I appreciate your direct honesty here and elsewhere, but I—and likely much of your core market—feel that leverage of opt-out and old customer data to get critical mass in a pivot to an unrelated business was already unethical. That you’re a recruiter made it inexcusable but it was never a idea that was respectful to your users to begin with.

Dude, you were going to use us to publicly endorse your new platform via usage and give it immediate legitimacy, without our consent. Don’t you get that’s what “critical mass through public profiles” means? People join because people are already there?

This is probably the post that disturbs me most of what I’ve read, for simply ignoring that the decision was problematic on multiple levels. Either you’re still not completely getting it or this is disingenuous, and neither option is comforting.

And trying to be charitable as possible here, it’s very easy to take your clinical recounting as being cavalier in its precision. I don’t think we’re all necessarily far enough from the situation yet that you should treat it as the distant past when discussing it. You still have my data, at least for the moment, and it’s still an ongoing concern.