A few weeks ago, someone at Fly threatened to disable a customer's account over Twitter (Alex Graveley, the creator of Github Copilot) because he complained about a minor-version breaking API change. Did anything ever come of that? I like Fly as a company, but overall the impression I get from their employees (even in this thread) is just...highly defensive and immature.
It's hard to pass judgement when the first couple of tweets are deleted, but this didn't read to me as Fly.io kicking anyone off the platform. Here is what my interpretation was of this interaction:
> Customer: Your service is bad and I had a bad experience
> Vendor: Okay
> C: I've given you multiple chances but you're still not up to my standards
> V: (assuming C was done with the product) Sorry to hear that, but here is a refund
(1) @mrkurt: ... you can go ahead and find yourself another vendor.
(2) @alexgraveley: [I'm] Trying! [to find another vendor]
Kurt thinks Alex is choosing to leave due to (2):
@mrkurt: ok good luck [switching vendors by your own choice]. I'll refund all your payments.
Alex thinks Kurt was the one telling him to go due to (1):
@alexgraveley: I'm sorry, you're kicking me off your platform ... ?
Typical human stuff. Maybe this is a great opportunity for an LLM extension - have it give people the benefit of the doubt before you respond nastily to them, by checking your response.
I've tried asking ChatGPT a few times to explain responses people have made to me on Twitter that I didn't rate highly but which received likes. It wasn't particularly insightful, but its unbiased perspective had a surprisingly calming effect.
EDIT: I fed all but the last line of this conversation into ChatGPT, then asked it to evaluate 'my' proposed reply (the final line) with the following prompt: "What is the presupposition behind my response? Can you point out any potential mistakes I've made in my assumptions?" It correctly identified the ambiguity in the statements, and made a helpful suggestion on how to proceed.
I don't see it in as clearly bad a light as babelfish does, but nor do I see it as positively as you do.
My rubric:
- CEOs shouldn't publicly call their customers dicks
- if a customer thinks the CEO is threatening to kick them off the platform and asks for clarification about it, they should get a clear response (Graveley's last tweet)
Both of these points are about professionalism of the vendor.
Perhaps the Fly CEO realized Twitter wasn't the right place to have this conversation and answered Graveley's question in a separate channel.
>A few weeks ago, someone at Fly threatened to disable a customer's account over Twitter (Alex Graveley, the creator of Github Copilot) because he complained about a minor-version breaking API change. Did anything ever come of that?
I hadn't heard of that, but I think that's an inaccurate characterization based on what I'm seeing of the conversation:
>Alex Graveley: [two deleted tweets]
>Kurt Mackey, Fly CEO: Wow, harsh. It's fair to be upset and an API change. But if you're going to be a dick on twitter you can go ahead and find yourself another vendor.
>Alex: Trying! It's not like this is an isolated event - gave you all a pass the first 4 times.
>Kurt: ok good luck. I'll refund all your payments.
>Alex: I'm sorry, you're kicking me off your platform because I was mean to the company on twitter?
Kurt was telling him that his behavior was unacceptable and that he didn't want to act as Alex's vendor if he didn't correct it. I think it's fine for companies to fire customers that are rude or abusive.
I can understand if Kurt said, "oh yeah? Well I just nuked your account with zero notice!" But it seems like Kurt was giving Alex the opportunity to exit the platform gracefully.
Also, I'd be a little more sympathetic if it was like Andy Jassy crushing a random company's business on AWS because they complained on Twitter. But this is a principal engineer at Microsoft presumably shitting on one of Microsft's underdog cloud competitors because he didn't like his experience using Fly on a pet project, so it's not like there's a huge power imbalance here.
Thank you for noting he is the CEO, I didn't realize that in my initial comment.
While I saw the two now-deleted tweets originally, I don't recall what they said now, but I do remember feeling like it wasn't anything serious enough to warrant the "find yourself another vendor" comment.
If Kurt is willing to (gracefully, as you said) crush someone's side project over a rude tweet, why should Fly be trusted with a potential business? I don't use TinyPilot but I am a big fan of your blog. Would you trust running any servers required for TinyPilot on Fly.io after that exchange, running the risk that if Kurt doesn't like one of your tweets, he (gracefully) will ask you to move to a new platform?
> If Kurt is willing to (gracefully, as you said) crush someone's side project over a rude tweet
I didn't read this at all. I read it as "we will refund you", not "we will kick you off". I know that fly.io frequently refunds payments for customers, if they feel the bill was unexpectedly large.
> running the risk that if Kurt doesn't like one of your tweets, he (gracefully) will ask you to move to a new platform?
I read this as "if you don't like us, leave us", not "I want you to leave us because I didn't like what you said". The first one is a bit more fair, because it's just a statement that if you don't like the way we do things, there are alternative providers, though some may say it's not the most graceful way to talk to an annoyed customer (picture "apologies for the breaking change, we will try to warn/communicate/avoid such changes in the future"). The second one is far more brazen.
Regarding your first point - the first thing Kurt said was "if you're going to be a dick on twitter you can go ahead and find yourself another vendor". I don't believe there were any billing issues as a part of this exchange, though Kurt's offer to refund was kind.
And regarding your second point, I read the above quote the same way Alex did, as being kicked off the platform ("go ahead and leave", not "you're free to leave").
>If Kurt is willing to (gracefully, as you said) crush someone's side project over a rude tweet, why should Fly be trusted with a potential business?
To clarify, when I said "gracefully," I meant "exit within a grace period," as opposed to "delete an account with zero notice."
And I don't read the exchange as Kurt crushing anyone's project as much as telling them to go elsewhere on their own if they won't meet Fly's expectations for professional conduct.
But I do think the fact that it's a side project makes it a more minor issue. It would be higher-stakes if someone had built their business' entire infrastructure on Fly and then Kurt asked them to leave. I'm assuming a principal engineer at Microsoft isn't putting anything serious on Fly, so it seems like the stakes were just a couple hours of Alex's time to migrate.
>Would you trust running any servers required for TinyPilot on Fly.io after that exchange, running the risk that if Kurt doesn't like one of your tweets, he (gracefully) will ask you to move to a new platform?
TinyPilot's critical servers actually do run on Fly.
The exchange doesn't make me nervous because I don't harass my critical vendors, especially not in public. I have vendors that I critique, but I try to do it professionally and respectfully. I think if I behave unprofessionally toward my vendors, then they're within their rights to drop me as a client.
Again, I'm assuming that what Alex deleted was something inappropriate. It sounds like your memory was that Alex said something benign. If Alex truly was critiquing Fly respectfully and Kurt responded by asking him to leave the platform, that would give me pause, but I'm not seeing evidence that was the case.
Edit: Here is the link to the thread. Alex's original tweets were deleted. https://twitter.com/alexgraveley/status/1619117645932150784