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Comment by milkshakes | Hacker News Reader

For the record, "opt in" has a specific meaning. For your spamming to be considered "opt in", a user would have to actively take an action that indicates that they want you to spam their friends. What you have described appears to be an "opt out" scenario.

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>I didn’t have to do it but I thought oh well, I guess I’ll do it and see what happens.

The guy whining in the blog post exactly opted in.

For context:

> FounderDating asked me to identify ten that I would vouch for. I didn’t have to do it but I thought oh well, I guess I’ll do it and see what happens. So all I did was click their photos. Nothing more.

Can't speak to the rest of the flow but clicking photos indeed sounds like opting in.

Yes, he opted in to "vouch for" those people. A ethical UX designer would have shown a modal showing the full message with the list of people it would go to BEFORE sending it on the user's behalf.

I think we all agree that he opted in to vouching for the people. The complaint is that it wasn't clear that vouching also entailed sending a message if you didn't opt out of the message portion.

He opted in for one action, and was signed up for two actions. How is the second action considered opt-in?

He clearly did not give his full consent because the UI was designed to bury the thing that he would have explicitly opted-out of.

No, you're deliberately misunderstanding her. Here's a screenshot of the page in question: http://cl.ly/image/2V302C3j290B

I can see how it'd be easy to miss the fact that this will send an email, although it's stated unambiguously, at the top of the page, and underlined. And it's definitely opt-in. I have to select folks.

Thank you for posting the screenshot but I don't think this is the one I saw. It was a different flow. I was not applying and asking people to vouch for me. I believe I was asked who I would vouch for.

That's not the page in question.

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