They describe that they have come to the light and now realize the policy was bad, as well as the communication around it, but don't describe how they are actually going to address this fundamental misalignment with their userbase and out-of touch decision making.
"What does take responsibility mean?" "This is just PR fluff". "They are just saving face." Criticism of good things because the poster didn't like the motivation. Stuff like that.
Did you really think the company was going to bare their soul to you like you were their psychiatrist or their priest? Do you think you are even entitled to that?
Commenting about whether or not this is a good decision is valuable. Complaining about the content of PR fluff is not.
Why should we cheer on PR and product folks trying to break their fucking arms patting themselves on the back for walking back an incredibly disruptive, short sighted and user-hostile decision?
Analogous to “someone who will never be happy no matter what was said”, the tone of the press release will always be happy no matter what they have to say.
It seems very natural - almost inevitable, even - that someone will reply to an artificially max-positive document with an artificially max-negative comment.
(Personally, I made peace with the tiresome nature of both press releases and critical replies by viewing it as an informal application of Laplace’s Rule - add one success and one failure to the total count to more accurately estimate the real underlying probability. The press release presents one observation guaranteed to be as positive as possible, and the inevitable critical reply presents another observation guaranteed to be as negative as possible, so with those two in hand you can look at other observations and get a better final estimation.)
The reflexive complaints about press releases don't have that value.
Sure, they changed course on this single decision, but they haven't addressed the situation that allowed this to even take place, nor does it look like they are planning on it.
Even if the writer of the post explains lessons learned and policy changes they're making, it's no guarantee. The people who learned the lessons can leave the company. Policies can be changed at a moment's notice or simply never be enforced.
The best anyone will get is a contract that can be legally enforced, and that won't ever happen for free users.
If the reflexive maximally-negative complaints are contradicting the actual information presented, they had better come with strong evidence or I’m dismissing them (and I do find those comments more tiresome than press releases or the other negative replies; they come across as conspiratorial crank-cases with an axe to grind, even bordering on spam to my mind).
The comments I had in mind are “the most negative interpretation of the information that comports with the facts”, much like the non-information components of the press release are the most positive interpretation of the information that comports with the facts.
A press release contains info and fluff. The opposite of soft fluff is hard edges, so perhaps a cute and pithy summary of my view is that no fluffy PR statement is complete without an edgy reply.
So grow your own filter. But as another reply said, this press release still has valuable information remaining after having been filtered. Complaints about their press release reading like a press release do not.
I did! I combine the fluff of the PR with the edge of the negative reply and they cancel out, leaving me free to analyze the info that remains.
I personally think the rote complaints about press releases are much more tiresome than the press releases themselves.
From all the corporations that control so much of our lives, the government, science, medicine, religion. Every major institution in our society. Every message has to be carefully parsed and squinted at, one always has to deduce what might have been the (truthful, real, honest) conversation behind closed doors that produced what we're hearing or reading.
From every message it is possible to know only one thing: what the author wants us to think. What is real is almost always another story.
That is tiresome.
Related clip from Crazy People https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzyNPoI17rE
But we all know that, right? We don't need to pretend like we don't, or act like we are offended by it, as if it's the first press release we've ever seen.
this is why lying exists, because the ones doing the lying thinks it benefits them over telling the truth.
PR is lies, spindoctors are liars and scammers
Okay, then clearly the solution is to punish dishonesty even more harshly, thus fixing the incentives.
The CEO could take a 100% paycut, relinquish all of his shares, take 20 lashes on the back, and fire himself yet the top comments will always be about "oh so this is taking responsibility huh, how about not screwing it up in the first place???"
It's a tired act.
Interesting theory, but it doesn't match my experience - the only time I've ever seen a thread about a (japanese) CEO doing those things the comments were closer to "why can't our (USA) business leaders behave like this".
(I don’t disagree with your point at all but …) I’m reasonably sure many of us get paid to do both, sometimes simultaneously to satisfy various undue optimisms, and other times encapsulating our pessimisms from certain audiences.
The tiresome aspect is also putting his own words into the CEO's mouth, to make his point. Even though parent poster is probably somewhat right and we are feeling similarly, the cynicism shines through.
And you are right, nothing that they would realistically have said would have satisfied me. But that is because they have set themselves up for failure long before. Quoting from GordonS above [1]:
> I get what you are saying, but I gave little sympathy for their situation - they used the VC tactic of "give it away to gain and monopolise the market, then do the old switcheroo once we're #1", so they had to know what was coming.
What were the multiple points of failure that led to this decision and how are they altering their operations from preventing something like this from happening again?
Without deep transparency they will lose trust.
A win would be a commitment to never do this again (ideally), or put in something that binds them to provide <x> amount of notice.
What we can hope for is they learned something from this so when a hard decision like this must be made they’ll use a different approach.
As soon as one company gets away with leveraging namespaces to extort money the flood gates will open and everyone is going to have their hand out asking you to pay just to maintain a consistent identity across platforms.
It's time to make sure you've got trademarks on your namespaces IMO (if possible). At least that gives the upside of being able to make legal demands to companies that don't do enough to prevent impersonation and namespace squatting.
But it isn’t and they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. I will be continuing with my original plan of communicating ideally not using DockerHub internally and making every effort remove our reliance off of it.
Seriously, what else do you want? This kind of pointless whinging is just noise. They flat out said they were wrong in the first place.
1) transparency into who was responsible for this decision
2) how exactly this decision was made and how they came to the conclusion that it was sound policy
3) how they are going to prevent these decisions that are disruptive, user-hostile and short sighted in the future
4) some degree of commitment they won’t sunset this in the future when people aren’t as upset
I self-host 100% of my dev environment and tools. I don't care too much about getting services from Docker Hub, regardless of whether it's free or paid. However, I do care about my namespaces and I don't want someone acting as if they're me, even if it's innocent and unintentional.
Because of that I feel like I'm forced to deal with services like Docker Hub. It's a net negative for me to begin with, because I have to take the time to register an account, but it gets really awful if everyone starts asking for money to simply own a namespace.
On the Docker Hub side, there can't be much cost in letting me hold my namespace and, because I've got my preferred namespace there, it makes it low friction to check them out as the first option if I ever need reliable image hosting that scales. There's some reciprocal benefit IMO.
In principal I should probably be paying them something because all of my self-hosted stuff runs on Docker.