Nearly a week ago now, the goodwill Proton had built up with the nerdy folks (like me) who use and love it, imploded because of their CEO. 404Media’s Joseph Cox broke all this news at the end of October.
There’s a lot to unpack in that article, but, I’ll shorten it all for you to some of the highlights:
- Proton, including the CEO, have basically confirmed it’s true.
- Proton’s CEO called an engineer’s desire for more time to test security of new code “loser thinking”.
- Proton is pushing AI hard, and pushing for AI to speed development.
- There’s a lot of smoke around testing less, and trusting AI code more.
- There was some “re-interview for your own job” bullshit.
Usually, when this type of news breaks, I am pretty whatever, and in the end news like this tends to spur some change at the company and that is that. With Andy Yen, Proton’s CEO, it seems to have thrown him fight mode, not what you expect to see from someone like this. Proton has oddly latched on to this notion that AI is what people are upset about and that’s it.
When, in fact, the community has been abundantly clear that they are more concered about two things:
- Proper time to test code, so it is secure and private.
- Not calling staff ‘losers’.
It is fucking wild to me, that the loser statement isn’t the thing Yen immediately sought to reconcile, becuase it would have solved everything and cost him nothing. But, ego is always the enemy, and we just found out how fragile Yen’s ego seems to be that he’s finger pointing this as rage at AI.
Proton has conituned to double down on the narrative, with wild tactics like:
- An AI manifesto from the CTO.
- Having ‘behind the scenes thoughts’ posted from loyal staff to Reddit, with Yen’s approval (weirdly this is all positive!)
- Locking down Proton sub-reddits very hard, as Proton themselves moderate those.
- Stating there is no re-interviewing, and clarifying that the reason for this is because the work there is already done. Which is an impressively tone deaf statement. Anyone with actual skill in PR knows that you could just say “we have canceled all this bullshit, thank you to the community for opening our eyes” and then TAKEN THE FUCKING WIN. WILD you guys, WILD that they would explain in such a gotcha way “hahaha we don’t need to do that, because it’s already done.”
- I believe there’s Polymarket odds on how many days until we get a photo of Yen flipping double birds in an email to all current paying subscribers. I don’t use Polymarket, but it tracks.
Why am I writing about this so late? It was a strategy on my part. First if it resolved, then I could be lazy and write about some backpacks instead. Second, if it did not resolve, I was worried it would be buried by the USA mid-term election coverage, which I suspected a smart PR person might be banking on, so I wanted to make sure I posted after that, because that’s how I roll.
Raed on his blog wrote a very good and short post on why people are upset:
For most companies, trading some caution for speed is a reasonable call. Proton is a privacy company, though, and what its users pay for is the confidence that the people building it are careful. Shipping slowly and carefully is part of what they’re selling. A bad release from a B2B vendor can be catastrophic, but for a company like Proton, a bug that exposes users’ mail would be fatal.
It’s odd that a company like Proton, who clearly built the brand on security and privacy, now seem so oblivious to that being the objection to what 404Media reported, and are instead attempting to pretend it’s all about AI fear.
Two interesting things are coming to fruition since this news dropped, and more specifically Proton’s indignant responses have dropped:
- There’s a new subreddit for Proton which is not moderated by Proton, and it’s not small, it growing, and they are livid.
- There’s a non-trivial amount of people leaving Proton for other services. Which is wild, because spend enough time with people trying to leave services like Google, and you’ll see that Proton gets top billing. Now those same users are like “anything but Proton (and Google)”
Normally you see a few people leave and that’s that. It rarely touches beyond some people making a stand on Reddit. But when it starts to seep out of Reddit, that’s when I know it’s a bigger number than assumed.
People are leaving over this, Proton seems to not care.
Visit that new subreddit for long enough, and you quickly get the sense that people are really unhappy with this, and are not standing for it, and are just as baffled as I am about how dense the thinking at Proton seems to be. As I write this, here’s a screenshot of the Proton homepage as I see it on my laptop:
I count somewhere around 7 nods in that screenshot to privacy/security. Yet, somehow, this is not about spending more time to vet code, and clearly about not liking AI? Wild.
So what about me? Given that I just moved all my email over to fucking Proton? I’ve done nothing as of right now, and I don’t have immediate plans to make a change. That has nothing to do with the current state at Proton or how I feel about this. To be clear my feelings about Proton is that it seems like ‘loser thinking’ from the CEO. My staying right now has everything to do with my pessimistic belief that it’s unlikely you’ll find a well established tech company that is fully better and I am also lazy, as we covered.
Though, I do fully think that the least we can expect is for a CEO not to be projecting his loser mentality on his staff and instead maybe just not call his staff names. It’s really not hard.