Hi drakonka, I have only just found out about this, and was until now not aware of what happened. I don't know why my cofounder Michael marked you as spam, and I will ask him to contact you. I can only apologise for the handling of your account deletion, it really is not acceptable that it took so long, so we will make it a priority to improve this.
What's wrong with you? Take the page down. There's a whole HN thread sitting here hitting fucking refresh on it over and over again waiting to see how much more drama your insane team can generate over this. Are you running a company, or a very elaborate piece of nerd performance art?
Normally I'm not a fan of comments like this but this guy is running a company, a YC backed one in fact, and I think the application of a clue stick might be just what's needed.
Looks like you guys just corrected the spelling of your website name on my profile (previously "LIIVECODING.TV"), which is still accusing me of spamming. Is this the kind of improvement you had in mind?
Are you just copying and pasting these replies now without looking at which comments you are replying to? My name is literally on the website this thread links to, and my LinkedIn profile is on the Contact page. Of course it was also up for hours last night on the Livecoding profile you vandalized. I think you're confused.
If I may allow myself a guess, possibly the line of thought at livecoding.tv, given the other examples of banned users on your site, and given the lie about the cron job, is that these are merely moronic, worthless customers you're alienating that you wouldn't want on your site anyway. Perhaps you think (thought?) that this is another such instance. This is not the case. You've created a huge leak in your potential enthusiastic user base, which now consists of "programmers willing to stream their content who also happen not to be HN readers."
Mistakes happen. Many startups have survived bad publicity on HN. Your actions have not ensured you a spot in this roster. Even generously overlooking the juvenile behavior of your cofounder and ban messages, the narrative of livecoding.tv stored in the collective brain of HN is now "fails to respond to user and petulantly refuses to apologize for seven hours."
The best thing you can do right now is to identify the responsible individual in your company, apologize specifically, and abjectly, as a company, on behalf of this individual, remove all the ban messages, delete OP's account, explain how a cron job came to enter the story, and both explain and apologize for why this took two hours to resolve after you heard about it.
(Disclaimer: I was about to sign up for livecoding.tv for similar reasons as OP just yesterday. I'm disappointed to know this might've happened to me.)
If this is how you usually "mark spammers" her account issue is the least of your problems. It makes it look like the site is run by a paranoid schizophrenic. Most unprofessional thing I've ever seen from a YC company, even if the allegations would be true.
In all seriousness, you need to remove your co-founder's ability to do anything on your site. If that's not practical, you should seriously think about making an exit yourself. For one, your business is now effectively dead in its primary market, it's going to be a long hard road back, if it's even remotely possible; for a second thing, you've just had your name and personal and professional reputation completely tarnished by what appear to be Michael's actions, and made worse by the childish retaliation on OPs profile (regardless of who did that).
The loss of your own reputation is going to be harder to come back from. Reputable VCs doing even basic due diligence are going to see this incident and aren't going to want to have anything to do with you, unless you show swift and decisive action, one way or another. So far your response has been neither swift nor decisive.
For what it's worth, asking Michael to contact OP seems like a really bad idea. He's hardly shown good customer services skills so far, do you really think he's going to do a better job suddenly?
You have completely destroyed your company. And now you seem hell bent on destroying your own reputation. If this wasn't so fucked up, it would be sad.
Why is the page still up with the spamming accusations on it? If you're a co-founder, please take care of it ASAP instead of wasting drakonka's time 'contacting' them.
You can do more than apologise. You can stop calling her a spammer, delete her profile entirely, apologise profusely, and make sure this kind of utter ridiculousness never happens again! I suggest making sure your cofounder never has anything to do with user relations.
Uh, you should be acting a lot more decisively than that, considering that your co-founder is currently torpedoing your company's reputation in front of a large part of your potential userbase.
As part of cleaning this mess up you need to also institute an inviolable policy that you will never edit a user's profile without the user's permission unless legally required to. If there is something in a profile that you cannot allow to remain on your site then you should delete the profile content. If you want to name and shame spammers it should be done somewhere other than the profile.
This is important because it never occurs to most users that you might edit their profile, and so it never occurs to them that you might edit other users' profiles. Thus, when people see something on someone else's profile they assume the person put it there.
Founder Comment was over 1 hour ago and the seeming libel and doxxing of Lazer's full name, and employer are still up - an apology in words but not actions - messing with someones employment is egregious.
As minimaxir pointed out, she's not even an employee of Dice.com, she's works at the similarly named video game studio DICE. A legal minefield for Livecoding.tv for sure...
As I mentioned here[1] they at least mention this address on their site. Might not be headquarters, but at least means they are operating under british law.
Wow, is there any recovering from this? Usually I'm against the internet machine latching onto people that have stuffed up. But you're trying to publicly humiliate a user that just wants to delete her account. I'll be surprised if you last much longer.
Idle curiosity: Are you aware that you have zero believability at the moment now unless you can demonstrate results or at least your commitment usefully?
2 hours and only a spellfix (which is even more insulting than nothing). Still no clue about priorities it seems. I guess after Twitch Creative all press is good press... Let's hope for some press.
Do you have any explanation as to why you are running a page with her name, publicizing her employment and calling her a spammer? That requires both a deliberate effort to research her, and then the poor judgment to actually post the text, presumably in an effort to shame her.
Hi, how is your company such an absolute colossal failure? Reading the replies of this thread, it keeps getting worse and worse. You should be doing a hell of a lot more than "ask him to contact you". DELETE THE FUCKING ACCOUNT!
So, since its 3 hours since you said this and the page is still up, the charitable interpretation is that you don't have the technical know-how to take it down yourself and are frantically trying to get in touch with Michael, who does. Or, you've gotten in touch with Michael, and he's just being a stubborn dick and is refusing to take it down. If that's the case, I feel kind of sorry for you. Sucks the fate of your company seems to have hinged on an apparently unhinged individual.
