Hacker News Reader

Comment by segasaturn | Hacker News Reader

Matt has a history of doing this. There was a similar blowup at Tumblr (owned by Automattic) earlier this year [1] where Matt did the same thing, DM'ing users criticizing him and even tweeting out the private handles of the user he was beefing with.

1: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-...

View on HN

> and even tweeting out the private handles of the user he was beefing with.

While I think Matt's current behaviour is abhorrent, my understanding is the linked article buries the lede a bit.

The user claimed they were banned due to bigotry and that Tumblr was lying about them having NSFW content. Things continued to escalate until Matt shared a list of their NSFW accounts.

https://www.threads.net/@samhenrigold/post/DAuTTaEtm_7

Good on him for doing so.

The accounts were empty and didn't have any NSFW content on them. The only explicit thing was the usernames of the accounts, which doesn't violate any rules. Posting the user's private account names was just meant to smear them as a sex-pervert.

> The accounts were empty and didn't have any NSFW content on them.

Was this confirmed by Tumblr staff?

And if the accounts were empty then what's the harm?

> ...was just meant to smear them as a sex-pervert.

The user voluntarily made several accounts with extremely vulgar and sexual names, ostensibly for NSFW purposes. If merely sharing the names is enough to "smear them as a sex pervert", I don't think that's Matt's fault.

Especially considering the post was in response to the user inciting harassment against Tumblr staff.

Why does a CEO even get involved in something like that? No matter who is in the right?

I mean, we're aren't talking about him and Automattic because he's a good CEO or person.

There's plenty of reasons to dislike Matt without stirring up petty drama that's exaggerated or misleading.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com