Raspberry Pi brags about hiring a spy, then doubles down
raspberrypi.social
raspberrypi.social
But, the edgy responses from Raspberry Pi aren't inspiring to this longtime customer. I've been following RPILocator this morning to source some CM4s for a project, but I'll look at alternatives after seeing their responses. "Bye bye now," indeed.
The archived post (linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33911670) worked for me.
But the optics aren't great.
And the response to the criticism reads like Pi's social media person is trying to take them down from the inside.
Being that toxic to fans and customers on social media is - I'll put this bluntly - stupid. It's unprofessional and very, very off-putting.
Maybe a better play would be to let the responses roll, then do a blog post discussing the use of technology in law enforcement. They let the haters get under their skin and provoke an aggressive response... take the bait and you lose.
"ACAB" is not a criticism tho and that's all I see
There's a lot more anti-cop folks on mastodon, so coming out right away with "We hired a policeman & it's going great" is probably not the best icebreaker. It's already gonna set folks on edge.
Then the quote is about hiding covert video and audio surveillance, which is also something that's not gonna be well received by the audience on mastodon.
They then doubled down in their responses to folks concerned with the toot. They started making edgy responses which simply shouldn't be how brands engage folks on mastodon. It's a different audience than twitter. Telling well-respected folks to unfollow and "chill" is unnecessarily combative, especially by saying condescending stuff like "bye bye now" and calling followers childish.
If they would have framed it as hiring a former security officer and then detailing what he's doing with the Pi, they would have been fine. But they framed it in just about the worst way possible, then doubled down with troll-y replies.
I respect Raspberry Pi for standing by their employee, and the need for technical skills in law enforcement.
IMHO, it seems the only story here is that people are discriminating against this guy because he's a cop. They know nothing about him other than they don't like his typecast.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221208131915/https://raspberry...
The primary source is "Meet Raspberry Pi’s Maker in Residence – Toby Roberts" available at:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/meet-raspberry-pis-maker-in...
It was archived.
Apparently they hired a former police officer whose specialty was disguising surveillance equipment.
Which kind of tracks. If you want specialty cases for your Raspberry Pi units to blend with your environment, it's not a bad choice per se.
So many people believe he's going to be building backdoors on the silicon. That's not what he does.
if this is an official voice of the company itself, then this is a super awful way to carry yourself in public. Your customers might be from "blue states" or "red states" but their money is all the same: green. Alienating customers == bad.
User agents don't toxify social media communities. User's do.
Social media is an unnatural environment, there’s more time to cultivate replies.
"The medium is the message? Dafuq does that mean?"
"You know how every social network is horrible?"
"Ah, now I get it."
It doesn't.
We should go back to ignoring some people. That doesn't mean banning them, just ignoring.