I read him as brilliantly trolling Elad with everything that would trigger him to be pissed off. Simply a flawless troll against the social justice types, meant to be completely politically incorrect to infuriate the kind of person who would post with Elad did, and it seems like everybody here is biting too.
Given that Elad's reaction was to run here and post it, I'd say it worked. Most successful and subtle troll I've seen in a long time.
At some point, trolls have to crawl out from underneath their pre-pubecant rock and realize that "trolling" and "being an asshole" are the same thing. If trolling is the sort of thing you enjoy doing, fine, but don't expect to get along much with anyone but other assholes.
I never claimed that he wasn't being an asshole. I just don't think he actually believes what people are debating in this (thankfully now deleted) thread. If I'm right, and I'm 98% sure I am, this thread where people are arguing every word of what he said is a demonstration of a pretty damned good troll at work.
The definition of trolling is pretty nebulous, by the way; one could make that case that you attempted to troll me by calling me pre-pubescent, and hoped for me to lower myself to your level.
Apologies, I'm not referring to you as prepubescent; rather I'm referring to "trolling" as prepubescent behavior. I edited my post to more accurately communicate that point.
Trolling is a loosely defined term, but most definitions agree that it is a tactic whose primary purpose is to "get a rise" out of someone. The method used to accomplish this here (in the FB post) is to use language becoming of an asshole. Impersonating an asshole as a rhetorical strategy seems like an act doomed to fail.
I have no appreciation for trolling as a rhetorical device. It belongs in the bin with other disingenuous debate techniques. There are, I think we can all agree, far better, more honest methods of making one's point.
The good trolls are basically self-sacrificial. A good friend of mine makes the racists on Stormfront look like idiots by trolling them without them realizing it. It can be a weapon of good. However, I agree with you; everybody these days rushes to call what they're doing trolling when it falls apart in their face, but the post under discussion here is what a troll should look like, IMO.
Go read his other public timeline posts then where he reveals the depths of his misogyny. And then remind yourself that this person is representing the Ruby community on facebook.
1. I don't maintain a Facebook account because it's either family bickering and arguing, spam I don't give a shit about, arguments I don't give a shit about, or trolling. What some guy says on Facebook concerns me absolutely zero and it is completely not worth my time. So no, I won't be reading his timeline. Because I can't log in.
I'm good friends with someone who is an absolutely face-blistering troll on Stormfront; everything he says online has to be part of his "act," if you will, so it would surprise me very little if this guy's entire Facebook schtick is keeping up his act. Welcome to the Internet.
2. I hope you read my other comment and stop treating women like they need to be protected from everything, because you perpetuate exactly what you hope to destroy with a blog post like this.
3. You got the pants trolled off you and want to argue about it with someone, and no, it's not going to be me. And now that your thread's been deleted from HN, it's not going to be anybody else here, either. Seriously, your reaction to the guy's post is absolutely comical given that you were being trolled, and is exactly what he wants you to do. Plus, now you've given him an excuse to ban you.
I'm going to add a fourth thing:
4. You've spent more of your life talking to that guy, me, HN, and your blog's readers about this topic than you should have, by a mile. Focus on things that can actually make a difference, like listening to what women want to see change in the industry instead of projecting your penis onto the industry from a position of male authority.
Yes. Filter gem names to block terrible, woman-hating names like retarded, therapist, hoe, and sex. A rake is an immoral pleasure seeker[1], better get rid of that one too! That will fix your community's problems, Ruby, because that's totally what the problem is! You nailed it!
Or rather than a bunch of dudes blogging about how to fix the problem, we listen to the women for once and not treat them like a tiny snowflake, ready to melt if they read the word fuck. Christ almighty. Nothing perpetuates this sort of shit more than male voices of authority saying "women can't handle a gem named 'bj'! We're assholes if we let it stand!"
I agree with you on rape-me, which is why I left it out. There's an American breed of thought which says that the mere mention of anything related to sex demeans women and objectifies them, which comes from puritanical sensibilities. I've been in a meeting where someone discussed something sexual which was actually in-context to make a point about a product, and someone interrupted him and said "let's not discuss sexual matters, there are women present."
Smoked a cigarette with the woman in question later that day and she basically rolled her eyes about it.
Actually, you're the pretentious one here, using a device specifically labeled for emergencies to complain at someone every day about the cleanliness of the elevator. They're telling you it's not their job because you're ringing the fucking police, not custodial staff. You are diverting police resources away from, you know, responding to rapes and stabbings because you're a precious snowflake that can't handle a bit of piss on his way to work (undoubtedly in a city that also smells like piss). I'm surprised you haven't been arrested or shot yet, particularly since you are arrogant enough to believe that the rules do not apply to you. Take your bike in the elevator and suck it up. I bet you sneak on with your bike during rush hour, as well.
Those of us that ride BART daily are smart enough to understand that BART has culturally drifted into a transportation service that is inappropriate for children. Particularly during rush hour, BART is an extremely unsafe place for children, and the reason you are disgusted by bringing your children onto BART is because you are taking an unnecessary risk by doing so. You are correct that it shouldn't be this way, but you are a terrible human being for abusing BART employees for the situation in the manner that you do.
We get it. BART is disgusting in some places. You know what? It still beats the hell out of traffic for me every day that I rode it, and I don't walk around making my problems everyone else's problems because I expect perfection out of everything I do. It's a public transportation service, not your personal train. Hop off your horse, get in line with the rest of us and shut up, or go on Craigslist and buy a car, for crying out loud. You're a technologist. You can afford one.
God, I hated people like you when I commuted daily on BART. People like you are too self-absorbed to realize that they make everybody else's commute suck by broadcasting and/or protesting how much the commute sucks. If I had a dollar for every time someone tried to sneak a bike on during rush hour and then had a standoff with the train operator, making the rest of us miss our transfers, I could buy a car.
The only person broken in this situation is you. You wouldn't last a second in New York. I'd think twice about letting these comments stand attached to your name, because they make you look really bad. Like, I hope I never interview you bad.
You're being an ass: If you are in an elevator, there is a button to call the agent. This is THE ONLY BUTTON to all the agent. When you are in a confined room with an infant and a 2 year old and the space is covered in piss and god-knows what else - it is perfectly appropriate to us that button to complain about the hygiene, cleanliness and SAFTEY of that space.
In the event of an overdosing homeless person outside the elevator upon arriving to the platform level, it is again appropriate - and to demand that BART keep these services not only functional - but at a level of accepted cleanliness should not be some ridiculous request.
>It's a public transportation service, not your personal train. Hop off your horse, get in line with the rest of us and shut up, or go on Craigslist and buy a car, for crying out loud. You're a technologist. You can afford one.
> If you are in an elevator, there is a button to call the agent. This is THE ONLY BUTTON to all the agent.
The emergency call button is the only button to call the agent because the only reason to call the agent is to report an emergency.
> it is perfectly appropriate to us that button to complain about the hygiene, cleanliness and SAFTEY of that space.
No, its not. It is appropriate (and more likely to be effective) to complain about non-emergency problems of this type by other mechanisms, but it is neither appropriate nor effective to use the emergency call button to complain about it.
> In the event of an overdosing homeless person outside the elevator upon arriving to the platform level, it is again appropriate
Well, yes, that is an emergency.
> and to demand that BART keep these services not only functional - but at a level of accepted cleanliness should not be some ridiculous request.
The demand is not ridiculous. The use of the emergency call button to make the demand is.
Call someone a pretentious jerk but get it back and suddenly that person's an ass. Got it.
> This is THE ONLY BUTTON to all the agent.
That button contacts BART police dispatch in some cases because stations do not always have operators. Particularly in my old home station, I've seen people use it and communicate with someone while the station agent was not in the kiosk. That's the expectation around something labeled "emergency." Give me your pager number so I can page you at 2am to complain about reading your comment.
Do you ever listen to yourself? Seriously, I was being brutally honest. Your comment ranks among the most pretentious and awful I've ever read on HN, and I received a link to it in an e-mail thread where the subject was you. There is no plane of existence where anything you have typed in this thread is normal, rational human behavior.
Do you have any idea what would happen if you pulled this stunt on the New York subway? NYPD would probably paralyze you with a night stick for abusing resources while New Yorkers recorded it with their cell phones. And I've stepped around human shit in the stairwell in New York. And you know what? I don't care! I didn't rage! I didn't vent on HN! I accepted that bad things happen in the world and who gives a flying fuck, and went on my day without sparing two brain cycles except laughing about it later. Who cares? Keep on clenching and frothing at the mouth over every little inconvenience and you're going to die by 50. Relax.
It's public transportation. It's going to be bad. Universally. That's the rule. Wake up into reality, carry hand sanitizer, and focus on things that actually matter. If you're worried about your kids seeing a homeless person because oh no think of their precious beliefs and ideals, drive them where they need to go. Come on. You're better than this.
>Do you ever listen to yourself? Seriously, I was being brutally honest. Your comment ranks among the most pretentious and awful I've ever read on HN, and I received a link to it in an e-mail thread where the subject was you. There is no plane of existence where anything you have typed in this thread is normal, rational human behavior.
Seriously? Calling the emergency when I come out of a piss-filled elevator to a body convulsing on the floor on the platform is not an emergency? And when I am attempting to bring small children through a public service elevator where there is real risk of infectious disease? Complaining about this is "on no plane of existence rational"???
Your original story was that you use the emergency call button everytime you use the elevator. You later added that the most recent time you used the elevator, there was a someone convulsing on the platform floor.
No one has suggested that the latter single incident was an inappropriate use of the emergency button, what people have said is that the former, recurring use was inappropriated.
> Complaining about this is "on no plane of existence rational"?
Complaining is not the isssue. Using the emergency call-button for those complaints when there is not an actual emergency is the issue.
> Calling the emergency when I come out of a piss-filled elevator to a body convulsing on the floor on the platform is not an emergency?
Yes, it is, and good for you for doing something. Minus the piss-filled elevator part, which is an irrelevant detail.
> And when I am attempting to bring small children through a public service elevator where there is real risk of infectious disease?
No, it isn't. The difference between these two was pointed out to you elsewhere, and now you're just being obtuse. Take the stairs. They're good for you. There are foldable strollers. I have a toddler and we love the stairs. He makes a game out of them.
I feel like I'm teaching second grade here, but an emergent situation is when someone is in immediate danger. Someone having a seizure is in danger. You using an elevator with contaminants in it is not an emergent situation. You probably need some education about when it's appropriate to call 911, as well.
I'm pretentious, yet you're teaching me as though I am a second grader, right.
You insinuated that I was "sheilding my precious kids from the homeless" and have stated that I'm pretentious for expecting a functional, clean elevator from a service which already pays a respectable income while threatening strikes if not given more money while doing nothing to fix their current issues.
So, while I obviously did a poor job expressing to you how I find a piss-filled elevator unacceptable - and you're clearly not bothered by human excrement in your public transportation systems - I find calling to the attention of the system, by the only means made available, perfectly reasonable. I also did that holding a standard for cleanliness for a system that wants more money an acceptable thing to expect as a user of the system.
When I took my new position, I stopped because it's in the peninsula. It was a recent transition. Before that I rode it daily for years. I'm not sure what you're getting at; in the first instance I'm referencing an aggregate group that I consider myself a part of.
He has a point, though. Between you, sneak, and wilkie, I can see why people are hesitant to discuss this topic openly. It's almost like the three of you are looking for a fight on this topic and ready for all comers. Like if it weren't for you three, we would all be woefully misinformed about sexual assault. There are opinions on this topic that differ from yours and in almost every one, I can find two or more of you going to the mat on how wrong it is.
At multiple points while reading this thread, I've come across your/their username again and said to myself, Jesus, take a break, let other people speak. I really rolled my eyes when you brought up the woman whose feelings you hurt on Twitter and subsequent witch hunt, as well. Trust me, the "witch hunt" you experienced after that suffocates in comparison to what Joe has in store.
To your credit, you are at least the most civil and coherent of the three. As a victim of false accusation, it was really swell to be dismissed out of hand by sneak.
Have you seen this thread? Not only are people misinformed about what constitutes sexual assault, but on top of that they are ignorant of what constitutes consent. It's quite honestly TERRIFYING.
Take a look at sneak's other comment nearby in this thread. Yours are more civil at least, but in the wake of these assault broadcasts there is always a knuckles fight like this.
Everybody has an opinion. By spending hours of your time shooting down every opinion that differs from your own, you are working toward an environment where yours is the lone voice. Silencing dissent, basically.
As I said though, your actions are the most tame of the three I mentioned. In these threads, people who disagree with the "burn him!" mentality end up aflame themselves; victim blamer! rape apologist! silence the victim! asshole! It's all part of the same push against disagreement on this unique, taboo topic.
Things would have been better if everyone in the situation acted like adults. No matter how detailed and specific the Code of Conduct, Adria probably would have done what she did anyway.
Rather than worrying about the effects of shaming people publicly, conferences are basically putting up "no glass in pool area" and announcing their triumph at conquering this problem.
Imagine if the United States adopted the legal structure around the reporting of accusations in Britain. Nancy Grace would be out of a job overnight, and perhaps we'd see more successful libel verdicts.
To explain: the media cannot report on an accusation until the accused is convicted, as I understand it, though I'm not British and not familiar with the very probable nuances that exist.
And yet frighteningly effective; here's an anecdote that includes a thought exercise to consider, and let me preface the thought exercise by making clear that I am not accusing anyone of lying in the situation linked here and intentionally have no opinion on it, for reasons that shall become clear. (In fact, I wish I hadn't read it.)
Let's introduce Bob (not his real name). Bob is a mid-level engineering manager. Single, handsome, mid-30s. Bob is a friend of mine from school and I've known him for 17 years. At work, he has a handful of direct reports, all developers. One of these reports is Ashley (not her real name). The entire time Ashley has reported to Bob, she never made any display of personal affectation, never so much as having a cigarette with Bob on a break.
Early this year, Ashley and Bob represented the company at a conference. Bob was having a drink at the hotel bar when Ashley materialized and asked to join him. Bob agreed, and they were alone in a dark corner of the bar for more than a couple hours. Bob tells me that the conversation was light, cheerful, and fun. At the end of the evening, Bob walked Ashley back to her room, said good night, and went back to his room. That's what Bob told me happened. I pressed him; "are you being truthful with me?" He indicated that he was, and I believe him because I've known him for the better part of my adult life. If he needed to maintain a lie publicly, he would have confided it to me. He has no reason to lie to me and I can safely say that he never has.
Ashley isn't the best employee and knew it. Bob was, in fact, preparing to hit Ashley with negative performance, which would have prevented transfer and a bunch of whole other terrible things. It just so happens that this conference was two weeks before her annual review, which is salient because Ashley attempted to blackmail Bob. She showed him a Tumblr draft that claimed that Bob had attempted to rape her when he walked her back to her hotel room, in enough detail to sell the story. The implication was clear: be good to me on my review or I publish this.
Bob confided this to me because he had no fucking idea of what to do. He had no proof either way, and as the alleged victim would be a report, things would look bad if he attempted to terminate her. And then, if he did, she'd potentially revise the draft to make it look like Bob fired her to cover up his alleged misdeeds. This happened in the last six months, and I am legally prohibited from knowing how it resolved. Bob cannot tell me, but he still has his job and a career, so the shoe hasn't dropped yet.
Clearly, Ashley is quite aware that when stories like this are published on Hacker News or other media, a sweeping majority of the audience will immediately interpret what is presented as hard fact. In this case, there are two witnesses, but in others there have not been. Bob's ordeal gave me a thought exercise and made me think of all the times I've been alone with people at conferences: if someone wrote this exact post and substituted all the details for me, instead, what recourse would I have as the accused? The answer is none. Even walking away with the lesson of "don't be alone with someone" doesn't really help, because by the time witnesses step forward to defend you and say a blog post is completely fabricated, it's already bounced off the moon and come back.
And yes, I realize sociopaths like Ashley are rare. But given how demonstrably effective blogging like this is, do you really think they will remain rare in the long-term?
The only solution to this is to be suspicious of everything you read that is one-sided. Be suspicious of my anecdote, even; I could be making it up, for all you know. The thought underlying it, that the Internet's talent for rushing to conclusions on one side of a story is extremely dangerous (Sunil Tripathi, anyone?), is the important part of the story that I want to convey. Imagine if this blog post appeared on the Internet with your name and a conference you've been to substituted in. As Twain said, how long would it take you to get your boots on? Would you ever recover from that kind of damage?
We can't foster this environment in our industry, and I'm saddened that it just continues to get worse. It's going to get worse because time after time after time, the Internet makes clear that understanding both sides of a story is a historical artifact, and events of the future will be determined by who blogs about them first. Scary shit. Imagine sharing a name with the accused, even! My mom just got denied an apartment because a woman of a different race shares her name and has a felony conviction. And that's a government system, not a social network.
A pile of folks have made clear, too, especially some well-known names in the industry that are already all over this thread, that if you express the opinion that I just did you are enabling rapists to completely gut our industry, blaming and/or silencing victims, and so forth. I made the mistake once of sharing this opinion in another high-visibility disclosure similar to this one, the thrust of which was "let's not blog about someone's guilt or innocence on any topic until they've been convicted of something regardless of gender or offense," and I was directly accused of being a rape apologist because of the context. The only reason I'm even sharing this opinion is because I'm on a throwaway, but my identity is fairly deducible if you follow my history. Another commenter was right: there is really no talking about this. It really chills me on the industry, to be entirely honest, and I've had exiting the industry on my mind since the PyCon incident involving dongles.
There is a lot of conflicting research on this, but many reports show that false rape accusations are no more common than false accusations of any other kind of crime.
There are many reports showing that false rape accusations to the police are no more common than false accusations of any other kind of crime. She didn't go to the police. There could be a vast number of accusations of rape like hers that are, in fact, totally made up and they wouldn't count as accusations for the purposes of those reports.
Which still wouldn't be worth worrying about, especially compared to all the actual rape that is happening, except there's a lot of pressure from certain groups to shun any man who's accused of rape regardless of the merits of the accusation. There's a very vocal school of thought that says if you employ or are friends with one of those men you're a rape apologist.
Though in this case it does sound very much like she was raped and can prove it.
Rape creates victims. False accusations create victims. Before you say "not the same!" they both often end in suicide.
So, knowing that and knowing how difficult of a topic false accusations are to study and how little we know about the bad side of human beings, I would hope that anybody who is reasonable would read "rape is a bigger deal than false accusations of rape" and say whoa, nelly, partner, do you know something that the rest of us don't or are you acting on your gut feeling? Or are rape victims just the team you happen to root for in the "victims I need to give a shit about" World Series?
The fact that you don't think it's bold reinforces my entire point about concluding things too soon. And I'm intentionally discussing this on a deliberate action that demonstrates that false accusations are easier than ever, given the Internet's (a) reach, (b) accessibility, and (c) slow erosion of doubt in most folks, who make up their minds rather readily on the first thing they see.
And yet I worry about both because I realize that all victims deserve my sympathy and attention, regardless of how they were made a victim or whether there is enough of them to justify me giving them a second thought. And I'm saying that the blogging response to the one you do care about might be having unintentional consequences for the other that you don't care about, and advising caution on an obviously explosive subject for the sake of both problems.
Look, it's your prerogative to dismiss victims of false accusation. It's even your prerogative to condescendingly dismiss me from the discussion as you are doing here. It's my prerogative to care about the things you don't, and by dismissing a problem due to frequency, you are no better than the people that dismiss rape in the industry. Can you really not see that?
I already made clear that I do not want to argue about this. I'm simply uninterested in your opinion on false accusation victimhood because based on how dismissive you are of it, you haven't been paying attention and you haven't had it hit close to home. I've been in a similar situation that resulted in my life being threatened at a conference. I know how victims of rape feel, having to sit on HN and keep reminding people that rape really is a problem and shouldn't be dismissed, because here I am debating false accusation victimhood with some random on HN.
In what you are arguing, you fail to realize that there is only one victim. And while that might be the accused, in this case where we have 3 accounts supporting the accuser... well... it's not wrong to side with either of them, but you can't really call out supporting her side as biased in any way.
You missed the part where I said I had no opinion on the specific incident that resulted in my comment. Go back and read that part; I read someone's entire comment before replying and hope for the same respect in return.
In particular, I lamented that I was aware of this incident at all and pivoted into my larger point.
I've floated this question in two other places, but I'll try again here.
> False accusations create victims.
This is almost certainly not a false accusation since Justine has multiple eyewitnesses, two of whom have confirmed her story on their blogs.
Why are you bringing up the problem of false accusations?
edit: I really am interested in your answer, more so now that you responded but failed to answer. Rereading the post I think you're referring to didn't really help.
I can count on one hand the number of times you need to click "parent" to read my original thesis that made this point. I didn't make the point until the latter half, and I appreciate that it is revealing the folks that pick what they want out of a comment.
Imagine sharing a name with the accused, even! My mom just
got denied an apartment because a woman of a different
race shares her name and has a felony conviction. And
that's a government system, not a social network.
Strangely, I can completely relate because something like this happened tonight. This evening I checked my Twitter mentions and came across this tweet with a racist remark and a hyphen and my twitter handle at the end, so it appeared as if he was quoting me:
I was like "WTF?" because I don't know the guy who tweeted it and while perusing his followers list I realized what happened. He has a friend who is also named Andrew J de Andrade, but uses a different handle, @ajayyd, which is totally odd because there are probably only a half dozen or so Andrew de Andrade's in the world.
The only way is to wear GoPro-alike all the time while interacting with other people or record everything on your cellphone (at least audio). Equivalent to Russian dash cams. Perhaps some use for the glass.
Devilishly clever marketing for Cloudflare, though. Clearly I need to spend my days on more bridge calls for situations affecting other ops teams that have nothing to do with me, so my company can put out a PR piece from a position of authority about how awesome we are. What exactly did a team of people at Cloudflare do today? Consult? Do you bill hourly or is it a friendly NYT discount? What was your plan connecting end users with recursive operators? Want them to manually flush their resolvers out of the normal DNS TTL protocol? Is that a service that comes with my Cloudflare subscription?
Next time a startup goes down, ask yourself: if I were on a bridge call with their ops team, could I use this to sell my company's reliability product? Clearly, the answer is yes.
Classy, too, jumping out in front of MelbourneIT's response then speculating on it. I would be furious about Cloudflare writing a details-thin "postmortem," headlining it as a postmortem, analyzing my initial statement to customers in it, then getting it on HN before DNS caches are even cold from the incident itself. It's not even subtle.
This is the sort of thing I remember in discussions about using Cloudflare. There's lots of choices for CDNs, a market growing surprisingly full of ambulance chasers: one CDN startup had the fucking courage to email me directly after a hellish multi-hour outage and say "want to set up a call to discuss how our product could have prevented this outage?" I was still awake from fixing the problem overnight and no, your CDN is not going to fix my catastrophic DB failure. Get bent.
This is a disgusting move by Cloudflare. The little human network signoff made me gag; don't forget, small ops teams, you will only get things done if you know people. Notice HuffPo wasn't on the call? Exactly.
No shit... it almost reads like a hit-piece on MelbourneIT (damning with faint praise).
But at least they rode in with some knights from the mighty Google and OpenDNS to patch some caching issues and release a State of the Domains address.
Meanwhile the empires of NYT and Twitter were left being ravaged by hordes of Syrian Ninjas and an overseas registrar.
Didn't they pull a similar story telling people an attack on them by Cyberbunker impacted the London Internet Exchange, prompting quite some pandemonium?
I remember there being a more somber post after the whole incident by another blog detailing just how little fluctations there were on the alleged day of the incident, and how the numbers didn't stack up.
This is known as 'inserting yourself in the news story' and it works well as a marketing trick but in this case cloudflare is actually part of the story because the NYT (one of the affected sites) and cloudflare did communicate on the subject. The more peripheral the link the trickier it is, in this case (a first order contact with the affected party which was initiated by cloudflare) I think it is fine to issue some statement, but not necessarily this statement.
Before leaving my comment, I searched and searched for any shred of reason for CloudFlare to release this inappropriate statement, including reading all of Rajiv's timeline. Obviously, since I left the comment, I came up empty.
Can you point to what you feel makes this statement appropriate on behalf of your company? I can't identify what annoys me most about it, because there are many things: the "it's who you know in ops" attitude that I've been fighting for my entire career, the creation of a Batman-esque hero at a startup CDN provider who assembles a team to guide the lesser ops teams through a crisis, the overdramatizing of a DNS hijack that happens countless times daily (just with an interesting vector this time, but certainly not the first of ITS kind, either), speculating on another company's statements, preempting an official response with your own "postmortem" to score some traffic...
It's particularly frustrating because I've been in this exact scenario, to the T and including a registrar compromise, before. But because my personal side project doesn't have name pull, I didn't get a CloudFlare Crack Squad on speakerphone calling in a dozen courtesy phone favors to score my contract. And I had to wait for tickets and TTLs like everyone else. That sounds bitter -- and I hate bringing it up for that reason -- but that's why this is ethically shitty. Either you're playing favorites or capitalizing on something for sales. There is no third option, not even an altruistic one.
No good deed, it seems, goes unpunished by those upset they're not getting enough attention. May I suggest you read the end of the NYT CTO's recently updated blog post:
That wasn't remotely the thrust of my comments and you know it. I also (correctly) predicted you would hop on the bitter swan song instead of, you know, the half-dozen reasons why this sucks immediately prefacing it. Also, that's two employees who have posted Rajiv's words as rationale for the blog post; can we go for three? Shouldn't you be hiring Rajiv at this point, as hard as you're riding him?
Address something smaller and bite-sized, like preempting MelbourneIT's statement with your own and speculating on their behalf. Can you at least defend that inappropriateness? Can we start there?
Your company provided guidance and connections, which makes this statement inappropriate. Or did CloudFlare do something that has been left out of all statements?
I am not annoyed by your "good deed". I'm annoyed by how hard and how inappropriately you are capitalizing upon it as a PR coup, before the ashes have even settled. The victim tone is discouraging for this conversation, I have to say, and it's quite unbecoming.
To clarify that, the general thrust is to unify everything onto G+, eventually. Should be fairly obvious and I inferred as much even before I joined Google.
Good luck with that. I fear the day when my Apps domain is forcefully migrated to Hangouts. Hopefully there will be an alternative to Apps by then that is actually worth using.
(One of the people present during my firing needed to summon his boss using internal Hangouts. He eventually gave up, went back to his desk and got his laptop because the experience is completely unusable while mobile. It was hugely amusing to watch, and drove home the dogfood drama for me -- you know what I'm talking about.)
That's not strictly true. Google Search itself has inherited the ability to run image search, mail search, drive search, and calendar search within the front page.
Sorry to hear about your firing BTW, hope everything works out. I believe in second chances and I don't think people should be blacklisted for all time for something far in their past, with certain exceptions (e.g. sex crimes and working with children, etc)
Given that Elad's reaction was to run here and post it, I'd say it worked. Most successful and subtle troll I've seen in a long time.