Comment by sillysaurusx
5 years ago
I had the exact same reaction, and even briefly panic'd that that might be the case. I saw some DMs come in, and I was like "he's going to give some reasonable explanation, isn't he?"
But those DMs were other people. I got silence. And I spent all day pondering what the hell had just happened.
You're right. This is the first time I've ever posted someone's DMs without their consent. And yet for the life of me, I can't bring myself to feel even slightly bad about it.
In that vein, I'll post here what I DM'ed him with five minutes ago. https://gist.github.com/shawwn/150f2711efc1d4a7821806ec23aeb...
I don't know whether he'll listen. And me making it public will make it even harder for him to listen.
But you know what? I felt the switch flip from "on" to "off" for "do I care whatsoever about repl.it?"
And that's sad. I was... just, such a huge fan. Still might end up one.
People usually feel like "yeah! fuck this dude! I hope X bad thing happens to them!" in situations where there's a lot of outrage. But all I feel is sorrow. I grew up on HN, and by extension YC's mission, since HN = YC was true from 2007 til ... 2015-ish, I think. That's around the time the cynical masses truly overwhelmed the YC founders, and they all fled off to Bookface. Who wouldn't? I've been curious about bookface not because of "oh look, a bunch of powerful people are here," but because "man, I bet so many interesting conversations happen there. I wonder what they're like."
pg and jessica forged YC's reputation by hand, from day one till now. It was not easy. And I hate that this incident has made me question whether I was falling for an intelligent rich person's selfish ploy this entire time, and all those words about earnestness (http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html) and niceness (http://paulgraham.com/mean.html) were just a siren's song for the young and the naive.
Thankfully, I know I'm not wrong about pg being genuine. he writes lisp. amsad writes js. :)
the only other thing I want to say is, I'm so sorry to Radon for casting so much suspicion, and making up completely crazy theories. You didn't do anything wrong. I was wrong.
Keep on building stuff, and everything will work out.
Remind me not to become your "friend" who you're so willing to rat out in public the second the road gets a bit bumpy.
Please don't cross into personal attack. You can make your substantive points without stooping to that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To my surprise, Amjad said he was sorry for letting me down, and that he apologized. It caught me off guard, and I had no idea what to think. Against my better judgement, I've decided to put in a good word for him here.
(Firstly, to dispense with your reply: ditto! If you're using your position of power to punch down at powerless people for vanity reasons, we probably wouldn't have much in common anyway. The synonym for that is "abuse.")
He ended up not saying much, and I did most of the talking. I was mostly working out what to make of all of this, and testing the waters about whether I was foolish to still give the benefit of doubt. But as I kept talking, I got the impression that maybe the magnitude of what happened had hit him, and that perhaps he was being genuine.
I've been a really shitty person in my past. It cost me my best friend, which was a wake-up call. If certain people hadn't been willing to extend me the benefit of doubt, I would've ended up spiraling further into depression rather than working on myself and improving. That's why I truly believe in everybody's ability to change, if they take a hard look at themselves and their behavior.
The two things that restored my faith in amjad somewhat were (a) he seemed to actually care that "he let me down," which I didn't expect. As for (b), that will take more context, but humor me: I thought amjad's apology was posted online somewhere. So I started talking about ways he might be able to approach Radon and chat with him. I mentioned that Radon's 5-year college buddy showed up in the thread to defend him, and that perhaps amjad could reach out to them as an intermediate step. It would show that amjad wasn't, in fact, a mustache-twirling demon brandishing a pitchfork – it helps to have a third party's opinion on that. But mainly I was just nudging him towards apologizing to Radon directly.
amjad said he'd called Radon and apologized. I didn't expect this. I've fallen victim to manipulative people in the past, and neither of these actions were typical behavior of those kinds of people, in my experience.
Look. Think whatever you want about amjad. It's probably reasonable to think he only apologized because of all the outrage. All I'm saying is, the vibe I got from him was the polar opposite of someone who was just doing one of those standard PR containment maneuvers.
The whole reason I believed in amjad in the first place was that he was willing to do things that others weren't: to be goofy, to chase oddball ideas, etc. And I ended up feeling like he was genuinely unaware that his pride was getting the best of him – that he was so caught up in his work and himself that he forgot to think about what he was doing. So perhaps that's where the lawyer bullshit came from: it's fucking hard to build a company, let alone one that's on the path towards "massively successful."
That's not to excuse any behavior. It's a reminder: any of us could get tunnel vision, and forget to think about other people, or how they're treating others. Again, lost my best friend from doing exactly that damn thing. It's shockingly easy not to give it a second thought until too late: to feel like they owe you something because X, or that your behavior is justified because Y.
When the reality finally sinks in, you end up sort of in a state of shock. Or at least I did at the time. And – I might be completely misreading this, since evidently I do – perhaps he felt the same tonight.
So. Points in his favor. One, he took responsibility. Most people would rather go to the grave than admit they were wrong, let alone self-reflect or change their behavior. Two, he went straight to Radon and tried to make things right.
A word on Radon. When you're the target of a threat like he faced, as I once was, this type of thing can haunt you for years. You end up not really trusting whether people are just going to fuck you over, or second-guessing whether you were in the right, or other destructive things. And when you're facing someone who's casually waving legal threats at you, you're never quite sure how far they're willing to go. It could be a bluff, or it could ruin your life. It must've been pretty scary. Thank you for having the courage to speak up and say that this happened.
All that said: obviously, form your own opinion. You've seen today how easily mine has swayed. But I couldn't go to bed tonight without at least trying to put in a good word for someone who went out of their way to make things right, for what it's worth. Which is approximately nothing, but perhaps it rounds closer to 1 than to 0.
This is none of my business, and I should probably refrain from offering unsolicited advice. However, in the interest of one human being looking out for another:
**
Friend, the best thing a person like you could have done in a situation like this was: nothing--to not get involved.
Instead, you have really, really gotten involved. You seem to have taken it upon yourself to attempt to direct the public perception of these parties' respective characters by investigating and pronouncing judgment on him. You privately inquired as to the inner self of this person you admire(d?), and then you published your private correspondence (within mere minutes), implying it to be evidence of bad faith. You've written at-length about your personal experiences with the man and how your feelings about him have now alternated between admiration and contempt (probably several thousand words now).
You seem to feel like his possibly mistreating another person is equivalent to his mistreating you, personally, and so you join this crusade (or brigade?) against his reputation--perhaps with some hesitation at times, nevertheless with vigor.
**
Why?
**
It's disappointing that the only person who pointed out the natural consequence of your actions was heavily downvoted and finally even chastised by dang. He was trying to do you a favor, but keen language is frowned upon here--it's required that one dress up one's arguments in verbosity and appearances of ambivalence. (I can imagine how a classic writer like Twain would be treated here, but I digress.)
He was certainly right: anyone who has seen the way you've reacted to all this would be wise to keep interactions with you to a minimum. Otherwise, someday you might do again what you've done here, and with friends like that, who needs enemies?