I don't think anyone is faulting Tailscale for using their blog to advertise, and no one is faulting Tailscale for how they handled this situation in general, or their response to it.
The issue is acting like their response is 'brave' in anyway, or altruistic. It can be considered admirable only to the extent any company doing a good job running its business can be.
This is a good, smart response to what happened. They are approaching this incident as a way to improve their product and offer a better service to their customers. That is good, and it is fine to reward them with your business in response. There is nothing wrong with making good business decisions, but it isn't something that we need to unduly respect.
I have recently noticed that the words "ad" or "marketing" have become, in and of themselves, with no additional information or context, slurs or dismissals.
I understand why. The modern internet has turned advertising into a morass of constant bombardment and the only sane response is to block as much as possible and ignore as much else as possible.
But it's unfortunate because, in some sense, ever single thing that a company every says that is not legally mandated in some way is a form of advertising.
And in many cases, that "advertising" contains true, useful information that can be helpful.
What is important isn't whether or not something is an "ad", but instead, whether or not it contains true information that is helpful in some way.
Many ads don't reach this bar. They are either misleading, straight up lying, or information that is almost completely useless.
But when I'm searching for a particular product, about the only source of information at all is some form of advertising, and I almost always find at least some amount of it to be helpful in making a product decision.
Ads are more often than not polluting to the informational ecosystem, but that's not because they are ads.
Fun corollary: Self-promotion is only considered to be advertising, marketing, or spam when it’s describing someone else’s self-promotion. When it’s describing one’s own, it’s not a perjorative :)
i said i have a lot of respect for this. whether you do or not is up to you.
anything a company writes is an advertisement by the nature of being written by a company. i dont think that means anything a company writes is bad by default. there are many corporate blogs i enjoy reading, or learn from, etc., despite the fact that they are all technically advertisements.
in this case, tailscale is setting a higher expectation for themselves when no one asked for it. i find that respectable.
> tailscale is setting a higher expectation for themselves
What exactly is the higher expectation? As someone with little expertise and no stake in any of this, the blog reads as "our products are great and could have solved this problem if they were being used correctly, so it's not our fault" with a few vague proclamations about how they will improve their UX. This isn't at all a bad thing, it just isn't very notable in my opinion.
better defaults, better documentation, better UX, and "But, we didn't stop it. Next time, we will." are all commitments that they didn't need to make, but now they need to follow through with or lose face.
>it just isn't very notable in my opinion.
i agree that this seems to be getting way more attention than i would have expected.
The issue is acting like their response is 'brave' in anyway, or altruistic. It can be considered admirable only to the extent any company doing a good job running its business can be.
This is a good, smart response to what happened. They are approaching this incident as a way to improve their product and offer a better service to their customers. That is good, and it is fine to reward them with your business in response. There is nothing wrong with making good business decisions, but it isn't something that we need to unduly respect.