Comment by vincentmarle

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.