Since both her and a part of Livecoding are in the EU, EU data protection laws probaby make the situation fairly clear (and give her tools do deal with it, but it shouldn't be necessary)
This is a terrible practice for consumers, but a huge strategy win for startups(AOL zombie account trick .. hope they forget about wanting to delete or cancel).
I ran into this awful practice with Uber after a hack they know about lets your account be hacked by London drivers who rip you off for rides in London (im in the states). I went to my forgotten Uber account to cancel and found out I have to email support and further I cant remove all payment options from my account either. WTF ... as a consumer any company who follows such a practice needs their ass handed to them.
On the other hand as startup person I can see the slimey merit in following said practices.
I've been contemplating streaming my work for the same reason as the author of the post, but now I'm having second thoughts about choosing livecoding.tv. The merits will be there only until people realize that they're being tricked.
The type of value Uber provides is different from the value livecoding is trying to provide. People will continue to use Uber as long as it provides convenience because that's the value. As for livecoding, it's a different story.
You along with other startups make it incredibly hard to cancel ones account. It's a trick to keep your user base numbers high vs. offering an easy way for the user to delete their own account themselves, as most startups use to allow.
2.Except for Broadcaster Content already downloaded by users, the foregoing license granted by you terminates regarding a specific piece of Broadcaster Content once you remove or delete that Broadcaster Content from the Livecoding.tv Service.
Please bear in mind that Livecoding.tv cannot be the place yu resolve personal issues with your business partners. We asked you to provide more evidence on your identity and you did not follow up. We cannot start deleting other user's content based on a single email from an individual we do not know.
The issue here is not that Livecoding.tv isn't removing this individual's account, but that individuals sign up for things with the expectation they have rights to their data. Here's a gem from Livecoding.tv's TOS which clearly indicates their intent with other people's data:
> All Materials contained on the Livecoding.tv Service are the proprietary property of Livecoding.tv or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies and/or third-party licensors. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names are proprietary to Livecoding.tv or its affiliates and/or third-party licensors. Livecoding.tv reserves all rights not expressly granted in these Terms of Service.
Unless otherwise expressly stated in writing by Livecoding.tv, you are granted a limited, non-sublicensable license (i.e. a personal and limited right) to access and use the Livecoding.tv Service for your personal or internal business use only.
In short, if you sign up for an account on their site, they own EVERYTHING. They don't have to delete your account because all of their users agreed to these terms by using the site. Looking through the TOS, there is nothing mentioned about canceling accounts.
I'm empathetic to the author of the article, but I will point out that expecting ownership of your content after giving up ownership of your content is logically unsound.
Shaming aside, not signing up for a centralized service with limited rights like this in the first place would have resulted in less suffering for everyone involved.
I think you are quoting the part the protects their( livecoding.tv's ) intellectual property and , and not the streamer.
The license for the streamers stars at 11.Broadcasters.
It seems you are allowed to cancel the license:
11. Broadcasters
a.License from Livecoding.tv.
If you sign up for an account as a Streamer, subject to your compliance with these Terms of Service, Livecoding.tv hereby grants to you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, freely revocable license to use the Livecoding.tv Service for the uploading and distributing of authorized digital content, including videos (" Broadcaster Content ").
and:
2.Except for Broadcaster Content already downloaded by users, the foregoing license granted by you terminates regarding a specific piece of Broadcaster Content once you remove or delete that Broadcaster Content from the Livecoding.tv Service.
I read through that, but that last part basically says "if someone hasn't watched your content, you can revoke the license from the content by deleting it". If anyone has seen any of the other content, the company owns a perpetual license for it. Regarding their site content, it would appear they think they own everything on the site, including user content:
> Unless otherwise indicated, all Content and other materials on the Livecoding.tv Services, including, without limitation...
That goes on to list all types of content, that the content is trademarked, copyrighted, etc. and then states they own all of the licenses to it, as I mention in my comments above.
In comparison, here's Github's statement on the rights to content:
> We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.
>Regarding their site content, it would appear they think they own everything on the site, including user content:
> Unless otherwise indicated, all Content and other materials on the Livecoding.tv Services, including, without limitation...
... are protected by United States copyright, trade dress, patent, and trademark laws, international conventions, and all other relevant intellectual property and proprietary rights, and applicable laws (including in your country of residence).
Where does it say that they own everything?? You are interpreting this whole contract incorrectly.
I read through that, but that last part basically says "if someone hasn't watched your content, you can revoke the license from the content by deleting it". If anyone has seen any of the other content, the company owns a perpetual license for it.
I read that as "if someone is watching a video, they don't suddenly lose their license just because the author removed the video from the platform". Which is reasonable, IMO.
That goes on to list all types of content, that the content is trademarked, copyrighted, etc. and then states they own all of the licenses to it, as I mention in my comment above.
Yes, but then they "otherwise indicate" that you license your content to them, ie., you own it.
> expecting ownership of your content after giving up ownership of your content is logically unsound.
...which is why the OP is only really concerned about account deletion, not content deletion (the second half of the article). I am surprised Livecoding has not figured a way to have even a "shell" account with no personal data left but still have the content left untouched, considering the stringent EU laws surrounding personal data.
Indeed. Even removing all personal data, putting "deleted account" in the account description and setting it to a company owned email addres would probably work as "deletion" and keep the content visible.
Maybe we didn't read the same story, but the issue I see is the way Livecoding treat their users. For example, saying that the account would be deleted on the next cron run seems to be one blatant lie among several.
Trying to shift blame with a "it's your own fault, you signed up" may satisfy a lawyer, but it doesn't really do much for customer relations.
That the latter is an issue does not make the former not an issue. The actions of Livecoding.tv here are reprehensible; if they didn't plan to remove the account—be the reason lack of technical capability or legal obligation—why tell the user otherwise? This is a marked display of carelessness.
I haven't read the full document, so can't say if they HAVE to delete the account or not, but the last line of the privacy policy definitely implies you can remove any personal information they hold:
> If you would like to: access, correct, amend or delete any personal information we have about you, register a complaint, or simply want more information contact our Privacy Compliance Officer at support@Livecoding.tv
The user in question here is in the EU, the startup has their HQ in the EU, so EU data laws apply, and the user has to be able to delete their account and all data stored.
I've been unimpressed with LiveCoding.tv's spammy tactics as well.
The decided to enable email notification of video streams for users who have already signed up by using an opt-out system rather than opt-in system.
I created an account out of casual interest and then weeks later got slammed with dozens of spammy "stream is starting" emails every day.
I did actually try to delete my account as well but gave up when it appeared that they didn't allow for that option. Instead I've just been training Google that all the email from them is Spam.
As of last week they expanded the definition of what they allow, explicitly mentioning coding
http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/2176641-creat...
Q. What if my creative broadcast is gaming-related art, game development, programming, or involves creation of music?
A. You are free to choose whatever you think is the most appropriate category for your creative broadcast, so long as you adhere to the Rules of Conduct for the category when doing so.
Q. Does all Creative category content have to be gaming related?
A. No, you’re free to broadcast your creative process for any genre!
Uuuh, this is really factually wrong. 1. You activated stream notifications by yourself. 2. Every stream notfiication has in the footer an unsubscribe link or information on how to unsubscribe from your user dashboard. Our support answered you with screenshots on even how to click on the link.
Can you change the gender on your account? Switch it over to male and set up a couple dozen pseudonyms to throw off their count.
If Livecoding has aligned their interests with the gender ratio of their users to the extent that they're treating you like this, makes sense to speak back to them on their own terms. IMHO.
Unfortunately at this point that redirect back to home on login that I discovered after changing my password is still there, so I doubt I can change any part of my account details now; it's just going to sit there until they decide to actually delete it (if ever). But I did manage to change the profile description and stream title to make it clear that I am waiting for the account to be deleted before the redirect was put in place.
I didn't actually connect their shadiness about deleting my account with gender and am honestly not convinced that this is it. Sure, they were kind of pushy about promoting the site to women, but there is actually no gender identification on my profile other than my profile picture. I can't remember if gender was specified somewhere in my account settings but then not publicly displayed at this point.
The government of the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany uses for most official websites the domain .sh, which actually belongs to Saint Helena.
At this point almost all domains on .sh actually belong to companies or governmental entities in Schleswig-Holstein, the remaining domains mostly belong to geeks using it due to the similarity to the file ending .sh for shell files.
- https://www.wir-bewegen.sh/ (Kickstarter for public projects, operated by the government; one example is "a 3D model of the city for blind people as map, publicly accessible next to the train station")
Many more such cases exist all around the world, it is... weird.
Yep. The Minnesota House of Representatives and Senate use http://www.house.mn/ and http://www.senate.mn/ respectively. It's really strange to see a government agency use a TLD belonging to a foreign country.
We got a lot of complaints from women that we are not doing much to encourage women on Livecoding.tv. There would be too many guys and we would target the product too much to men even in our descriptions by using "his", "guy", etc. To counter the complaint, we launched a female streamer program where we specifically encourage female engineers to stream.We use it as a way of inspiring females to stream to balance the scale. To be frank we have many awesome female streamers and you can ask them how far we go to make sure they feel comfortable on Livecoding.tv: https://www.livecoding.tv/awakekat/
It's worth noting that when Livecoding.tv first launched, you were forced to register and log-in to watch any videos. It took an entire thread on Hacker News to force the founders to backpeddle once they were caught: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9800321
This isn't the first YC startup I've seen with such blatant "growth hacking" tactics, and it's disappointing.
So they were caught making TechCrunch not mention the required sign up?
So is that somehow ethically questionable to choose not to take down the login wall? I don't get it. I wouldn't sign in just to check something like this out and think it is probably a foolish obstacle to place in front of their potential users, but I don't get why it is somehow sneaky or whatever.
As much as I dislike their attitude, 'caught' is the wrong word here. You get 'caught' doing something that you where trying to hide. You can't hide the fact that you need to register to view videos, so you can't be caught.
Hi Alex from Watch People Code, i know you do not like us a lot because we did not agree to pay you money to move to Livecoding.tv. Please be honest and add a disclaimer that you are Alex from Watch People Code and you and your team members are trolling with different usernames in this thread and on Livecoding.tv.
Hey man. You might want to take a step back and look at what you're currently doing. Your paranoia is really getting the better of you.
The parent comment is from an aged account, linked to someone other than you suggest. In fact all of the accounts you've posted this exact comment to are aged accounts linked to other people.
You need to think about how this is reflecting on both you and your company.
You have accused minimaxir of being "Alex". Click on minimaxir's username on HN. You'll see he's been here for more than 1,300 days, and has information about who he is and where he is. Click his submissions link, and you'll see a bunch of his submissions. Not a single one is for any account to livecoding streams. (Although a stream of him creating on of his data posts would be interesting).
You probably need to apologise to minimaxir for that mistake.
You also need to find someone else to handle this thread, because you're not doing a good job at it.
Things you need to do:
1) Read up on your requirements under the various European data protection laws. You have to only collect the information you need; and keep it for the time you need it; and tell your users what you're collecting and why; and make the information you collect available to users when they ask; and make corrections when asked. There's probably a requirement to delete it when asked to too.
2) Fix your email. You must stop spamming people. Spam is any bulk, unsolicited, email. Bulk is "more than one". Unsolicited means i) You don't have a confirmed opt-in (and users not unselecting a box does not count in UK) ii) You don't include a single-click unsubscribe link in every email
3) Get someone who knows PR involved.
3a) Until then, get someone else to read your comments before posting. You don't need to post immediately, and doing so is causing you harm.
I'm not very fond of the admins on there (but not really in the same sense). I signed up maybe the first week that the website was up and found a bug. I reported it to the admins, who then criticized me of trying to hack their website and insisted that I was the same person as another user who had spammed their site. They told me that our IPs were the same (and when I asked them to tell my what my IP supposedly was they simply refused). They banned my account after that and I was forced to make a new one (because at the time it was impossible to watch without an account). The next account I made worked for about a week, but then they banned it as well, I guess because it was from the same IP. I don't think I even used that account once after signing up. Finally, I signed up on a VPN because I wanted to watch a friend who was going to stream on there, and that's the account that I've been using since. I think that they tried to ban that one as well after I logged in from my actual IP because it would log out all the time and I couldn't use any of the available account integrations to log in (having to do so directly by the username/password).
> "You are scheduled to be deleted on our next cron job. Nothing complex."
Is this serious? What's a cron job have to do with knocking out information from a rdbms?
I imagine a cron job could be useful if there was a script to clear out any static files - but you can also invoke the script manually. "Nothing complex" :)
Perhaps it's a manual cronjob - developer wakes up every morning at 9:00am, SSHs onto the production system, starts up MySQL, runs all of today's DELETEs.
Hi Alex from Watch People Code, i know you do not like us a lot because we did not agree to pay you money to move to Livecoding.tv. Please be honest and add a disclaimer that you are Alex from Watch People Code and you and your team members are trolling with different usernames in this thread and on Livecoding.tv.
https://www.livecoding.tv/2pointoh/ also called Dan by first name is an individual in New York city who's account we specifically banned for a) showing pornographic content on Livecoding.tv the second time after he was warned the first time. b) harassing women on channels
Do you think youtube/twitch/... don't face these issues?
Have you ever come across a youtube account that said:
BANNED FOR POSTING PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES ON LIVECODING.TV
BANNED FOR POSTING PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES ON LIVECODING.TV
BANNED FOR POSTING PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES ON LIVECODING.TV
No. They just delete the account. I don't think many people would want to join a website where the CEO vandalizes user profile pages, regardless of the reason.
Thanks for giving me a laugh in my math lecture, though.
----------------
Now for the legal part:
Dear Sir or Madam,
If you are represented by legal council, please redirect this message to your attorney immediately and have your attorney notify me of such representation.
You are hereby directed to
CEASE AND DESIST ALL DEFAMATION OF MY CHARACTER AND REPUTATION, AND CEASE AND DESIST PUBLISHING ANY CLAIMS I WOULD HAVE ANY CONNECTION TO "Watch People Code", or "Dan", OR THAT I AM IN ANY WAY CONNECTED TO OR INVOLVED IN ILLEGAL OR IMMORAL ACTIVITIES
Additionally I demand that you provide me with prompt written assurance within ten (10) days that you will cease and desist from aforementioned actions.
If you do not comply with this cease and desist demand within this time period, I am entitled to seek monetary damages and equitable relief for your defamation. In the event you fail to meet this demand, please be advised that I will pursue all available legal remedies, including seeking monetary damages, injunctive relief, and an order that you pay court costs and attorney’s fees. Your liability and exposure under such legal action could be considerable.
Before taking these steps, however, I wish to give you one opportunity to discontinue your illegal conduct by complying with this demand within ten (10) days. Accordingly, please sign and return a statement that you will stop and publicly apologize for aforementioned actions to
Janne Koschinski
Steinberg 148
24107 Kiel, Deutschland
I recommend that you consult with an attorney regarding this matter. If you or your attorney have any questions, please contact me directly.
Sincerely,
Janne Koschinski
----------------
I will send a written copy of this to your mailing address as listed on your website.
DICE.COM EMPLOYEE SPAMMING LIVECODING.TV
Liza Shulyayeva banned for spamming. WORKS FOR DICE.com and is just spamming Livecoding.tv
BANNED FROM LIIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING
BANNED FROM LIIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING+
BANNED FROM LIIVECODING.TV FOR SPAMMING
...did they mispell their own startup in their vandalism?
Also, per her LinkedIn, the OP works for DICE the game-development studio (subsidiary of EA, made Battlefield, etc.), not Dice.com (job hunting site).
As far as I know, Y Combinator invests a lump sum and then contributes mentorship. Their only real recourse is to say, "Sorry, we've decided that you're not worth our time" and to terminate all work with the company.
Which, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
> To maintain our community, if a founder behaves unethically during or after YC, we will revoke their YC founder status. This includes access to all Y Combinator spaces, software, lists and events. All founders in a company may be held responsible for the unethical actions of a single co-founder or a company employee, depending on the circumstances.
In the last 30 minutes they fixed the misspelling but kept the text as it is. This means someone is currently following this problem and thinks they are in the right by doing this.
Unless this hacker was able to get the COO's HN account as well that seems unlikely. And even then a call to someone at YC to jump into the thread and let everyone know it was a hack wouldn't be too hard.
But by linking mental illness to scumbag behaviour you're making life worse for all the people with mental illness who aren't scumbags - which is most of them.
A group that I am a member of. Perhaps I'm biased but I don't feel like my life is particularly worsened.
I've had the misfortune of bearing witness to paranoia fueled by both mental illness and drug abuse (and a combination of both). I've also worked with and for unapologetic assholes. There are things about this case and his communications that have me leaning toward the former.
In all seriousness I think their founder is still quite immature and possibly has some temper issues, at least judging by these past interactions and now this immature act. You can see this was written hastily, probably in anger - they didn't even spell the name of their own website right here. They don't really seem to care about maintaining the least bit of professionalism.
I don't quite understand this idea of YC companies being somehow immune to idiocy. I've been approached by multiple YC companies about early-stage roles and been stunningly unimpressed by each. That it's publicly foolish now is maybe a little funnier, but I don't get the surprise of it.
Can anyone please explain to me why a YC company is making such a terrible name for themselves at a website which is literally FULL with people, who they should aim at building positive image with. I am pretty sure that over 70% of their users have at least a username in this community. I hardly have ever seen a worse way to respond to a marketing crisis.
edit: Now the answer of the co-founder(you can find it below) is way better and it should have been the first reaction to this post. Hopefully there can be a happy result to both sides.
I really did not wanted to blame YC. My mention of them is mostly because they are the biggest incubator, so people who get in should have at least minimum amount of marketing skills. They literally make fool of themselves in front of their main "customers" and apparantly we are still talking about one of the cofounders. You are trying to run companies worth millions and do such stupid mistakes, it is just beyond understanding for me.
I think it's because that doesn't scale to seventy companies without being a hinderance. I'm sure the skills are there, the problem is unless the founders ask UC doesn't know where to deploy them.
Founders of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Linux, Oracle, Tesla and probably many more have been famous for childish or angry stuff. It's not very uncommon.
Yes, but I had the same thought; along the lines of "does YC really have to do a dinner where someone comes in and tell the batch's founders not to try to make examples of customers/users that are annoying them, because they will look ridiculous at best and, as in cases like this, actively malignant at worst"? Is that really a lesson YC needs to teach?
People have crazy unrealistic expectations of YC in this regard. They invest in 30-40 teams per batch, based on an application and a very short interview. That's a good thing for founders, and whatever else you might think of them, YC is the probably the most founder-positive force in the entire technology industry.
It doesn't need to be a dinner, but a nice blog post would possibly help. It's not as if this is the first boneheaded response from a YC funded company, and it's YC's name that gets linked to this sub-optimal behaviour.
That "break the rules" post got around. Maybe there needs to be a "but don't be a massive jerk to ex customers" follow up post.
YC doesn't run your company for you, but a big point of YC is that they provide advice and guidance. As they say in an article [1] linked from the YC FAQ:
Most people don’t do YC for the financial investment—they
do it because they want the advice, the help of the
network, the benefits of the program.
Heck, for a long time YC only invested something like $20k and got something like 7% of your company. From a money point of view, only a complete idiot would have taken that deal. What made it worthwhile was getting access to the YC people for advice.
Now YC gives $120k for 7%, so it is no longer completely idiotic from a purely monetary point of view, but even at $120k most of the value is in the access it gives you to the YC staff and the other people YC puts you in contact with.
Because of this a lot of people have higher expectations for YC companies.
Hi drakonka, I have only just found out about this, and was until now not aware of what happened. I don't know why my cofounder Michael marked you as spam, and I will ask him to contact you. I can only apologise for the handling of your account deletion, it really is not acceptable that it took so long, so we will make it a priority to improve this.
Idle curiosity: Are you aware that you have zero believability at the moment now unless you can demonstrate results or at least your commitment usefully?
Do you have any explanation as to why you are running a page with her name, publicizing her employment and calling her a spammer? That requires both a deliberate effort to research her, and then the poor judgment to actually post the text, presumably in an effort to shame her.
If this is how you usually "mark spammers" her account issue is the least of your problems. It makes it look like the site is run by a paranoid schizophrenic. Most unprofessional thing I've ever seen from a YC company, even if the allegations would be true.
Why is the page still up with the spamming accusations on it? If you're a co-founder, please take care of it ASAP instead of wasting drakonka's time 'contacting' them.
You can do more than apologise. You can stop calling her a spammer, delete her profile entirely, apologise profusely, and make sure this kind of utter ridiculousness never happens again! I suggest making sure your cofounder never has anything to do with user relations.
Looks like you guys just corrected the spelling of your website name on my profile (previously "LIIVECODING.TV"), which is still accusing me of spamming. Is this the kind of improvement you had in mind?
You seem to enjoy this whole thread, but very coward that you hiding your real identity. Can you at least post your Linkedin profile url as comment for others to know?
Are you just copying and pasting these replies now without looking at which comments you are replying to? My name is literally on the website this thread links to, and my LinkedIn profile is on the Contact page. Of course it was also up for hours last night on the Livecoding profile you vandalized. I think you're confused.
Founder Comment was over 1 hour ago and the seeming libel and doxxing of Lazer's full name, and employer are still up - an apology in words but not actions - messing with someones employment is egregious.
As minimaxir pointed out, she's not even an employee of Dice.com, she's works at the similarly named video game studio DICE. A legal minefield for Livecoding.tv for sure...
As I mentioned here[1] they at least mention this address on their site. Might not be headquarters, but at least means they are operating under british law.
Uh, you should be acting a lot more decisively than that, considering that your co-founder is currently torpedoing your company's reputation in front of a large part of your potential userbase.
2 hours and only a spellfix (which is even more insulting than nothing). Still no clue about priorities it seems. I guess after Twitch Creative all press is good press... Let's hope for some press.
If I may allow myself a guess, possibly the line of thought at livecoding.tv, given the other examples of banned users on your site, and given the lie about the cron job, is that these are merely moronic, worthless customers you're alienating that you wouldn't want on your site anyway. Perhaps you think (thought?) that this is another such instance. This is not the case. You've created a huge leak in your potential enthusiastic user base, which now consists of "programmers willing to stream their content who also happen not to be HN readers."
Mistakes happen. Many startups have survived bad publicity on HN. Your actions have not ensured you a spot in this roster. Even generously overlooking the juvenile behavior of your cofounder and ban messages, the narrative of livecoding.tv stored in the collective brain of HN is now "fails to respond to user and petulantly refuses to apologize for seven hours."
The best thing you can do right now is to identify the responsible individual in your company, apologize specifically, and abjectly, as a company, on behalf of this individual, remove all the ban messages, delete OP's account, explain how a cron job came to enter the story, and both explain and apologize for why this took two hours to resolve after you heard about it.
(Disclaimer: I was about to sign up for livecoding.tv for similar reasons as OP just yesterday. I'm disappointed to know this might've happened to me.)
No site in the world likes banning any user. We only put a temporarily ban on certain users or in severe cases a permanent ban. As explained we are a community and you can expect that there a lot of people who hide their real identity and misbehave in away they wouldn't do in real life.
What's wrong with you? Take the page down. There's a whole HN thread sitting here hitting fucking refresh on it over and over again waiting to see how much more drama your insane team can generate over this. Are you running a company, or a very elaborate piece of nerd performance art?
Normally I'm not a fan of comments like this but this guy is running a company, a YC backed one in fact, and I think the application of a clue stick might be just what's needed.
Wow, is there any recovering from this? Usually I'm against the internet machine latching onto people that have stuffed up. But you're trying to publicly humiliate a user that just wants to delete her account. I'll be surprised if you last much longer.
Hi, how is your company such an absolute colossal failure? Reading the replies of this thread, it keeps getting worse and worse. You should be doing a hell of a lot more than "ask him to contact you". DELETE THE FUCKING ACCOUNT!
So, since its 3 hours since you said this and the page is still up, the charitable interpretation is that you don't have the technical know-how to take it down yourself and are frantically trying to get in touch with Michael, who does. Or, you've gotten in touch with Michael, and he's just being a stubborn dick and is refusing to take it down. If that's the case, I feel kind of sorry for you. Sucks the fate of your company seems to have hinged on an apparently unhinged individual.
As part of cleaning this mess up you need to also institute an inviolable policy that you will never edit a user's profile without the user's permission unless legally required to. If there is something in a profile that you cannot allow to remain on your site then you should delete the profile content. If you want to name and shame spammers it should be done somewhere other than the profile.
This is important because it never occurs to most users that you might edit their profile, and so it never occurs to them that you might edit other users' profiles. Thus, when people see something on someone else's profile they assume the person put it there.
In all seriousness, you need to remove your co-founder's ability to do anything on your site. If that's not practical, you should seriously think about making an exit yourself. For one, your business is now effectively dead in its primary market, it's going to be a long hard road back, if it's even remotely possible; for a second thing, you've just had your name and personal and professional reputation completely tarnished by what appear to be Michael's actions, and made worse by the childish retaliation on OPs profile (regardless of who did that).
The loss of your own reputation is going to be harder to come back from. Reputable VCs doing even basic due diligence are going to see this incident and aren't going to want to have anything to do with you, unless you show swift and decisive action, one way or another. So far your response has been neither swift nor decisive.
For what it's worth, asking Michael to contact OP seems like a really bad idea. He's hardly shown good customer services skills so far, do you really think he's going to do a better job suddenly?
It will be honest if you could disclaim your name to the people reading here so they know how to intepret your comments here. Not good if you just hide your face and troll.
You have completely destroyed your company. And now you seem hell bent on destroying your own reputation. If this wasn't so fucked up, it would be sad.
I had started using Livecoding.TV about 4 months ago, but had to take a break to move house. I got spammed by them quite a bit to start streaming again. I'm sorry I'm not helping you build a revenue stream, but seriously, get off my case.
What is the narrative you think these emails are fulfilling? Did anyone ever stop using a site because they just forgot? "Oh yeah, I think I remember that site I had been using for a month but stopped two days ago. Must have slipped my mind."
I had even bought a t-shirt from them and it took longer to show up than I remembered I had an account there. Then they decided they fucked up the t-shirt and at least two months later another one showed up at my old address. No warning. Luckily, I still own the place but had gone to show it to a new tenant.
I was willing to chalk my experience up to operational growing pains, but this story here is just inexcusable. Clearly, reasonable people with a love of engineering and a passion for their product aren't running the show there. Now I want my account deleted.
Ah I remember them pushing t-shirts fairly hard in email at some point a few months ago. I think I got some sort of email or internal Livecoding message about having won a t-shirt or _something_ of the sort. I would have to give them my address to receive the item and considered it but never went through with it I think. From memory they claimed to have made the offer based on some sort of user criteria, like a "You did this so we are giving you a free x!"
A few days later I get another message saying the first message offering the free item was a mistake, and that I wasn't invited to have one after all. Can't say I was too torn up.
Your 10 replies of claiming people should spell out their full legal names in the thread are not making anything better. In the few cases we don't already know their names, it wouldn't make you seem any bit less incompetent or hostile to know their names.
Also, you're going on the record as saying that the important thing here is not to apologize, not to fix the problem, not even to try to explain but rather to point out to people that they should sign their names in an online discussion with full names.
Sorry for the T-shirt delay. In order to keep cost down we don't order single T-shirts but put all orders in a batch. That is why there was some delay. Next time there is a delay please ask for the shipment id so you can see where the shipment is.
So the cron job turned out to be an invented lie told to a user they essentially assumed would be too stupid to think about it. Which is it then, that they e.g. have a tired support team using a canned response that includes a lie? Or is it the founders themselves thinking their audience are fools?
Sure, separate business policy from code, but it seems unwise to assume your users are technically ignorant when your site is about inviting programmers to stream their work.
could be a monthly cron job. Principle of charity right?
Of course, assuming that it is a monthly cron job and the account actually is scheduled for deletion then, the question would be: Why in gods name would you not just say that?! "Your account is scheduled for deletion at so and so time", and if at that point you're complaining that it's not fast enough, no one would really have much sympathy for that.
It's still possible this isn't an example of a vindictive and petty individual lying through their teeth. It may still be an example of someone who with poor PR skills, and is not coping with the situation those poor PR skills created.
If livecoding keeps acting like this they are gonna lose whatever foothold they currently have of coding live streaming. With twitch.tv's recent announcment to open up streaming to creatives it is only a matter of time until they capture this audience too.
I made an account to see how their system worked after thinking about doing a stream myself a few months ago. After I signed up and poked around their platform, I was none too pleased with the features or way their application worked. They emailed me too many times (almost every day) in the first week and I just marked them as spam and went along with my life.
Glad to hear about what's going on here, I will be sure to never stream or give a website with this type of management my business :)
I think actual deletion of accounts is not a functionality that is high on any startups list - disabling is probably the usual course of action? However, to lie about it is another matter entirely.
Outright deletion of data, especially anything used in financial calculations, might run afoul of Sarbanes-Oxley in the United States.
I say "might" because it's not exactly spelled out that way in the regulation. Basically, any sort of reports that are used to make financial decisions must be replicable. You have to be able to show an auditor how you came to your numbers. You have to show how the report would have looked at the time it was made, and what data it would have contained.
I could potentially see raw count of users, or counts of users combined with popularity of videos (and growth of popularity across those videos) be a part of plans on how to monetize such a site. If Livecoding.TV had made revenue projections based on some future monetization plan and had started circulating this plan amongst potential investors, it becomes a serious landmine to hard-delete data.
Most places assume this just means "keep backups", but I don't know anyone who is operationally prepared to restore year-old backups of databases and running application code to be able to appease such an auditor. Full compliance is really hard, so I almost always advise people to go for soft-delete instead. There are any number of technical and business reasons why soft-delete is better, too. If this report that a 3rd party registered a new account with the same name just to be able to troll everyone involved turns out to be true, that would be one of those reasons.
That said, that's a completely different issue than privacy compliance. Any sane authorization system should make it easy to de-authorize specific sets of data for everyone. No data request meant to go out into the world should ever lack an authorization check. Given the difficulties of keeping tabs on internal- versus external data, I just generally believe all data requests should come along with an authorization check, regardless of whether or not it's required, because you can't ever really predict what code a jr. programmer is going to reuse some day.
Deletion of accounts is a very low bar that should be met for anything to be qualified as a minimum viable product. It shouldn't be that hard, especially if you take 5 minutes to think about your assumptions and how you could handle it, right at the start.
This is a service that ends up running on the internet and can have international people using it. That means you need to be very conscious of international laws. EU citizens have a legal right to have their data deleted by sites.
In the span of a just a few days we have YC-backed companies being publically outed for engaging in behavior which most of us consider pretty egregious and would certainly warrant any rights as YC founders to be revoked. The tone of commenters (here and w.r.t the Homejoy) can be described as mild shock. This particular example is perhaps even worse than the Homejoy issue, as it seems the founders have taken to personally attacking an individual user for, as far as we can see, are pretty legitimate claims.
But I think probably the least shocked people are the YC partners. If you are Paul G./YC, what do you do about this? By far the biggest question that YC must confront as it expands into research, bigger and bigger classes, new types of involvement through fellows, etc., is how to retain their ability to suss out, deal with, or prevent things like these. I think they are fully aware that they can't.
If anyone hasn't figured it out already, YC is becoming the first 21st century university. In order to get there, they have to become significantly bigger, and just like the startups they fund, that's the metric that's on their radar.
I don't think these events are a sign of YC's negligence. Instead, I think YC is slowly transitioning to a new era in the company. Paul G and the gang are incredibly brilliant. They knew the odds when they decided to continue this incredibly rapid growth of batches and outreach. They aren't surprised by these events; they are just moving to a stage where things like this are unfortunately the cost of doing business. If Paul G is cooking dinner for you and your few buddies over the summer every night, you aren't getting away with this. If you are now one of thousands of people fighting for (or trying to avoid) their attention, you certainly can.
Go around to any top school, and you see the same. Out of your couple thousand bright-eyed, brilliant freshmen, there inevitably are a couple bad apples. But none of them would think that a solution to this is to shrink class sizes.
Over 700 companies have gone on through YC, so they now have a few thousand alums and actively maintain an Alumni network -- really wish universities had something like this!
The companies go through the program in cohorts for a set amount of time -- they call these "classes". Not sure if universities have anything of the sort.
Sam Altman himself said that soon he "we will have to do something" with respect to housing. Again, nothing like I've seen any university do.
My personal favorite, though, is the part where they get everyone to come to dinner together to exchange experiences and whatnot. If only Harvard figured out that they could use their beautiful dining hall for this sort of thing...
The things you're describing here are common to many large organisations - is Google a university?
Tellingly, you don't mention the primary reason universities exist - to educate, regardless of the profitability of the subject. This is exactly the opposite of YC's primary goal, which is to make money and avoid unprofitable investments.
Nothing unless it gets bad press. Why do you think they care about "egregious" behavior?
Quote From: What We Look For In Founders - Paul Graham - October 2010
[...]
Naughtiness
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they
tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody
Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions
right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word
naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules
that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by
imagination. [...]
This is a fair point. It's just that in this particular instance, I feel that their actions crossed into the "evil" category -- they dig up PPI on one of their users and plaster it on the site, slandering her in the process. This is different than "creatively" interpreting some piece of regulation or something of the sort. I take your point, though.
I don't think that's fair. I strongly doubt PG considers spamming, or (falsely) naming & shaming customers, as "naughtiness". That's something very different.
"The culture of any organisation is shaped by the worst behaviour the leader is prepared to tolerate".
By stating that rules breaking is desirable, but not stating clearly where the lines are, companies are not given clear enough guidance to avoid scumbag behaviour.
Thank you very much! He is better now (knock wood), but needs medication 3 times a day and may have a permanently damaged bladder. But as long as he's happy and peeing I'm happy.
Did anyone else see "Eli the Computer Guy" slamming YC on his channel about an email exchange he had with the founder of Livecoding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h66PNIUtaaE
The entire premise of participating in YC is to learn from other founders about how to build a successful startup. You're saying that YC doesn't have any reason to try and help founders do better at running their companies?
It's up to the founders to reach out and try to figure out how to solve the problem. If they don't do that YC isn't going to perform an audit or hold a bunch of seminars or something.
TBH most of this is basic competence. YC can't ensure that all of the companies are competent in all aspects.
Remember, pg has defended a YC company's sleazy tactics for bundling unwanted software in installers (including disguising the choice to install them as an ordinary EULA acceptance scheme, which he whitewashed as confirming that they wanted to install the software) and even that didn't do them any real damage.
I expect pg to defend profitable sociopathic behavior; but this destroys value. If he's not providing any coaching, it's probably because he already wrote the entire team down to zero and thus doesn't want to invest 14 seconds in a text message telling them to 'fix this ASAP'
He also defended AirBnBs founders when they were publicly blaming-the-victim: customer whose house had been trashed by meth heads after renting it out on AirBnB.
Eventually the company seemed to hire a crisis consultant and started acting better.
But in the early days the founders were being extremely douchy and PG wrote an article that I was astounded to receive, defending the douchiness.
That was the point that I started to think YC isn't better than the average level of Silicon Valley.
BTW, many YC companies engage in fake traction tactics sometimes ones that cross the line into dishonesty-- for example AirBnBs "we'll spam people listing their places on craigslist while pretending to be someone else" marketing scheme.
If I'm YC and I have invested in a company, I'm going to step in and give a bit of coaching in a situation like this. Especially when the solution is completely obvious and the core action required (deleting the account, sending a quick apology) would be minimal.
"but I can tell things like when people are BSing, how tough they are, if they get along, and surprisingly often, considering I only have 10 minutes to observe them, whether they're good people or not."
- Jessica Livingston
So, yet another win for Jessica's infallible intuition! Maybe these guys can get together with the Homejoy team and create something really special.
464 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadSince both her and a part of Livecoding are in the EU, EU data protection laws probaby make the situation fairly clear (and give her tools do deal with it, but it shouldn't be necessary)
I ran into this awful practice with Uber after a hack they know about lets your account be hacked by London drivers who rip you off for rides in London (im in the states). I went to my forgotten Uber account to cancel and found out I have to email support and further I cant remove all payment options from my account either. WTF ... as a consumer any company who follows such a practice needs their ass handed to them.
On the other hand as startup person I can see the slimey merit in following said practices.
https://www.livecoding.tv/video/designing-a-touch-screen-int... @ 20:37
-- From Livecoding T&C https://www.livecoding.tv/terms/
seems from the T&C you should be able to remove or delete videos
I can delete the videos one by one though, it's just a lot of work, especially when the connection is flaky (it produces a ton of videos in that case)
> All Materials contained on the Livecoding.tv Service are the proprietary property of Livecoding.tv or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies and/or third-party licensors. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names are proprietary to Livecoding.tv or its affiliates and/or third-party licensors. Livecoding.tv reserves all rights not expressly granted in these Terms of Service. Unless otherwise expressly stated in writing by Livecoding.tv, you are granted a limited, non-sublicensable license (i.e. a personal and limited right) to access and use the Livecoding.tv Service for your personal or internal business use only.
In short, if you sign up for an account on their site, they own EVERYTHING. They don't have to delete your account because all of their users agreed to these terms by using the site. Looking through the TOS, there is nothing mentioned about canceling accounts.
I'm empathetic to the author of the article, but I will point out that expecting ownership of your content after giving up ownership of your content is logically unsound.
Shaming aside, not signing up for a centralized service with limited rights like this in the first place would have resulted in less suffering for everyone involved.
The license for the streamers stars at 11.Broadcasters.
It seems you are allowed to cancel the license:
11. Broadcasters
a.License from Livecoding.tv.
If you sign up for an account as a Streamer, subject to your compliance with these Terms of Service, Livecoding.tv hereby grants to you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, freely revocable license to use the Livecoding.tv Service for the uploading and distributing of authorized digital content, including videos (" Broadcaster Content ").
and:
2.Except for Broadcaster Content already downloaded by users, the foregoing license granted by you terminates regarding a specific piece of Broadcaster Content once you remove or delete that Broadcaster Content from the Livecoding.tv Service.
> Unless otherwise indicated, all Content and other materials on the Livecoding.tv Services, including, without limitation...
That goes on to list all types of content, that the content is trademarked, copyrighted, etc. and then states they own all of the licenses to it, as I mention in my comments above.
In comparison, here's Github's statement on the rights to content:
> We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.
> Unless otherwise indicated, all Content and other materials on the Livecoding.tv Services, including, without limitation...
... are protected by United States copyright, trade dress, patent, and trademark laws, international conventions, and all other relevant intellectual property and proprietary rights, and applicable laws (including in your country of residence).
Where does it say that they own everything?? You are interpreting this whole contract incorrectly.
I read that as "if someone is watching a video, they don't suddenly lose their license just because the author removed the video from the platform". Which is reasonable, IMO.
That goes on to list all types of content, that the content is trademarked, copyrighted, etc. and then states they own all of the licenses to it, as I mention in my comment above.
Yes, but then they "otherwise indicate" that you license your content to them, ie., you own it.
...which is why the OP is only really concerned about account deletion, not content deletion (the second half of the article). I am surprised Livecoding has not figured a way to have even a "shell" account with no personal data left but still have the content left untouched, considering the stringent EU laws surrounding personal data.
Trying to shift blame with a "it's your own fault, you signed up" may satisfy a lawyer, but it doesn't really do much for customer relations.
http://www.twitch.tv/user/legal?page=terms_of_service
https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=GB&template=terms
I haven't read the full document, so can't say if they HAVE to delete the account or not, but the last line of the privacy policy definitely implies you can remove any personal information they hold:
> If you would like to: access, correct, amend or delete any personal information we have about you, register a complaint, or simply want more information contact our Privacy Compliance Officer at support@Livecoding.tv
The site has already been reported by an affected user to the local EU data protection officer, so the legal fallout has already started.
If you still have shares in the company, sell.
The decided to enable email notification of video streams for users who have already signed up by using an opt-out system rather than opt-in system.
I created an account out of casual interest and then weeks later got slammed with dozens of spammy "stream is starting" emails every day.
I did actually try to delete my account as well but gave up when it appeared that they didn't allow for that option. Instead I've just been training Google that all the email from them is Spam.
http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/2176641-creat... Q. What if my creative broadcast is gaming-related art, game development, programming, or involves creation of music? A. You are free to choose whatever you think is the most appropriate category for your creative broadcast, so long as you adhere to the Rules of Conduct for the category when doing so.
Q. Does all Creative category content have to be gaming related? A. No, you’re free to broadcast your creative process for any genre!
Or does the link require the user to log in and adjust settings on a dashboard?
If Livecoding has aligned their interests with the gender ratio of their users to the extent that they're treating you like this, makes sense to speak back to them on their own terms. IMHO.
I didn't actually connect their shadiness about deleting my account with gender and am honestly not convinced that this is it. Sure, they were kind of pushy about promoting the site to women, but there is actually no gender identification on my profile other than my profile picture. I can't remember if gender was specified somewhere in my account settings but then not publicly displayed at this point.
Write a Cease and Desist letter to
That should get them to stop.A letter such as this costs less than a Euro, and means they have no excuse not to act on it.
Otherwise you can try sending them a fax, that usually also has better chances at success with businesses.
I kinda want to move my twitch streams over to livecoding just to be able to get into this deletion mess and send lawyers after them now...The government of the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany uses for most official websites the domain .sh, which actually belongs to Saint Helena.
At this point almost all domains on .sh actually belong to companies or governmental entities in Schleswig-Holstein, the remaining domains mostly belong to geeks using it due to the similarity to the file ending .sh for shell files.
Examples:
- http://www.nah.sh/ (Official transit agency)
- http://www.studentenwerk.sh/ (Official Student Service Agency, operates dormitories, etc)
- https://www.wir-bewegen.sh/ (Kickstarter for public projects, operated by the government; one example is "a 3D model of the city for blind people as map, publicly accessible next to the train station")
Many more such cases exist all around the world, it is... weird.
Yep. The Minnesota House of Representatives and Senate use http://www.house.mn/ and http://www.senate.mn/ respectively. It's really strange to see a government agency use a TLD belonging to a foreign country.
This is clearly data protection stuff. I've taken screen shots and poked the information commissioner.
This isn't the first YC startup I've seen with such blatant "growth hacking" tactics, and it's disappointing.
If you can't use the site without registering, it probably isn't a secret that you can't use the site without registering.
I can see using a phrase like 'called out' or 'called on their bullshit' or whatever, but I don't see how they were 'caught'.
So is that somehow ethically questionable to choose not to take down the login wall? I don't get it. I wouldn't sign in just to check something like this out and think it is probably a foolish obstacle to place in front of their potential users, but I don't get why it is somehow sneaky or whatever.
The parent comment is from an aged account, linked to someone other than you suggest. In fact all of the accounts you've posted this exact comment to are aged accounts linked to other people.
You need to think about how this is reflecting on both you and your company.
You had an opportunity to make this right, but now you're doubling down on the insanity.
You probably need to apologise to minimaxir for that mistake.
You also need to find someone else to handle this thread, because you're not doing a good job at it.
Things you need to do:
1) Read up on your requirements under the various European data protection laws. You have to only collect the information you need; and keep it for the time you need it; and tell your users what you're collecting and why; and make the information you collect available to users when they ask; and make corrections when asked. There's probably a requirement to delete it when asked to too.
2) Fix your email. You must stop spamming people. Spam is any bulk, unsolicited, email. Bulk is "more than one". Unsolicited means i) You don't have a confirmed opt-in (and users not unselecting a box does not count in UK) ii) You don't include a single-click unsubscribe link in every email
3) Get someone who knows PR involved. 3a) Until then, get someone else to read your comments before posting. You don't need to post immediately, and doing so is causing you harm.
That is my end-goal. :) Trying to set up a good, video-friendly workflow first.
I sorta wish I was able to reply to parent's comment before it got flagged to death, though.
Is this serious? What's a cron job have to do with knocking out information from a rdbms?
I imagine a cron job could be useful if there was a script to clear out any static files - but you can also invoke the script manually. "Nothing complex" :)
> You're joking, but a quick Google search of [site:livecoding.tv banned] shows that's exactly what is happening.
> https://www.livecoding.tv/2pointoh/
> https://www.livecoding.tv/hekton/
Which shows their usual procedure for deleting or banning is... vandalism.
https://www.livecoding.tv/2pointoh/ also called Dan by first name is an individual in New York city who's account we specifically banned for a) showing pornographic content on Livecoding.tv the second time after he was warned the first time. b) harassing women on channels
BANNED FOR POSTING PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES ON LIVECODING.TV BANNED FOR POSTING PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES ON LIVECODING.TV BANNED FOR POSTING PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES ON LIVECODING.TV
No. They just delete the account. I don't think many people would want to join a website where the CEO vandalizes user profile pages, regardless of the reason.
I don’t know who you think I am, but this is the most ridiculous claim I’ve ever heard.
Proof of not being this "alex" here: http://i.imgur.com/G7qo5qn.jpg
Thanks for giving me a laugh in my math lecture, though.
Now for the legal part:Dear Sir or Madam,
If you are represented by legal council, please redirect this message to your attorney immediately and have your attorney notify me of such representation.
You are hereby directed to
CEASE AND DESIST ALL DEFAMATION OF MY CHARACTER AND REPUTATION, AND CEASE AND DESIST PUBLISHING ANY CLAIMS I WOULD HAVE ANY CONNECTION TO "Watch People Code", or "Dan", OR THAT I AM IN ANY WAY CONNECTED TO OR INVOLVED IN ILLEGAL OR IMMORAL ACTIVITIES
Additionally I demand that you provide me with prompt written assurance within ten (10) days that you will cease and desist from aforementioned actions.
If you do not comply with this cease and desist demand within this time period, I am entitled to seek monetary damages and equitable relief for your defamation. In the event you fail to meet this demand, please be advised that I will pursue all available legal remedies, including seeking monetary damages, injunctive relief, and an order that you pay court costs and attorney’s fees. Your liability and exposure under such legal action could be considerable.
Before taking these steps, however, I wish to give you one opportunity to discontinue your illegal conduct by complying with this demand within ten (10) days. Accordingly, please sign and return a statement that you will stop and publicly apologize for aforementioned actions to
Janne Koschinski
Steinberg 148
24107 Kiel, Deutschland
I recommend that you consult with an attorney regarding this matter. If you or your attorney have any questions, please contact me directly.
Sincerely,
Janne Koschinski
I will send a written copy of this to your mailing address as listed on your website.Thanks.
Let’s see what’s going to happen, if they don’t react at all, I can still go down the legal path.
I’ve volunteered in a child daycare for 2 weeks a few years ago, and even those children – age 3 to 6 – behaved more mature.
What does make me sad, though, is that his co-founder was caught in this fallout, and his reputation will be stained by this.
https://www.livecoding.tv/lazer/
Also, per her LinkedIn, the OP works for DICE the game-development studio (subsidiary of EA, made Battlefield, etc.), not Dice.com (job hunting site).
CTRL+V, RETURN, RETURN,
CTRL+V, RETURN, RETURN, CTRL+V and then accidentally hitting + together with RETURN....
Which, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/
The vitriol was spelt LIIVECODING now it has been corrected to LIVECODING - wow, just wow.
A company blatantly pissing off much of its would-be userbase and sticking to its grossly incompetent guns, obviously not caring at all.
I literally cannot imagine a way they could handle this more poorly.
I've had the misfortune of bearing witness to paranoia fueled by both mental illness and drug abuse (and a combination of both). I've also worked with and for unapologetic assholes. There are things about this case and his communications that have me leaning toward the former.
Is that legally irresponsible naming someone in full and directly implying they were responsible for a negative action?
Anyways, I don't think I would sign in to their site anymore. It is unfortunate that one of the YC companies doesn't feel "cool" anymore.
edit: Now the answer of the co-founder(you can find it below) is way better and it should have been the first reaction to this post. Hopefully there can be a happy result to both sides.
They're investors, not chaperons.
That "break the rules" post got around. Maybe there needs to be a "but don't be a massive jerk to ex customers" follow up post.
Now YC gives $120k for 7%, so it is no longer completely idiotic from a purely monetary point of view, but even at $120k most of the value is in the access it gives you to the YC staff and the other people YC puts you in contact with.
Because of this a lot of people have higher expectations for YC companies.
[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal
https://www.livecoding.tv/2pointoh/
https://www.livecoding.tv/hekton/
This is unacceptable behavior from any business.
If I had stocks in the company, I’d have sold by now. It’d be a miracle if the company would still be up and running by next week.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487394
this is too good, it could only get better if you could somehow manage to slip "soon" in your reply.
Mistakes happen. Many startups have survived bad publicity on HN. Your actions have not ensured you a spot in this roster. Even generously overlooking the juvenile behavior of your cofounder and ban messages, the narrative of livecoding.tv stored in the collective brain of HN is now "fails to respond to user and petulantly refuses to apologize for seven hours."
The best thing you can do right now is to identify the responsible individual in your company, apologize specifically, and abjectly, as a company, on behalf of this individual, remove all the ban messages, delete OP's account, explain how a cron job came to enter the story, and both explain and apologize for why this took two hours to resolve after you heard about it.
(Disclaimer: I was about to sign up for livecoding.tv for similar reasons as OP just yesterday. I'm disappointed to know this might've happened to me.)
customer‑focused ... and professional
Might want to re-think that too.
Mishandling personal information is a big deal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/timferriss/comments/3g2mjg/tim_ferr...
"Startup L. Jackson @StartupLJackson Sep 4
[Startup L. Jackson Retweeted Ced]
How to make your team completely ineffective.
Treat communication & collaboration w hostility.
Done."
It seems a little strange that that was the course of action taken here.
So far everything you and your cofounders have done has made this problem worse and larger.
You are untrustworthy and incompetent.
This is important because it never occurs to most users that you might edit their profile, and so it never occurs to them that you might edit other users' profiles. Thus, when people see something on someone else's profile they assume the person put it there.
The loss of your own reputation is going to be harder to come back from. Reputable VCs doing even basic due diligence are going to see this incident and aren't going to want to have anything to do with you, unless you show swift and decisive action, one way or another. So far your response has been neither swift nor decisive.
For what it's worth, asking Michael to contact OP seems like a really bad idea. He's hardly shown good customer services skills so far, do you really think he's going to do a better job suddenly?
You are destroying your product, your work and your name at the moment. This is very sad to watch, I really wish you'd stop.
What is the narrative you think these emails are fulfilling? Did anyone ever stop using a site because they just forgot? "Oh yeah, I think I remember that site I had been using for a month but stopped two days ago. Must have slipped my mind."
I had even bought a t-shirt from them and it took longer to show up than I remembered I had an account there. Then they decided they fucked up the t-shirt and at least two months later another one showed up at my old address. No warning. Luckily, I still own the place but had gone to show it to a new tenant.
I was willing to chalk my experience up to operational growing pains, but this story here is just inexcusable. Clearly, reasonable people with a love of engineering and a passion for their product aren't running the show there. Now I want my account deleted.
A few days later I get another message saying the first message offering the free item was a mistake, and that I wasn't invited to have one after all. Can't say I was too torn up.
Also, you're going on the record as saying that the important thing here is not to apologize, not to fix the problem, not even to try to explain but rather to point out to people that they should sign their names in an online discussion with full names.
Grow up, step back, fix it, apologize.
And I've done t-shirt orders from screen printers before. It doesn't take a month.
Sure, separate business policy from code, but it seems unwise to assume your users are technically ignorant when your site is about inviting programmers to stream their work.
Of course, assuming that it is a monthly cron job and the account actually is scheduled for deletion then, the question would be: Why in gods name would you not just say that?! "Your account is scheduled for deletion at so and so time", and if at that point you're complaining that it's not fast enough, no one would really have much sympathy for that.
It's still possible this isn't an example of a vindictive and petty individual lying through their teeth. It may still be an example of someone who with poor PR skills, and is not coping with the situation those poor PR skills created.
Glad to hear about what's going on here, I will be sure to never stream or give a website with this type of management my business :)
I say "might" because it's not exactly spelled out that way in the regulation. Basically, any sort of reports that are used to make financial decisions must be replicable. You have to be able to show an auditor how you came to your numbers. You have to show how the report would have looked at the time it was made, and what data it would have contained.
I could potentially see raw count of users, or counts of users combined with popularity of videos (and growth of popularity across those videos) be a part of plans on how to monetize such a site. If Livecoding.TV had made revenue projections based on some future monetization plan and had started circulating this plan amongst potential investors, it becomes a serious landmine to hard-delete data.
Most places assume this just means "keep backups", but I don't know anyone who is operationally prepared to restore year-old backups of databases and running application code to be able to appease such an auditor. Full compliance is really hard, so I almost always advise people to go for soft-delete instead. There are any number of technical and business reasons why soft-delete is better, too. If this report that a 3rd party registered a new account with the same name just to be able to troll everyone involved turns out to be true, that would be one of those reasons.
That said, that's a completely different issue than privacy compliance. Any sane authorization system should make it easy to de-authorize specific sets of data for everyone. No data request meant to go out into the world should ever lack an authorization check. Given the difficulties of keeping tabs on internal- versus external data, I just generally believe all data requests should come along with an authorization check, regardless of whether or not it's required, because you can't ever really predict what code a jr. programmer is going to reuse some day.
This is a service that ends up running on the internet and can have international people using it. That means you need to be very conscious of international laws. EU citizens have a legal right to have their data deleted by sites.
But I think probably the least shocked people are the YC partners. If you are Paul G./YC, what do you do about this? By far the biggest question that YC must confront as it expands into research, bigger and bigger classes, new types of involvement through fellows, etc., is how to retain their ability to suss out, deal with, or prevent things like these. I think they are fully aware that they can't.
If anyone hasn't figured it out already, YC is becoming the first 21st century university. In order to get there, they have to become significantly bigger, and just like the startups they fund, that's the metric that's on their radar.
I don't think these events are a sign of YC's negligence. Instead, I think YC is slowly transitioning to a new era in the company. Paul G and the gang are incredibly brilliant. They knew the odds when they decided to continue this incredibly rapid growth of batches and outreach. They aren't surprised by these events; they are just moving to a stage where things like this are unfortunately the cost of doing business. If Paul G is cooking dinner for you and your few buddies over the summer every night, you aren't getting away with this. If you are now one of thousands of people fighting for (or trying to avoid) their attention, you certainly can.
Go around to any top school, and you see the same. Out of your couple thousand bright-eyed, brilliant freshmen, there inevitably are a couple bad apples. But none of them would think that a solution to this is to shrink class sizes.
This is a ridiculous statement, it is nothing like a university.
Over 700 companies have gone on through YC, so they now have a few thousand alums and actively maintain an Alumni network -- really wish universities had something like this!
The companies go through the program in cohorts for a set amount of time -- they call these "classes". Not sure if universities have anything of the sort.
Sam Altman himself said that soon he "we will have to do something" with respect to housing. Again, nothing like I've seen any university do.
My personal favorite, though, is the part where they get everyone to come to dinner together to exchange experiences and whatnot. If only Harvard figured out that they could use their beautiful dining hall for this sort of thing...
Tellingly, you don't mention the primary reason universities exist - to educate, regardless of the profitability of the subject. This is exactly the opposite of YC's primary goal, which is to make money and avoid unprofitable investments.
Nothing unless it gets bad press. Why do you think they care about "egregious" behavior?
Quote From: What We Look For In Founders - Paul Graham - October 2010
By stating that rules breaking is desirable, but not stating clearly where the lines are, companies are not given clear enough guidance to avoid scumbag behaviour.
I found it to be fairly entertaining...
TBH most of this is basic competence. YC can't ensure that all of the companies are competent in all aspects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
Eventually the company seemed to hire a crisis consultant and started acting better.
But in the early days the founders were being extremely douchy and PG wrote an article that I was astounded to receive, defending the douchiness.
That was the point that I started to think YC isn't better than the average level of Silicon Valley.
BTW, many YC companies engage in fake traction tactics sometimes ones that cross the line into dishonesty-- for example AirBnBs "we'll spam people listing their places on craigslist while pretending to be someone else" marketing scheme.
Well, if it's not a YC problem, it should very well become one.
- Jessica Livingston
So, yet another win for Jessica's infallible intuition! Maybe these guys can get together with the Homejoy team and create something really special.