“We’re technical” is no excuse for a pitchfork mob. I’m technical and HN’s reply feels more like echo-chamber than a reasoned consideration of what they said. Almost every comment as of now is people reacting to the tone and dialect. It’s like there’s nothing to object to technically and so the mob has turned their rage onto speech patterns.
With topics like this it's worth waiting for ca. 12h (depending on your timezone) and then reading the whole page of comments at once. I'm here 4h after you, and I saw 2 most upvoted comments as pretty sympathetic if not outright supportive to the company. There's a lot of discussion below them, with both sides being represented near-equally. There are some bad comments - one or several words of generic dismissal or insults, and one lengthy incoherent rant - but they are mostly flagged, dead, or downvoted to the bottom of the page.
I believe using HN (for whatever reason) is a skill in its own right. If you want to use it as a tool for escaping your own echo-chamber, it takes some more thought to get right. Once you do, it works a significant percentage of the time, which is kind of impressive for a simple marketing platform of the Y Combinator (which is just a bunch of people with money and a bunch of people wanting that money to build or expand their business).
> It’s like there’s nothing to object to technically and so the mob has turned their rage onto speech patterns.
I’m usually the first to roll my eyes at such mobs but this case is different. When you have a company that has a documented past of privacy and security violations and then releases a letter saying “sorry about the new reported problems but you wouldn’t have known about it if we weren’t so popular lately,” you can hardly blame us for getting ranty. It just demonstrates that fixing those problems was never a priority and thus that press release is really just meaningless platitudes.
I absolutely blame us for pitchfork mob behavior in the initial reply, even if there’s a risk that Zoom is misbehaving intentionally. Theories about their motivations are no excuse for this. There is never an excuse for this. This behavior is unprofessional of us, disrespectful of us, and makes HN look no better than 4chan or Reddit to anyone who sees us doing so.
Which initial replies are we talking about? The one I wrote was literally just calling out their statement as being generic, templated and “hogwash”. I don’t see what’s disrespectful nor unprofessional about that.
As for other people’s comments, if others took it too far (I haven’t read the majority other other comments since I came to this early and haven’t ventured outside of my thread since, so you’ll have to excuse my if ignorance here) then perhaps you should be taking that up with them rather than me?
In any case, I don’t appreciate being lumped as part of a “mob mentality”! My own opinions are my own and not the product others.
