Lori seems (from the blog post and the subsequent email chain with the CEO) to be unnecessarily combative and most definitely too emotionally invested in Kagi.
You're paying, what, 10, 25 USD - are you getting a good service for it? If not, unsubscribe, if yes, what's the problem? Sounds like they're profitable now, so little risk of the service dissapearing.
Unnecessary drama by people who live for drama. My only advice for Vlad would be to not get caught up in it.
People pay $0 to Google/Meta/Twitter/TikTok for their base level offerings, and their privacy policy is valid to discuss and criticize. Does it somehow become less important just because they are also getting paid money?
People discuss Apple's commitment to privacy and if it is real or adequate.
And I think that the inability to explicitly confirm relationships w/ Stripe et al are ways that users cannot determine whether they are paying w/ their data on top of their monthly costs.
For a second there, I thought you were talking about Vlad!
Based on the exchanges, Vlad is both extremely combative and unwilling to accept the possibility that he is wrong (which he is here).
Being aggressively wrong is no way to go through life. Vlad should be more humble, and open to being wrong, rather than being unnecessarily belligerent.
I don't get the sense that Vlad is combative, just (over)confident. There are no personal attacks, no aggression, no flaming or flamebait. He just is very confident in his approach and doesn't slow down to listen to criticism. Not the best approach as a founder, but not combative.
Wouldn’t the same apply to Lori in that exchange. They just put the company on blast and aren’t willing to even hear the other side of things. That email exchange made me lose a ton of respect for them.
But, Vlad definitely should have stopped when Lori responded that they didn’t want to have a conversation at all. If for no other reason than they were a lost cause.
The one who "needs to hear the other side of things" is rarely the customer, and this is a good case study in why: no matter how much this customer "hears", they are right and Vlad is wrong with regards to the GDPR. By insisting that the customer needed to "hear the other (wrong) side of things" he looked worse than if he had just listened to the customer.
The customer isn't always right, but often is, like in this case. If you're a CEO, best to just pipe down, be humble, and listen to customers. Being open to being wrong is a nice plus, but either way, people will like you more if you appear to listen instead of argue. Even when you're right!
tl;dr: this isn't an internet argument between two otherwise-equal random strangers, this is a CEO talking down to a customer while being objectively wrong, which is 2x bad.
The problem is that Vlad seems objectively wrong about his interpretation of the GDPR and what is and is not PII. (I mean, jesus, "email address isn't PII because you can use a burner"? What, no, that's not how it works).
Instead of actually educating himself, he just argues that he's not wrong. I could easily see Lori being sick of the frustration of having to deal with that and just say "ok, nope, this conversation is done".
> They just put the company on blast and aren’t willing to even hear the other side of things.
If someone say "please don't email me about this anymore" after writing a hit piece on someone and there company without giving them an opportunity to respond they are being provocative, goading and a troll.
Lori isn't writing a 'hit peice' she is writing a short post that is in effect a review of the service and the company and the founder.
If the founder wants to respond they can write a respectful blog post and put it on the fucking homepage. They don't have a right to harangue the author via email.
I mean, your email is kind of an open box that people can stuff letters into. If you don’t like the letters from someone you can rip them up unopened (send to trash).
If your intention to stop communication - you can block someone.
Or if that's the words that would've been chosen - I would agree to you.
But if you mix those words with extra message, then no. A reply to this new message is warranted.
E.g. if you add a reason and that reason is unreasonable - it's warranted to address that and reply to you.
Either do a request without attached strings, or block.
Don't write extra conditions/reasoning and then complain that someone doesn't agree with you on those and kept messaging.
> "Thanks for reaching out, but no, I would not. I am not interested in being cornered into a call by the owner of a business because I made a blog
post about it."
This is not goading, this is telling someone to fuck off into the sun. If he wants to respond he can respond on his product with a blog post. His audience already dwarfs hers anyways, he Streisand-effect'ed himself because he's clearly got some narcissism issues.
This comment, taken as a response to the parent or just as general advice about life, is so entirely bereft of anything objectionable, and is so intrinsically reasonable that its status as 'downvoted' (assumed from the grey text color) is a blemish on HN's commentariat.
Put more simply: it takes a weird, broken logic to find fault in the idea that a person who won't stop emailing you, after being told to, isn't "combative".
The further responses from Vlad may be ill advised, and maybe he should've realized those emails were going to be unproductive, but they aren't combative.
The email Lori sends explicitly asking him to stop emailing is then followed up with some last-wordism "for the record" nonsense. Only on the extremely online internet do people consider someone the aggrieved party after they write a screed against a product or business, then close the conversation with representatives of that business with essentially a don't @ me and some last-wordism. It's terrible journalistic practice. It's a net negative in social and community engagement. I don't see why doing it over online spaces gives the author a pass here.
If someone say "please don't email me about this anymore" after writing a hit piece on someone and there company without giving them an opportunity to respond they are being provocative, goading and a troll.
> Being aggressively wrong is no way to go through life. Vlad should be more humble, and open to being wrong, rather than being unnecessarily belligerent.
I think that if he had different type of personality then he wouldn't start this company - a regular, humble, humiliated, developer would just tremble, sweat and shiver at the thought of starting business straight competing with core Google, MS products. He needs to be believer and confident to pull this.
Also almost all leaders of great and (now) big companies seem to be type of people that regular Joe not necessarily would enjoy to be friends with.
I think the image you paint of a "regular" person explains why some folks view this blog post as a opportunity for Vlad to learn, and others view it as a "hit piece" that he must "get a chance to respond to", as if this were combat (and as if he didn't get tens of chances to respond more effectively in the discord conversations we see).
There is a great strength in "I might be wrong here, I'd like to learn more" than makes even the most hardheaded wrongness look weak, and if you look at the history of effective CEOs, you'll likely notice that inability to entertain the possibility you might be wrong tends to be a liability.
Some other posters are claiming Vlad is combative. He’s not, he’s just direct. I’ve given feedback on Kagi/orion and Vlad just asks for clarity pretty directly.
American culture and customer support likes to blow smoke up your ass while saying no. Other cultures and Vlad don’t do that.
.. to emotionally invested. She saw some stuff on their discord from the founder that was honestly .. weird if not just plain neglegent (the gdpr arguments, he's wrong for the record) .. the tax stuff. She posted an article.
He reached out to her via email to set up a call. She demurred and asked him to stop contacting her, he persisted and wrote a petulant novella of an email. She asserted that he stop contacting her again. He seems to have finally taken the hint.
This is a guy who seems like he can't stand to be wrong about anything, not a business I would bet on with my wallet.
The way I see it, she has posted a blog post with factually wrong information, effectively slandering the business. CEO got in touch to bridge the gap and amend possible misunderstandings, there's absolutely nothing wrong in that, her email responses are just unhinged, and after reading the mother-of-echo-chambers that is her mastodon instance I think I understand why.
You're paying, what, 10, 25 USD - are you getting a good service for it? If not, unsubscribe, if yes, what's the problem? Sounds like they're profitable now, so little risk of the service dissapearing.
Unnecessary drama by people who live for drama. My only advice for Vlad would be to not get caught up in it.