Comment by davidcbc
7 months ago
If someone says "please don't email me about this anymore" and you continue to email them you are being combative
7 months ago
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.
> They don't have a right to harangue
And why is that, exactly? They do have this “right” and they exercise it.
I mean, your email is kind of an open box that people can stuff letters into. If you don’t like the letters from someone you can rip them up unopened (send to trash).
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.
> "Thanks for reaching out, but no, I would not. I am not interested in being cornered into a call by the owner of a business because I made a blog post about it."
This is not goading, this is telling someone to fuck off into the sun. If he wants to respond he can respond on his product with a blog post. His audience already dwarfs hers anyways, he Streisand-effect'ed himself because he's clearly got some narcissism issues.
1 reply →
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.
thank you for this example.