Comment by atonse
8 months ago
No I’m pretty sure they’re suggesting that the account got somehow flagged as a for profit account, and they consider that a mistake and are fixing it.
I think you don’t have to find the least charitable interpretation for what they’re saying. There can be something in the middle.
There was a phone call, there was a human, this was not resolved until there was a public backlash.
So if it were indeed a for-profit account, it would also be okay to give them just a couple of days to "find the money" or otherwise lose 11y of history?
I would guess that the issue came from losing the flag, and the disparity in amount owed built up over years, thus prompting the drastic action.
A company that had a for-profit account would likely not incur that much of a bill that quickly, so it wouldn't play out the same. I imagine there are a series of escalating collections steps, and the flag switch popped them right to the most extreme end.
Just a guess.
Not sure if this works out, from my understanding the $50k would not even remotely cover a hypothetical for-profit categorization (should only cover less than 500 annual users, while my understanding is that Hack Club is significantly larger, by some orders of magnitude).
I can think of at least a dozen explanations less charitable than this one. Taking their word exactly at face value is not “something in the middle”.
> least a dozen explanations less charitable than this one
Because you've already made up your mind that they're the bad guy, so it doesn't matter what really happened. One of the prevailing rules at HN used to be engage with the most charitable interpretation of an argument. It's always a better conversation when it's followed - this thread has just devolved into a bunch of pile-on virtue signaling with no actual interest in engaging honestly.
I don't perceive this as virtue signalling, this is your own slightly uncharitable interpretation. People are responding to what they perceive as bullying in line with what looks like extremely heavy-handee sales tactics that do not seem uncommon.
It also looks like it only got addressed because it hit a someone with enough traction to go viral. That they had to resort to this channel at all raises questions in itself that go beyond the initial mistake and this particular customer.
So while I agree that we do not know yet what actually happened, the response from Salesforce so far does not really address these all concerns, and is not inconsistent with less charitable views on what's going on.
I think this is rightfully getting called out. With big power comes big responsibility.
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The fact of the matter is that Slack knew they were a nonprofit and made the deliberate decision to engage in the SaaS equivalent of rent-seeking. This is honest engagement, and given the circumstances I think people in this thread have been incredibly charitable.
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