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Comment by ntsplnkv2 | Hacker News Reader

> Let’s keep focused on building an amazing company together; we are hitting amazing new records on users, volume and revenue, and we have so much great work to do together.

Ignore any potential negativity, everything we do is great, all that matters is revenue, nothing bad ever happens hear, blah blah blah. Don't focus on the bad part, those are all lies!

The NYTimes article isn't released so I can't comment on the substance there, but this quote struck out to me, and makes me less likely to believe Coinbase.

EDIT: Adding this to clarify for later readers, apparently the above quote I took from the post has been removed from the main post.

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Coinbase has been on the receiving end of news media abusive for a short while (ever since they offered to pay their disruptive employees to leave). I don't really blame them for wanting to preemptively defend themselves.

> news media abusive [sic]

Criticism is not abuse. They’re also not doing the best job defending themselves since they offer no concrete proof, testimony, or narrative. Who were these employees? What happened? We don’t know, but are left with some empty promise of a statement that Coinbase “handled it internally.”

Normally companies don't publish details of internal employee doings and especially not complaints. That's just not done. What if they're mistaken about the contents of the article? I'd be furious if a company put details of some internal complaint I made on their blog, if I hadn't actually gone and tried to get it into the press.

I'm not talking about criticism. I'm talking about publishing false information.

Huh. Looks like they agreed with you that it sounded sketchy and dropped that line.

Let's assume that CB is really the entirely innocent and maligned party here. In such a world, how would their response have differed?

They probably wouldn’t have responded preemptively.

Why not? They would've had intel from current employees who were interviewed about the likely contents, and they claim that a number of the allegations that are likely to be published are false. If I was either innocent or guilty of such allegations, I will want to try to control the narrative ahead of time. Doing so doesn't seem to update our prior beliefs about the probability of guilt, all it shows us is that the allegations are significant enough to warrant damage control

Because ideally your culture should be strong enough to weather things like these, and your damage control should read more as a statement of facts than "we did nothing wrong," especially when you issue it preemptively.

That's fair enough. They did say that three former Black employees made false allegations though, so there was some specificity there. Although it would be been better to outline what those allegations were and why they were false, in that I certainly agree (and not having done that, it is a bit suspect)

You respond with specific facts and supporting evidence, not nebulous dismissals, which is how guilty companies respond.

Good point. Let's see if CB follows up with evidence and details after the specificities of the NYT story come to light, but I agree that the lack of detail here is a bit suspect

> nebulous dismissals

this sounds like a good band name

sorry about the offtopic comment

TBH, this blog post from CB sounded like something you’d hear from the Trump campaign. Everything’s fine, we’re making lotsa money, it’s all fake news...

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