I understand that tweets were sent because a user opted-in and use some setting to elect to share activity on the site. As a developer I know how tempting it is to defensively declare "that's not a bug" when you feel that no error exists in the implementation itself. However I also think that is a weak excuse and one which you should stop using because it reads as you trying to pass off responsibility for what happened.
Yes, the system did what the user told it to. That doesn't matter. @julien51 seems to have sent 208 "I'm enjoying..." tweets between 10:31 and 10:34, more than a tweet per second for three minutes. To the product's user, and anyone following them on Twitter that's a bug. They don't care (though you certainly should) if the root cause was poor UI design or unclear documentation, or a poorly written background job, or a bad data migration, or whatever else could have gone wrong.
You really only have two options when communicating about your features to your users; either "its broken" or "its working as intended". If you're lucky you might have enough credit with them to be able to add "its working as intended for now but we have plans to improve it in the future".
I don't mean to be too harsh or attack bradfordcross or Prismatic specifically here. I've certainly been responsible for my share of bad user experiences through bugs or "not a bug"s. This just struck me as perhaps a poor way to represent a product to an audience that might trust it or be hearing about it for the first time.
I'm curious, if you had considered the root cause to be a bug what difference would that have made?
You are very persistent in defending unethical behavior. This is not uncommon among startups, the various companies that were stealing users Address Book a few months ago were likewise claiming both "everybody else does it" and "there's nothing wrong with this, we are justified".
You should not be impersonating people, it's unethical, and should be a felony when done without consent for monetary gain.
That you feel it is justified shows you are currently in a state of delusion, blinded to ethics and respect for your customers.
Nowhere does he say that it's justified. Cut the man some slack.
My interpretation from reading this whole thread, the associated article, and some comments is that there's an option for users to invite their Twitter followers/share activity, but the messaging around it is unclear or something (maybe a bug?) so people didn't realize they were doing it. And now it's being fixed.
That's hardly intentional unethical behavior. Saying someone is "in a state of delusion, blinded to ethics and respect" is WAY out of line for someone whose product had either a UX or technical bug, who apologized for it, and who is now trying to fix it.
I actually read his Twitter feed before posting. It was massively vandalized by Prismatic, who was clearly impersonating him.
The claimed bug is that the were not clear in getting permissions. That is completely irrelevant to the core of the principle here. They are fraudulently impersonating him, using his own account. That is a fact and it is a verifiable fact.
Given that you feel motivated to justify it, I have added your company Clever to my list of dodgy companies I will have nothing to do with. Thank you for informing me of your questionable ethics.
To quote The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
You say that both me and the guy from Prismatic are trying to "justify" his actions, but that's completely false. Nowhere did I say that doing something like that was acceptable behavior, nor did he. I agree that impersonating a user and posting to their social media accounts without their approval is unethical and immoral.
However, he said that it was an accident, a bug - that the intended behavior was not this unethical and immoral action, but something else entirely. You proceeded to accuse him of justifying it and being "in a state of delusion, blinded to ethics and respect".
And now you said that same thing to me, more or less.
If anyone here has questionable ethics, it's you. You COMPLTELY MADE UP these actions of other people, MALICIOUSLY, and used it to libel them.
Can you provide the verified facts? I've yet to see where a granted permission is _fraudulently_ used. I've yet to even see or see reproduced these supposed facts. In fact, the token granted from Twitter is a non-rate-limited permission to tweet indefinitely; the only abuse here is a user's trust; but that shouldn't preclude Prismatic from making good on a mistake before they are chastised forevermore.
Yes, the system did what the user told it to. That doesn't matter. @julien51 seems to have sent 208 "I'm enjoying..." tweets between 10:31 and 10:34, more than a tweet per second for three minutes. To the product's user, and anyone following them on Twitter that's a bug. They don't care (though you certainly should) if the root cause was poor UI design or unclear documentation, or a poorly written background job, or a bad data migration, or whatever else could have gone wrong. You really only have two options when communicating about your features to your users; either "its broken" or "its working as intended". If you're lucky you might have enough credit with them to be able to add "its working as intended for now but we have plans to improve it in the future".
I don't mean to be too harsh or attack bradfordcross or Prismatic specifically here. I've certainly been responsible for my share of bad user experiences through bugs or "not a bug"s. This just struck me as perhaps a poor way to represent a product to an audience that might trust it or be hearing about it for the first time.
I'm curious, if you had considered the root cause to be a bug what difference would that have made?