RescueTime guys, your reaction to criticism is immature. You are shutting down the feedback channel that has fallen into your laps - think what will happen after this process is complete. I urge you to reconsider your approach.
I think you're misinterpreting. We're not badly reacting to criticism, it's just surprising seeing that the tone here has seemingly changed from being one that used to be receptive to and encouraging of rapid progress and user-driven product development. The reason we launched these features to the broad audience was so they could be used and we could have feedback submitted. The reason I posted the blog post here is because this community is one that likes to try out the cutting edge things that are out there and frequently tend to post useful feedback.
I felt like the tone of the earliest comments was overly harsh, considering the above. This was always intended to be a soft-launch. I thought it would be a good idea to involve the HN community in it. Sincere apologies if this wasn't communicated better. Lesson learned.
Please, we want your involvement and your feedback, but in no way was this launched prematurely. This is the way we've always operated and we're proud of the product we've been able to develop because of it.
I think your responses are fine when talking w/ an audience who is familiar with the personalities involved, but probably not fine for professional-grade PR/marketing/whatever.
I think there's a linguistics word for that, speaking with one degree of familiarity when another is expected.
(I was also surprised by the hostility and tone of the comments, FWIW, but I think it's a sign of HN's evolving audience.)
Specifically, you use words like "premature" and "alarmed." More generally, I knew that RescueTime was posting this here in a chummy-chum-chum sort of way, rather than in an ultra-formal, survey-your-customers sort of way.
So, your comment was alarmist (understandable because you were acting as a customer, not as a friend of the company), while RescueTime's responses were too friendly and "unprofessional."
HN used to be all YC, all the time, so posting here was more about getting feedback from your peers, not your customers.
Does that make sense?
I don't think you did anything wrong, and I don't think this thread is evidence of RescueTime's unprofessionalism. If I showed my product to a fellow entrepreneur who wasn't a customer I'd feel comfortable teasing them back when they gave me shit, but I wouldn't ever do that to a customer.
It's worth noting that they have very serious-looking pricing page (segmented even to personal, business, education and enterprise plans) and I actually had to enter my credit card number and activate a recurring plan before I could get to the juicy features. This stuff sets expectations.
As a customer, your feedback was totally appropriate. As a peer, their response was totally appropriate.
I think this misunderstanding is a result of HN's evolving audience, which used to be dominated by YC alums or people who knew YC alums, but is now less cohesive.
Feedback comes in many forms, it is a data mining process. Just like you don't look a gift horse in the mouth you can't really complain about getting good free feedback in a format that you don't like.
And just speaking for myself I thought it was phrased very nicely, there was a sense of disappointment but nothing that even borders on 'hostile'.
However, I also reflexively dislike it when people start lecturing (though, lord knows, I'm sometimes guilty of that myself).
Compared to some of the other YC companies that received feedback here it was immature and unprofessional.
I think meanwhile that coin seems to have dropped.