Comment by lolinder
7 months ago
I don't get the sense that Vlad is combative, just (over)confident. There are no personal attacks, no aggression, no flaming or flamebait. He just is very confident in his approach and doesn't slow down to listen to criticism. Not the best approach as a founder, but not combative.
Combative in this case means treating the exchange as combat: a fight to win; rather than an opportunity to be humble and listen to others and learn.
The exchanges all read like Vlad derives a lot of self-esteem from being right, which isn't as good as deriving it from ability to learn when wrong.
Wouldn’t the same apply to Lori in that exchange. They just put the company on blast and aren’t willing to even hear the other side of things. That email exchange made me lose a ton of respect for them.
But, Vlad definitely should have stopped when Lori responded that they didn’t want to have a conversation at all. If for no other reason than they were a lost cause.
The one who "needs to hear the other side of things" is rarely the customer, and this is a good case study in why: no matter how much this customer "hears", they are right and Vlad is wrong with regards to the GDPR. By insisting that the customer needed to "hear the other (wrong) side of things" he looked worse than if he had just listened to the customer.
The customer isn't always right, but often is, like in this case. If you're a CEO, best to just pipe down, be humble, and listen to customers. Being open to being wrong is a nice plus, but either way, people will like you more if you appear to listen instead of argue. Even when you're right!
tl;dr: this isn't an internet argument between two otherwise-equal random strangers, this is a CEO talking down to a customer while being objectively wrong, which is 2x bad.
The problem is that Vlad seems objectively wrong about his interpretation of the GDPR and what is and is not PII. (I mean, jesus, "email address isn't PII because you can use a burner"? What, no, that's not how it works).
Instead of actually educating himself, he just argues that he's not wrong. I could easily see Lori being sick of the frustration of having to deal with that and just say "ok, nope, this conversation is done".
> They just put the company on blast and aren’t willing to even hear the other side of things.
I don't think that's what actually happened?
If someone says "please don't email me about this anymore" and you continue to email them you are being combative
If someone say "please don't email me about this anymore" after writing a hit piece on someone and there company without giving them an opportunity to respond they are being provocative, goading and a troll.
Lori isn't writing a 'hit peice' she is writing a short post that is in effect a review of the service and the company and the founder.
If the founder wants to respond they can write a respectful blog post and put it on the fucking homepage. They don't have a right to harangue the author via email.
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If your intention to stop communication - you can block someone.
Or if that's the words that would've been chosen - I would agree to you.
But if you mix those words with extra message, then no. A reply to this new message is warranted.
E.g. if you add a reason and that reason is unreasonable - it's warranted to address that and reply to you. Either do a request without attached strings, or block. Don't write extra conditions/reasoning and then complain that someone doesn't agree with you on those and kept messaging.
Sure, or if you're being polite, or even short in a reasonable way "I'd rather not discuss this privately," that is fine.
Lori's emails are deliberately designed to goad Vlad into replying, just to act indignant when he does.
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This comment, taken as a response to the parent or just as general advice about life, is so entirely bereft of anything objectionable, and is so intrinsically reasonable that its status as 'downvoted' (assumed from the grey text color) is a blemish on HN's commentariat.
Put more simply: it takes a weird, broken logic to find fault in the idea that a person who won't stop emailing you, after being told to, isn't "combative".
The further responses from Vlad may be ill advised, and maybe he should've realized those emails were going to be unproductive, but they aren't combative.
The email Lori sends explicitly asking him to stop emailing is then followed up with some last-wordism "for the record" nonsense. Only on the extremely online internet do people consider someone the aggrieved party after they write a screed against a product or business, then close the conversation with representatives of that business with essentially a don't @ me and some last-wordism. It's terrible journalistic practice. It's a net negative in social and community engagement. I don't see why doing it over online spaces gives the author a pass here.
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