup explodes and grows to become widely successful and morphs from startup to corporation. An incident happens, and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon and bashes them mercifully. Boycotts insue. Clone competitors pop up proclaiming to be "not-evil" and the cycle starts again.

Let me backup my claim with examples:

   GitHub
   AirBnB
   Uber
   CloudFlare

Who is the next unicorn to join the PR nightmare show?

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It's only natural. When a company is small and just starting out we're forgiving of mistakes. Once you start getting more established you really should have better practices in place.

Also when a company is small it's hard for them to make big mistakes because smallness precludes. Also, it's easy to give away awesome stuff to almost-nobody.

And, I think it goes deeper than that and reaches in to social signalling and self-identification. We like to be in on the new thing before everyone knows about it. Once that thing is big, and everyone is using it, and especially if it makes a mistake, then we lay on the criticism and distance ourselves from it.

I know I'm guilty of that. I wonder if this is an intrinsic part of being human or a learned behaviour. I'm leaning toward it being, as you say, only natural.

Don't forget Zenefits and Theranos.

I've been predicting failure for Instacart for a while, mostly because of their business model. But when the funding dries up and the business is unsustainable, businesses start doing shadier things (like stealing tips), so maybe they'll go out on a PR comet.

I still remember when everyone liked Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg (yeah, I'm old!). Facebook was the clean MySpace without all the flash and spamminess. The launch of their API/app platform was almost seen as an act of altruism towards third party developers. Mark was a nobody who had "made it", thanks to Silicon Valley's meritocracy. Ah, the good old days :)

I think Facebook is a considerable exception as it started as an exclusive place for University kids to plan and meet up then changed into the platform it is now where every one and their mom's mom has a facebook account and spends all their time on it. Facebook changed its audience, model of operation, and offerings completely, and also started to throw its weight around when it wanted things. This is a pretty far cry from what it had been and it also signaled the new age of the web.

Yeah people used to love Facebook. But it definitely changed its entire focus with multiple decisions and incidents, not just one or two hiccups.

I'm not a heavy Facebook user, I login once every few months, but I don't feel like it has changed dramatically in the ~12 years I've been using it. There are more ads today but it's otherwise basically the same product. I haven't closely followed any of the incidents and although there are likely good reasons not to like Facebook, I don't feel like its focus has changed much. Anyways, my intention wasn't to defend FB but just to illustrate how quickly narratives change.

The biggest difference from 12 years ago is invisible though- it's the news feed curation.

It used to be that you'd see the latest things from your friends and pages. Now you see what Facebook thinks you'll want to see from your friends and what some pages paid to advertise at you.

If you haven't liked something by that person in a while, you're unlikely to see anything by them if you only log in once every few months. And if you thought you'd see updates from a page after subscribing... well, you will if the page keeps paying for adverts.

Disclaimer: I don't use Facebook anymore, if I'm wrong please correct me!

No, understood, I wasn't saying you were defending Facebook, but I really do think its core purpose has changed. Even the way it functions is pretty drastically different than its initial offering.

I only used Facebook when it very first started and my University was added to the list of included Universities, and I didn't use it much since I didn't really trust it. Many years later (just last year), after leaving a job and my employees wanting to keep in touch with me, I started to occasionally log in just to check for messages, and it was a completely different place as far as I could remember. Nothing seemed familiar anymore, the "clean myspace clone" aspect was pretty much gone, since the social part was pretty much gone in favor of the feed. The rest is still there, but it seems like an afterthought now as opposed to what gets shown on the feed.

It seems like the hate begins when the companies don't own up to their mistakes and issues.

The 'hype cycle' [1] applies to all things.

http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hyp...

Whether or not something has a real utilitarian value determines if it will rise from the 'trough of disillusionment'.

Movements that are entirely emotional or euphoric (think music bands) - won't.

Products that are fun/fickle or mostly trendy (think some apps) won't either.

Products that have material value outside the hype hang on.

So the 'real long term value' of something is usually best measured by how well they do after the 'uncool' phase.

Facebook has done well after they became 'uncool'.

Twitter - not as well, but nevertheless they will stick around.

Snapchat? I think there is a lot more risk.

GitHub is evil now? What did I miss?

I don't think they are evil but... "GitHub Founder Steps Down After Harassment Probe" (https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom_pw/)

Not evil but they went a bit off the deep went with their "diversity" story, and it turned some heads for sure.

The technical director or somesuch (higher up manager) was writing stuff like

"don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon so let's limit their scope of damage"

Then their Social Impact director was giving presentations about how "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women."

So... I don't know, make up your own mind what that means.

They removed a repo because it was named "X for retards" instead of "X for dummies". All of the FORKS of that repo got nuked without notice. This is because the notice went to the original owner of the repo, not the owners of the forks.

I was about to ask the same and the replies aren't clarifying the extent of the sentiment. The black bar is the only signal I've seen that they're 'going dark'.

I also didn't realize that AirBnb is less liked. I still believe in the AirBnb/Uber model if not the current implementations. (btw, Uber is the AirBnb of transportation right, AirBnb started the model?)

> startups that at first everybody is in love with. The startup explodes and grows to become widely successful and morphs from startup to corporation. An incident happens, and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon and bashes them mercifully. Boycotts insue. Clone competitors pop up proclaiming to be "not-evil" and the cycle starts again.

Apple may be the only company which seems to be perpetually stuck in that cycle and still going strong. Even Steve Jobs apparently said something along the lines of "we are the biggest startup on the planet."

In all of these cases it was self-inflicted. Not a "bandwagon".

The trick is that when a company turns out to have major issues, go looking for the people who predicted it. Go looking for the people who never gave them a pass. Go looking for those who have been critical of these companies from the start.

Then see what other companies they are critical of and try figure out why the industry fails to be critical of them early.

I have always liked GitHub.

I never liked Uber. Buy a nice four door vechicle, pay for maintenance, wear and tear, and make us money. Excuse me, so many of us have a late model four door vechicle collecting dust---just waiting to "Get our side hussle on,". This company, from the earliest days, just reminded me of the terrible jobs that were created in the last eight years. (Yes--the tech jobs are great, but they will go away eventually.)

AirBnB was cute to begin with, until neighbors decided to open hotels.

I like new technology, and new companies, but treat All employees fairly? And just because you have the money for the best Lawyers/political muscle; try to follow laws that could put the average Joe in jail. I couldn't just decide to start a taxi service, or rent rooms out daily? Just crazy?

I'm all for change, but these companies are exploiting for essentially a small group of people. Wait until all the bugs are worked out if their systems--bye, bye Mr.Imbeingpaidwelltoprogram. "Oh--we will always have a spot for you, but at a minimum wage.

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