That checks. Ghost CEO launched massive e-mail flame at me when I asked them to clarify their migration policy (it used to say you could "request" your data but gave no indication as to whether they honor such requests). Dude is outright abusive.
Same experience here with the CTO... I was trying to notify some terrible security problems in their product. What she doesn't like she dismisses, deflects, and deletes. edit - it was the CTO, not CEO
Well they're based on Singapore (at least as far as it appears from the Contact page) so they're outside of any EU jurisdiction unless they have servers there.
It's definetly hard to enforce, but not impossible, if EU is dealing with a party in a random country which clearly shows no intention of doing business in the EU. I.e. the internet is practically lawless a lot of the time. But it depends on whether you're accepting payments and whether you have paying customers in EU.
Horrific CX. I'm sure if Ghost discovered a bug causing data loss it would become an engineering priority.
From a customer's perspective this is the same thing. This shows a complete lack of empathy with what customers feel when they use your platform.
Stories like these stick with me. When I evaluate using a product, hearing about customer pain like this makes it a no go. Similarly I've told friends that I wouldn't work for a company they've applied to based on bad c-level engagement with customers.
Stuff like this spreads. If you won't fix it for your customers sake, fix it out of self interest.
I often test our product by recording a speedrun video of the main functionality, not to be shared, but to reveal all the learned helplessness and clunky user experience.
It is amazing how recording a video going through the product does: the video is full of swear words and cursing. All the things that were invisible suddenly become glaring. All the un-necessary clicking and convoluted flows become torture with cognitive dissonance: "And you can easily just do [steps that clearly are not easy]" and it hits you. Hard.
Hence, some things trigger that agression, especially in a more mature product. For example, I only used YouTube as a consumer of videos, but recently I was putting a lot of videos there in my personal account.
I then created another account and wanted to transfer the videos. Easy, right? No. I looked and looked, and read documentation, and searched on the web, and people said you need to download the videos from one account, then upload them back again to the second account. That can't be, right? I mean I clearly am not the first one to want to do that, and YouTube has existed for ages. There has to be a way I'm stupid enough to have overlooked. I contact them on Twitter, and they link to the documentation that tells you to download videos somewhere, then upload them back again. This is insanity. They're already on YouTube's infra, why do the round trip. Just move the darn thing? I'm not privy to how their infrastructure works, but I have a feeling that this is not the flow I want.
One other example... I have one Android phone that was not physically in the same place as me. I wanted to get the call history (which is backed up in Drive) to urgently call the last number that called me. I could clearly see that the call history was backed up in Drive, and it shows you a "Preview" button that, when you click on, shows a modal that tells you the call history is backed up, and has a button that says "Delete".
I can use Find my Phone and pin-point the location, I can erase it, I can make it ring, I can download all my data and Drive. I can download the device settings. I can Delete a backup, but not download it.
Now I need to wait for tomorrow to be able to get that phone for that call log.
Here's what is interesting: it's almost impossible that I be the first one that hits something like this (either for YouTube or Drive) for products with this many users existing for this long. Moving a video around is practically so obvious, you don't think there would be a documentation for it, let alone a documentation that tells you you can't do it. Heck I'll run my mouth and say it's harder to write and maintain the docs that tell you you can't do it, than add that no-brainer functionality... But then again, I'm running my mouth.
The YouTube issue you describe could be on purpose to limit abuse/gaming of the system. Since we don’t deal in YouTube’s moderation day to day we aren’t privy to the reasoning that feature was never developed. Maybe they did it early on and realized before they released it could be abused to make copies of your YouTube channel with slightly different language optimized for different search terms. Hard to say intent without working on it day to day. Sometimes things are hard on purpose because a small part of the population suck and will abuse a feature.
Yes, that was my point. I know that the current flow is not what I want, but I understand there obviously are reasons I'm not privy to, but then again it looks obvious to me from the outside.... but then again I'm not aware of all the reasons they've done it like that.
The fact there exist reasons something sucks does not make it suck less for the user, even taking into account the user's awareness of these reasons' existence.
This is a really fun idea. Obviously when you do real user tests, they’re too professional to curse but finding and fixing UI friction by curses per minute is very appealing!
What's the really common use case for changing the ownership of individual videos? It seems super niche, and seems like a feature with a lot of really sharp edges that will be hard to get right.
While if you wanted to move all the videos, couldn't you just have moved the entire channel to a brand account, and then moved the brand account to a different Google account?
>What's the really common use case for changing the ownership of individual videos? It seems super niche, and seems like a feature with a lot of really sharp edges that will be hard to get right.
What's the really common use case for changing the location of a file from one directory to the other?
>While if you wanted to move all the videos, couldn't you just have moved the entire channel to a brand account, and then moved the brand account to a different Google account?
This blows. Is the word here "just"? Did you read how when I record videos and I say "And you can easily just do [steps that clearly are not easy]" and then it hits me that I'm using "simply" and "just" incorrectly because the steps are not easy.
The above is YouTube specific and requires to know channels and brand accounts. We're talking about moving something from A to B in the same context: like a file from one directory to the other on your interface, you should be able to move a video from one account to the other.
So I take it you did indeed not have a use for transferring individual videos to a different channel? I think "just" is a pretty reasonable word to use here, it is two well documented steps. Happy to help!
Look, you're claiming that videos are obviously analogous to files, and should thus support the same operations that files do. But that's not the case, they're more complex objects.
For example, moving a video can't be unilateral. For reasons that should be pretty obvious, you have to have both the old and new owner consent to the transfer, which is going to be a fairly complex flow. There's no analogous concept in any filesystem I've ever seen.
>So I take it you did indeed not have a use for transferring individual videos to a different channel? I think "just" is a pretty reasonable word to use here, it is two well documented steps. Happy to help!
Given that my original comment described an actual, real, use case with the actual problem I faced, your take that I did not have a use would be wrong.
The solution in your first comment of moving the "channel" to a brand account is not acceptable. Therefore, the fact they were "just" two well documented steps is irrelevant because it's not the right solution. If I want to move a TV from one house to the other, I shouldn't have to transfer the house as well.
>Look, you're claiming that videos are obviously analogous to files, and should thus support the same operations that files do. But that's not the case, they're more complex objects.
At some point, they are stored somewhere, right? Database, object storage, filesystem: something on disk.
>For example, moving a video can't be unilateral. For reasons that should be pretty obvious, you have to have both the old and new owner consent to the transfer, which is going to be a fairly complex flow. There's no analogous concept in any filesystem I've ever seen.
I am the owner of both. Simple enough scenario in my case.
Are you using words like complex and obvious without really giving details because you're speaking knowingly of the internal challenges YouTube is having to move one video from one place to the other but can't go into details, or do you not know of the inner workings of YouTube?
Would you agree that the user experience of being unable to move a video from one place to another sucks, notwithstanding the existence (or inexistence) of technical challenges?
Would you agree that you start with a desired user experience and then solve the engineering challenges, not get a user experience that sucks and spend too much time telling the user why they're wrong and how it doesn't make sense to want to move one video from one place to the other, and that there are complexities for obvious reasons, and that they're not like files...
This covers the ramifications of poor customer treatment (business practices), and also acts as a warning to startups that might be looking at ghost as an option for their company's blog
Frustrated users are an opportunity to learn and improve. As I read the rant about how his system is needlessly complicated web of "tens of thousands of apps, orchestrated by a complex billing management layer which has no link to the software itself, blah blah, blah" I couldn't help but think how much more fruitful the conversation would be if he had sent it to the engineering team instead of getting defensive to the customer.
Even Steve Jobs would commonly take customer complaints about Apple's products sent to his E-mail address, and forward them down to engineering with a terse note "Why?"
"Sorry, this is a bug and we're working on fixing it" would have been such a better response.
Seems like the CEO told OP that they would provide her an archive download link upon request. I'm confused what the problem is?
I buy that the trial lockout thing is annoying, but... Are we supposed to be up in arms that a user has to email support for... support?
I'm annoyed primarily by OP's entitlement and vitriol, and secondarily by the CEO's typos and grammar.
Those were the ones I was referring to. I'll agree that they aren't really rude, but I do think they're condescending.
I guess by rude I meant the negative comments seemed overwrought and unnecessary in the context of a support thread.
Shrug, I guess I've vented at support before, but usually in a tone that I hope better acknowledged that it wasn't the agent's fault. More commiseration than lecturing. Again, I hope.
In the various forms of support I've done, I've always encountered rude customers at some point. It's the job. If you feel like you have to be defensive (per other comments here, it sounds like this isn't the first time), you shouldn't be responding.
> I guess I've vented at support before, but usually in a tone that I hope better acknowledged that it wasn't the agent's fault.
I had a very bad experience with Chase. (They took $900 without explanation, and still haven't returned it) In my many calls, I had some heated venting sessions. I usually at least once told the person it wasn't personal, but they were the Chase rep at that moment.
As an aside, responding to this thread with a throwaway created during this thread, everyone is going to assume you work for Ghost.
> If you feel like you have to be defensive (per other comments here, it sounds like this isn't the first time), you shouldn't be responding.
Huh?
> I usually at least once told the person it wasn't personal
:thumbsup: Common courtesy
> As an aside ... everyone is going to assume you work for Ghost.
Fair. I don't, I make a new throwaway for every hn thread I bother to comment on (happens roughly every 4 - 6 months), but there's no reason to believe me. I don't even really know what ghost is; pretty confused why you have to pay for it at all if it's decentralized.
Could be shitty — just thought the thread author's reaction was unjustified from the facts she posted.
> Years ago, when l was younger and knew better, used to be very aggressive to companies on Twitter and lecture them about how they should do business. It was awful, honestly, and I regret how I behaved.
Even ignoring the obvious typo, it is a little condescending indeed.
When I was young and foolish, I also used to defend random CEOs on Hacker News. But now I'm older, and rationalizing their absurd and offensive rhetoric is too time consuming for my desired lifestyle.
But as a bystander I can ignore the obnoxious demands of a free tier customer and just look at how Ghost negotiates the facts of customer experience laid out before them, and how reassuring one might find their response.
For example, I note that nobody is contending the facts regarding the customer onboarding and payment process. I also note that the Ghost CEO provided an ad hoc fix with no discussion on whether their policy is good. That implies there will be a next customer who faces the same situation, notwithstanding any obnoxious Twitter followup — and who knows, perhaps another ad hoc fix.
How is it obnoxious to expect to be able to log in and add a payment plan yourself? Literally every other Saas that serves business customers does that. None glibly say “oh yeah and your data’s queued for deletion, but you can ASK to be let in to add a payment plan”
Sorry, I shouldn't have said that you are obnoxious. I originally thought that a free tier customer shouldn't load harsh criticism onto customer support when you know they can't ever respond.
But when I thought it over, I believe that industry rules will eventually catch up to your customer expectations. I would never expect a mainstream company that deals with data, such as Notion or Airbase, to replicate the same behavior as Ghost.
In a customer/company interaction, the company should ALWAYS take the high road. They don't get to be offended or defensive. They have more to lose by doing so.
A business is still an individual customer. (Whether that customer has 1 employee or 1 million) I'm talking "individual" in the many to one sense, not the C in B2C sense.
Twitter's had a login wall for a few weeks now. The company is pretty user-hostile.
edit: There were some threads on this in the past that are worth checking out. Public service announcements like fire notifications are pushed out by public agencies through these services and they can't go to the intended audience when put behind the wall. Public sector really needs to be compelled to adopt interoperable and freely consumable protocols.
I respectfully asked a question about something she blogged about years ago and she blocked me. It was rather bizarre. Perhaps you met a similar fate at one time.
You must be blocked… either for a reason, or part of a block list or I blocked you accidentally when blocking ads which has happened a few times. What’s your username?
Here’s the tweet you claim is racist — I know bc it’s the only time anyone has called me racist. I complained that Etsy w searches were dominated by mass produced goods from China. Not a slur on Chinese craft or people, but dismay at the amount of AliExpress-type items.
Yes she also willfully misread “mass produced goods” and asked me why I didn’t think Chinese artisans should use etsy for their handmade goods, a classic loaded question and a position I have never taken.
The mass produced goods — that didn’t belong on Etsy — were literally from China. Calling something Chinese doesn’t make it racist.
I don't know where to dm you, so I'll do this here:
I really shouldn't have posted this submission.
Ghost is a relatively big platform that I've always kept in consideration for projects. I was so shocked by the situation and the discovery that something similar happened in the past that I went "people need to know this!" disregarding how out of place it'd be to blast the thread here. Thankfully it was flagged quickly, but it shouldn't have been up to begin with.
I really appreciate you saying that. Don’t worry about it, it’s not causing me any distress and I’m too sick to do anything productive right now anyway.
But this place is a cesspit. This is actually a better experience than I would’ve expected from years before, and it’s still terrible. Just something to take away from the experience.
As I said at the time, I don't think she was willfully misreading you; I think she was suggesting you might be fallible. Because I said that, you've had me blocked on Twitter for eight years, which kind of amounts to conceding Star's original point.
I'm sort of puzzled about where you think the mass-produced artisan goods on AliExpress come from. Like, presumably we're not talking about goods like "one ton of calcium chloride" or "1MW supercritical steam generator", right? We're talking about the kinds of goods that Chinese artisans hand-make en masse and sell on AliExpress, things like furniture and decorations, right?
“mass produced hand made artisan goods” is not a thing. You’re inventing things and putting words in my mouth, just like you did originally, which is why you’re blocked. No, you can’t put words in someone’s mouth and say “you blocked me so it’s true” either.
I didn't put any words in your mouth in the original thread. If anyone had a legitimate complaint about that, it would be Star; you did put words in her mouth, and I suggested that you might be mistaken about your interpretation. Here are my tweets in full:
> Is it possible @starsandrobots did read your tweet, and simply thought you were fallible?
> I thought her point was actually pretty interesting: is Etsy a reasonable outlet for Chinese artisans? Could it be? How?
And then, in response to your accusations against Star:
> It's possible that might be in her heart, but doesn't seem certain to me.
And then (though this was hard to find) I posted this, but I'm not sure what it refers to; maybe someone said "for shame" in a tweet that's been deleted:
> I mean, it's possible that Chinese artisans who mass-handmake things and post them on Etsy will run into "for shame" even if not yet
And then, in response to a now-lost tweet from an extremely bizarre account that I now suspect was a Russian troll (flip-flopped from fervent support of Black Lives Matter to suddenly being some kind of alt-right account):
> @AmyStephen You're using these terms as if they're opposites, but I don't think they are. cc @amyhoy
(I just found those last two tweets and added them to this comment.)
That's the whole thread!
After that, you blocked us both, apparently for eight years.
Anyone can read this (at least, if they log into HN and turn on "showdead" in their profile, since my comments are getting flagged) and see that what I'm saying is true and what you're saying is not true, and moreover that you were doing what you falsely accused me of doing, so I don't know why you are posting these comments. Maybe you just think people are really easy to fool?
As for mass-produced handmade artisan goods, I'm not sure how you think mass production works in factories, but it generally involves a great deal of handmaking, much of which is done by artisans. There are exceptions, like JLCPCB and chemical plants, but I think their goods are not the kind that would sell best on Etsy. A lot of the totally unskilled assembly-line work, like what I did when I worked in a bubblebath factory, has been long since automated. What's left is largely skilled artisan work like investment casting.
Factory-created mass-produced handmade artisan goods? You're working really hard to misinterpret their tweet.
Do you expect people to think of skilled artisans working on handmade goods when they hear mass production? Because upon reading Wikipedia [1] or a dictionary [2], I'd think of factories, assembly lines, machinery and automation.
Etsy is a site that advertises carefully crafted handmade goods from independent creators, that are often custom and unique. They were looking for non-mass-produced handmade goods and found mass-produced goods from China instead. That's a mundane factual observation that couldn't be made clearer.
You're not really making your case here. Reading your flagged comments is not as flattering as you seem to believe.
> Factory-created mass-produced handmade artisan goods? You're working really hard to misinterpret their tweet.
You seem to have seized on a minor peripheral point and worked very hard to rebut it, I suppose because you want to take Hoy's side. But the entire original tweet thread except for Hoy's first tweet was about non-mass-produced goods from China, so the question of whether we should count mass-produced goods produced by skilled artisans working on an assembly line as "handmade artisan goods" is pretty much entirely beside the point.
In fact, the whole factual question there is beside the point. The reason this is at all relevant is that we're talking about Hoy's conflict with Ghost; her tendency to go nuclear and treat people very poorly over minor issues, as amply demonstrated here, is the relevant thing. There are people who applaud that sort of thing, which probably explains most of the appeal of Twitter. It looks like you're one of them.
Me, I'm sick of it, and I don't think this kind of behavior should be welcome here.
> But the entire original tweet thread except for Hoy's first tweet was about non-mass-produced goods from China
If I tweeted something and then a bunch of randoms started reply-guy arguing in my notifications about a straw man they'd made up, I'd block the lot of them forever too.
Every post you've made here is making you look even worse.
Minor peripheral point? The whole original thread was arguing about a point that wasn't made in the first tweet. They never claimed nor implied non-mass-produced goods from China were an issue. Replies created that point out of nowhere and you are using the fabricated discussion to paint them as somehow problematic.
Etsy (certainly back then, afaik they've sort-of given up on that by now: hard to police and bad for growth - turns out mass-production gives more turnover) was very much about things hand-made by seller. The promise was that you don't get people selling stuff they bought from factories on Ali[baba|Express] and claiming it's something they've handmade - in 2013 they had just allowed outsourcing production steps for the first time, if you documented who did exactly what step, so no buying things (handmade or not) and just reselling them. Nevertheless, that's what you get, X shops selling the exact same thing they supposedly made (or selling them with small customizations done, which was OK according to the rules but plenty people still disliked), and Etsy was pushing "integrity updates" and promising to better police this. And that wasn't in any way about Chinese people, because obviously if people are reselling massproduced stuff the problem is not the worker who made them. Nor are Chinese artisans selling their own product a problem, but I don't think that was a large group on the market anyways.
Of course nobody should resell things on Etsy that they merely bought, but there was nothing to suggest that Hoy was complaining about reselling; instead, she seemed to be suggesting that Chinese artisans who mass-produced things shouldn't sell them on Etsy. My reading of Hoy's reasoning at the time was "artisan = white person", so I tried to provoke some questioning of that assumption, and got blocked for my trouble. Certainly she had the opportunity to clarify at the time if that wasn't what she was talking about.
Rejecting the leading question clarified that quite nicely. And really, the jump of "could she be talking about the main Etsy point of complaints right now? No, way more likely she's just racist" is a crap starting assumption to make.
How am I supposed to know what the "main Etsy point of complaints" is, or was? I haven't talked to Kellan in years, I don't know if he even still works there.
I do pretty frequently see people making the "Chinese = impure" association, though. Maybe I should spend less time on places like this website, which would diminish my exposure to that kind of crap.
I don't think "reread what I wrote" clarifies anything. It leaves the interpretation entirely up to the reader, which is helpful when you're dog-whistling racism, counterproductive if you're trying to clearly express an idea that someone actually misunderstood.
So, I think your interpretation of the original tweet is plausible, particularly given the context you have—which I didn't have. But Hoy's response undermines your interpretation pretty strongly.
> so I tried to provoke some questioning of that assumption, and got blocked for my trouble. Certainly she had the opportunity to clarify at the time if that wasn't what she was talking about.
What would be the point of clarifying to you if you jumped in with those assumptions? She doesn’t owe you anything. Blocking someone like that seems like the right call.
You asked, "So you purposely provoked her instead of asking for reasonable clarification?"
No, to "provoke questioning" is to induce someone to re-examine something they thought they knew; it's not the same as "provoking a person", which means to intentionally offend them, which I wasn't doing. In fact, as you can see, I was very careful to phrase my questioning in as deferential and inoffensive a way as possible. And the particular way I was trying to provoke questioning was specifically by asking for reasonable clarification—clarification which apparently led somewhere she didn't want to go. It's good to see that she's now explicitly rejecting racism against Chinese people, which is something she wasn't willing to do eight years ago.
So you think you were trying to teach me with socratic dialogue by calling me racist? rather than asking, oh I don’t know, “what kind of goods”?
You made your decision — you called me racist then and now — and now you’re dishonestly trying to pretend it was more complicated and actually for my own good, really, when you think about it.
It’s super transparent tho so I appreciate all your replies that show just how twisted you’ve got it
I can’t reply to your nth nested comment so I’ll do it here.
You did call me racist, just like you did today. That’s how I knew EXACTLY which tweet it was 8 years later. Tweets can be deleted. I certainly don’t remember YOU as a person, you’re nobody to me.
You are being dishonest. You consistently saying things about me that are untrue. There was no racist tweet, I didn’t block Star — just you — and I didn’t flag your posts, among other lies.
You are using loaded questions and statements to try to assassinate my character.
You’re claiming I abuse people by blocking them.
You think you’re entitled to my tweets and attention. You fantasize we have some sort of relationships where I owe you conversation.
You’re obsessed with something that happened nearly a decade ago.
Bottom line: You need to stop talking about me and to me. I told you stop already and I’m telling you again: Stop.
I didn't actually call you racist then, as anyone who reads the Twitter thread can see; it's easy to see that the things that I'm saying are true, and the things that you're saying are not true. Even Star didn't call you racist. But (if I recall correctly) I knew that the line of questioning would quickly lead to you either having to take an explicitly racist position (which you'd probably be uncomfortable with) or strategizing on how to reduce the impact of racism (which you'd be even more uncomfortable with, if you were racist).
It's true that instead of asking, "What kind of goods?" I asked you whether you thought Etsy was a reasonable venue for Chinese artisans to sell their wares, which seems to me like a question you could have easily answered by explaining what kind of goods, saying something like "Of course, but people in North Carolina are reselling injection-molded Chinese toys like https://t.co/something." Instead, you blocked us both for eight years and counting, so I concluded that the discussion was leading someplace you didn't want to go, so you actually were just racist.
And now you're responding to me telling the story of how you treat people by smearing me as "dishonest" and "weird", which seems entirely in keeping with the kind of aggressive behavior that the whole discussion thread is about.
I really don't think that kind of behavior is the kind of behavior we strive for here, although I guess probably whoever is flagging all of my comments disagrees with that.
I see Star misinterpreting/extrapolating from the original tweet but (sort of) backpedaling or backing off relatively quickly, and you escalating and derailing the already tense situation with "interesting topics" Amy clearly doesn't want to discuss, then being whiny about this block 8 years later. Check yourself my dude. Amy does sound pretty annoyed in that thread from the start, but you were just pushing it further.
Just caught up on this thread, but just to reiterate what Amy said elsewhere and to refute your response that I can't reply to because it's flagged like basically everything else: She did not block Star.
Dude are you mad I deprived you of my tweets for 8 years, or are you mad I’m supposedly a racist? You can’t have it both ways. This is weird. You should stop.
I don’t think it’s in good faith to accuse someone of using multiple accounts to flag your comments without any basis and I believe this type of behavior is directly in violation of the guidelines of HN.
Claiming I refused to “explicitly reject racism” “eight years ago” is a loaded statement. You might as well accuse me of having refused to deny I was beating me wife. That would also be true. And it would also be dishonest and manipulative.
I understand why, but a lot of social media has gone this direction. It feels like a bit of a bait and switch over time.
The deal was we give them free content for eyeballs to serve ads and they give us a platform for exposure. Requiring login as well is a long trend I don’t like.
If the Ghost CEO really knew better about Twitter they’d recognize that this person is flaming for attention, not trying to get their problem resolved, so sending condescending emails is just throwing fuel on the fire.
I reckon some of the powerful distribution that can give you a centralized platform like Ghost, Medium, Substack or similar. But the long-term solution is to own your website.
At the very start the reach is not very enticing... but your home, your rules. (As long as you don't break the law, you'll be fine).
Its odd that Twitter flame wars are being discussed here. Though, I have steered clear of Ghost- their paid plans are too expensive. Yes, I can host it but what if I can't? Luckily WordPress works.
The best part is saying that you have learned so much about why you shouldn't be mean to companies on Twitter, and how embarrassing that behaviour is...and doing it in a whiny email to a customer.
Some people go through life "learning" the same lesson over and over.
