I think in the example of stealing a car is more binary: stole it or did not steal it. Maybe it could have been borrowed the car or something, but there would probably still be a more objective person in car event.

Whereas with ghosting, it could be not replying an email, could be not replying a text, could be some other thing the person missed and doesn't even know they missed. So it's hard to deny if the person isn't even aware they did it.

With mining, it could have been asking questions either live or in an email and not knowing the other person felt tricked into sharing more than they had wanted to.

I've taught a class called Emotional Self-Defense and one of the things I see the most is that the "attacker" often doesn't know they're attacking and the "victim" assumes it should be obvious the person is attacking.

What I'm saying is that he may not have any idea that his actions caused that much pain to the person. I had an ex girlfriend who said to me once, "and you don't respect my boundaries!" And I said what? And she said "yeah, 3 weeks ago when you were juggling the soccer ball and you kicked it to me, I said I didn't wanna play, and then a few minutes later you kicked it to me anyway." I was dumbstruck. I had no idea that she felt so angry/violated by me kicking the soccer ball with her the second time. If I had known, I almost certainly would have stopped. I just didn't receive the signal that strongly.

So I'm saying that may be the case here, too. It's also hard sometimes to tell someone in power that what they're doing is hurting or angering oneself.

I don't think ghosting and mining is so vage in this contex. It means engage in acquisition talks without actual intent to acquire, but instead to gain information. If you are the person doing this you will very clearly know what you are doing. Viewing in this context the comment is quite correct it is an odd denial, it sounds a bit like PR speak to me.

I'm imagining if this had been a comment from a spurned romantic partner. "He cheated on me and took advantage of me," posted anonymously to a web forum. If I were the person being accused, and assuming I had been romantically involved with many people, I may have no idea who is accusing me or which specific instance they meant. Maybe I'm aware that I cheated on one person, but I may not even know if that is the person making the accusation? If I've only been romantically involved with one, then it may be quite obvious to me who it is and maybe even the specific incident to which they are referring.

However, I imagine Stripe has interacted with many many companies regarding these things, but maybe not.

I think I've just been in too many conflicts where the other person thinks I intentionally hurt them and I didn't see it that way, or conversely, I think I did something to hurt someone, apologize, and they are confused because they didn't feel hurt at all.

But in your example if you never cheated on a partner you could easily sy "I've never cheated on someone". So if you're saying stripe has had so many interactions with companies they don't know if they "cheated" in this specific case, that implies they had least cheated in some cases, because otherwise they could simply deny that they ever cheated.

Because the accusation was more specific than "I felt taken advantage of" it was they engage engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.

I think most accusations of intent are extrapolations of actions, which one side makes and the other side may not see the same way.

> engage in acquisition talks with the intent to gather confidential information, not the intent to acquire.

Going back to the dating analogy, if I go on 5 dates with someone and then we don't go on any more dates, that person may assume I had no intention to pursue a long-term relationship with them and was just using them, maybe for sex or company or whatever. However, perhaps I was trying to determine whether I could make a long-term relationship work—maybe I initially didn't think it would work but only went on the next 4 dates because I really really wanted it to work.

All I'm saying is that people can glean different intentions from the same action and it can be really hard to know whether our actions have caused pain to people.

> that implies they had least cheated in some cases, because otherwise they could simply deny that they ever cheated.

Again, the tricky part is Stripe may _think_ they have cheated in one case but in that case, the other person may not have even seen it as cheating. Eg, maybe I'm in an exclusive relationship with someone and my ex comes into town and we get lunch. I feel tremendously guilty for doing it and confess and apologize to my current partner. And the my current partner looks confused and laughs saying they're grateful I went to hang out with my ex. A different partner could split the relationship with me immediately and say I'm evil for having that lunch.

To one side it may seem _obvious_ that a transgression was committed and to the other side, it may be _oblivious_.

I get what you're saying about it being blurry but I don't buy that it affects the ability to reject it. He can quire simply reject it and then explain it might be a misunderstanding or something. Or say it might have happened unintentionally. Or whatever. There are several options here, and refusing to deny the claims doesn't bolster his case.

And that's all kinda beside the point - note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting itself for us to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition, with or without ghosting. That should be far less blurry and easy to deny head-on, whatever you think of the ghosting.

One other story (I feel bad for blitzing with replies and in a weird order, I hope that's ok)...

I ran a workshop with abut 35 people in the audience. For about 15 mins, I had them sit quietly as I asked them "how do you feel when you think about this? How do you feel when you think about that?" And so on, and had them reply in their heads.

At the end of the session, I opened up group reflection. One woman shot her hand up and said "I feel like you manipulated us." And i asked if others felt this way, and maybe 5 others raised their hands and started talking about how my questions manipulated them. And then this other guy raised his hand and said how for the first time in months, these questions helped him stop thinking about politics and the chaos in the world and quieted his mind and thanked me. A few others agreed with a similar feeling.

So my one action caused (at least) two very different responses in the same group and I would likely have had no idea if they didn't tell me how they had received it.

I wouldn't say "I never ghosted you" if I don't remember the interaction, because perhaps I did? Why would I make that bold claim without having more info about which situation it is?

> And note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition.

Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months. One person who feels very secretive and protective of their business knowledge (even some people in startups who don't even have companies yet but just ideas) can feel very violated by one email with one question, whereas other people may not believe they were being fished for info after 3 months of interviews.

> I wouldn't say "I never ghosted you" if I don't remember the interaction, because perhaps I did? Why would I make that bold claim without having more info about which situation it is?

This whole discussion is about intent, which you can (and honestly, must) address separately from how you imagine your actions might have been perceived. See below.

> Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months.

This is irrelevant, the question is about intent. You should not have a hard time making it crystal clear whether that was your intent or not, regardless of whether you spent 10 minutes on it or 10 days. The only reason you wouldn't be able to make your intents clear is if you're doing things so borderline deceptively that you honestly cannot tell if they're clearly ethical or not, in which case that fact would sufficiently speak for itself.

P.S. I see you're repeatedly leaving parallel replies, I don't know why you do that (can't you just edit your comment?) but they drown out mine and divert the conversation, so I'm not going to reply to them and have 3 parallel conversation tracks, sorry about that.

Ah, I think I had misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you were saying to deny the action: "I never ghosted you." But now I think what you actually meant was to deny the intention of the action: "I never intended to ghost you."

I would agree one could deny the intention first, yeah, I might actually do that. "I didn't meant to ghost you but perhaps that's what happened or how it landed for you. Maybe you think it should be obvious to me but I feel unclear, will you share more with me about it?"

*edit: I'm not trying to leave the parallel replies, I guess I'm more used to replying on Twitter where I just add another reply to my reply if I forgot something, instead of editing the previous reply, and HN was stopping me from replying to my own reply. So I'll try to edit here, I wasn't sure what the HN preferred way was to do this, so thank you for helping me adapt better.

You can certainly make "intended to" explicit, and it's obviously better to be clear, but it's unnecessary. Keep in mind the entire point and heart of the accusation is the malicious intent. The accusation is clearly not "you're a horrible person because my email fell off your inbox!!", but rather "you saw and yet deliberately ignored my emails because you were actually trying to gain information while pretending to want to acquire us".

As such, you rebutting with "I never ghosted you" would not be equivalent in any shape or form to "I reply to every single email in your inbox" (or whatever) for you to feel you might somehow be accidentally telling a falsehood if you happened to miss some email in your inbox. "I never ghosted you" in this context would be a direct rejection of the purported intent—i.e. the accusation you were purposefully ignoring someone's emails because you were actually trying to fish information out of them—because, absent the intent, that accusation wouldn't have been made to begin with. You can make the lack of intent explicit if you want, definitely, but it's already implicit in the accusation, and so would be in implied in the rejection of that accusation.

I think I just tend to err on the side of less certainty/conviction in how I speak. I'd probably say "I don't believe I ghosted you" or "I don't remember ghosting you" or "I'm pretty sure I didn't ghost you." And maybe that's me projecting the fear of it getting into a "you ghosted me" "I never ghosted you" "yes, you ghosted me!" back and forth.

Frankly, I'd love if someone were to extricate their accusation as you did, making it easier for me to parse the different actions and intentions. I really liked how you phrased it: "you saw and yet deliberately ignored my emails because you were actually trying to gain information while pretending to want to acquire us." I feel more confident in rebutting different parts of that—e.g., "I saw the emails and deliberately did not reply to them but not because we were pretending to acquire you, but actually we were in a legal process where we couldn't share more at the time" or something like that.

Sometimes if someone accuses me of something, I'll even try to ask for clarification on what they mean by ghosted, or I'll rephrase it as you did, to try to gain more clarity. Maybe it should be obvious to people what ghosted and fishing means, but I find clarifying can at least help me and the other person know if we agree what the definition is and what we both think happened.

*edit: @dataflow, I really appreciate you going back and forth with me on this. I think I learned a lot, about how I try to pull out the intention from the action, and how others may see intention and action intertwined. I'm gonna let my brain digest this as I sleep, if you want to continue, I'd be glad to pick it up in the morning :-) Thank you!

*edit2: ohhh and for helping me get better at using the edit feature and not creating parallel threads, I'm not sure if what I'm doing now is more helpful, but I at least believe I'm being more helpful :-D

The important thing to note here is the point isn't how you word your reply. Nobody is saying you have to word it like I did. You can be as crystal-mathematically-pedantically-clear as you want in your reply about intents vs. actions vs. perceptions vs. whatever, that's beside the point.

The point is that your reply would need to address the lack of ill intent no matter how you word it. I find "I never ghosted you" and "I never intended to ghost you" both adequate, and you can disagree on either of them, but that's not the point. The point is "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate. It comes across as a completely ridiculous reply that very obviously fails to deny what is clear to everyone to be the heart of the accusation: the ill intent. Which makes it hard to interpret an omission like that charitably.

Edit: Sleep well!

I looked back at the original post to which pc replied and it seemed to have many accusations in it and I think pc did do what you're talking about, in a roundabout way by saying "I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith." I think, in a way, that's a counterattack on the other person's statements or intentions, yet kinda says he doesn't believe he had ill intent.

I agree he didn't directly refute the ill intent on the ghosting/mining accusations, yet, I think he tried to cover some of them in the following:

> (We obviously don’t control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, it’s because they’re upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)

> "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate. It comes across as a completely ridiculous reply that very obviously fails to deny what is clear to everyone to be the heart of the accusation: the ill intent. Which makes it hard to interpret an omission like that charitably.

But what if he legitimately had never heard such an accusation before? What if no one had previously told him, "I think you ghosted me and I think you were mining me for info and pretending to acquire my company"?

> I think pc did do what you're talking about, in a roundabout way

Or in other words... he didn't. Roundaboutness is literally how PR departments spin things to look like the exact opposite of the truth. "I don't think some of your claims are true" is not something that defends you when there are very strong, pointed accusations against you.

>> "I've never heard this directly before" would NOT be adequate.

> But what if he legitimately had never heard such an accusation before?

So? The reply would be inadequate just the same. I'm not saying he can't say that, I'm saying he can't say that and then leave it at that.

Btw I'm honestly tired of this back-and-forth at this point, so this'll be my last reply, sorry about that.

That's OK, and I appreciate you saying that so that I know what to expect. I appreciated the back and forth nonetheless, hope you have a wonderful Tuesday~

Actually, if it were me, I wouldn't deny it first if I truly didn't know what I did. Perhaps I did do something that I feel guilty about doing but just am not currently aware of. I'd probably ask as he did to figure out how the person is feeling and what they think I did to contribute to that and then see whether I feel guilty about that or not. I may actually feel really bad, hard to know without knowing more specifics.