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Comment by mdiep | Hacker News Reader

I think we can all agree that Marco overreacted: he says as much in his blog post.

But this doesn't affect my confidence in the Instapaper service. I think it says a lot about Marco that he was willing to admit his fault and reverse his decision—much more than the mistake itself said.

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I just don't see how making a very poor decision and then reversing in the face of intense and justified backlash is a net positive. Read it later apps are a dime a dozen and mostly interchangeable. Now we have a "willing to censor over a personal vendetta" checkbox in our comparison shopping. Even if he learns from this, I just am not going to do future business with a person who has crippled his product for users over a petty blogfit.

"Crippled" is a bit of an overstatement. Of the billions of websites in existence, he blocked one, for a poorly-thought-out but well-intentioned reason, and reversed it in a candid and transparent way.

I don't see how that would outweigh almost any other comparison shopping consideration (UI, features, etc.).

A developer making his product worse over personal bullshit would outweigh almost every other consideration, especially in such a competitive market.

You persist in assuming he had malicious intentions. Do you have a good reason to conclude malice rather than incompetence?

Going with my instinct, I would definitely assume malice. In this very post, Marco says that he overreacted in part due to his anger at 9to5Mac.

But in the end, I don't care if it was malice or incompetence. I refuse to believe person who made a mistake and apologized > person who never made the mistake in the first place. Learning is fine, but some things you shouldn't have to learn.

You've already noted this in your previous comment, and now you've included a word that is typically used in anger.

I'm guilty as the next internet-person of over-reacting. I can see no reason to be upset about someone else doing the same, whether it's Marco, you, or any other reasonable stranger.

It is a personal habit of mine that I treat shit and its variants as very casual terms. Doesn't reflect well on me, but it is a failing of mine. I'm not angry at all, just slightly baffled at how quick everyone is heap praise on someone who did something very stupid and then backtracked after many people pointed out how stupid they were being. Bullshit in this case is just used to point out how frivolous the matter was that caused the censoring.

It's called learning. Most of us get to make our mistakes in private or only in front of a few people. Some folks are public figures and get to show the whole world. On the whole, he has been a good guy and I am willing to move past it because this stuff happens.

It is very much like what I tell people about System Administration: "all your successes will be in the darkness and all your failures in the full light of day".

It's not like, "oops, I dropped an egg". It was censorship due to differing opinions -- not okay under any circumstances whatsoever and he really shouldn't be trusted ever again.

That is a serious load of crap and if that's how you deal with the people in your life, I wish you luck. Because we all go to extremes during our lifetimes and the only way back is for others to understand and allow us to move on.

Marco is not a government, he is one dude who has taken a lot of crap from 9to5. He got mad and acted. He regrets it, but I don't like bullies very much and sometimes those who are bullied will go to extremes.

That's not how I deal with people in my life, that's how I deal with service providers.

I would be wary of throwing the word censorship around. This is nothing of the sort. Instapaper deciding not to interact with a particular website (whether foolishly, in this case, or maliciously) is hardly censorship. At worst it is simply sticking your tongue out in the general direction of someone you dislike.

Censorship may carry ominous tones, but censorship is merely the practice of an overseer examining material and suppressing objectionable content. There are varying levels, obviously. I am not trying to associate Instapaper with oppressive governments. But Instapaper did temporarily censor 9to5Mac.

Absolutely. If anything I'm more confident that he wouldn't make the same mistake twice. He recognized that he made a mistake and he's tried to rectified it -- he'll only need to cross this bridge once.

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