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Comment by mattm | Hacker News Reader

Even the CEO's "apology" is pretty bad. He still finds a way to take shots at the original poster saying his original message was inflammatory (could also be read as how I'm justified in my response), that "he started it" and that the team was "spoken down to or treated dismissively" which they weren't. All the original feedback was about the project and was not directed at specific individuals.

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His 'apologish' is basically the same as his original flamepost, but dressed in PR.

He places all blame on the user, basically calling him a dick again, and re-brags about their thousands of users, while attempting to sound noble.

tbf that user was indeed being a dick

I really don't think it's inappropriate for the user to be a dick. I have no obligation to respect what you built unless it's genuinely fantastic, especially when you're asking for money.

Everyone has an obligation not to be a dick.

I meant "be a dick" only in the sense of providing a no-holds-barred critique of the product. Generalizing it is strawmanning.

fyi, I would consider this as a general statement to be the disrespectful attitude of an asshole, and I don't think I'm in the minority with that. Things people build don't have to be fantastic or free to deserve respect.

Even as a builder myself, I prefer to get unfiltered unabridged reactions from my users, emotions and all. I think it's more disrespectful when you tell someone they've built something good when you don't really mean it. It's a form of condescension and betrays that either you don't believe the person can do better, or you don't care to help them do better.

Truthful feedback is always a gift even if it hurts.

How I see things:

  - User is a bit of a dick (bad)
  - Engineer attempts to defuse situation (okay)
  - user expands (good)
  - CEO escalates situation (terrible)

Aiden definitely didn't begin the interaction the right way but it's also taking place over Twitter and the platform encourages refined points (would anyone have responded if his second response was his first?). The engineer got things going in the right direction but then the CEO turned it all around and made it far worse than had they just let Aiden yell into the void. It screamed arrogance and a disconnect from the users. Sorry, but the number of users a product has often doesn't correlate with its quality.

You need to also consider expectation and responsibility. Unfortunately there's no expectation or responsibility for a user to be well behaved. But that's not true for a business and especially a CEO. Yes, you can say it's unfair that responsibility doesn't go both ways but also recognize that there's a vastly different power dynamic.

No they weren't. If I say 'this thermos is a worthless piece of shit' that does not make me a bad person. Some religious tradition or other might argue that using negatively loaded words is bad for my soul or whatever and that's kind of the position you've taken.

Same goes for corporations. They aren't real people, and when you act as a representative of one you also aren't a real person, you're taking on a persona and doing theater. If someone says something mean about you as such a persona that's like someone saying that Orpheus was stupid for looking back.

Now this doesn't mean it's generally fine to be nasty to customer support, because they don't represent the corporation since they have no power over it, unlike e.g. the CEO or the board.

He didn't use any insults, nor did he swear, nor did he address any specific person. Instead, he just expressed his negative feelings toward a product.

The part about his team is so obviously performative, as though he’s such a great leader he just couldn’t help himself from being a dick because someone was “speaking down to his team”

A mediocre PR staffer got paid a decent piece of money to find a way to frame ab outburst as heroic

I will never use coderabbit due to the ceo's "apology". It's quite evident that he's a toxic douche and the product can't possibly be great.

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