Swiss company Proton is further expanding its productivity suite. In addition to an email service, calendar, VPN, password manager, and drive, Proton Sheets is now available. It is an alternative to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, an increasingly important advantage as countries take sovereignty more seriously.
I’m so, so tired of seeing that fucking article by ‘ovenplayer’ over and over again. It’s not your fault, mind you, but damn do I wish that abomination would get erased from the internet.
It’s incredibly biased, missing a ton of information, and just frankly outright lies to frame the whole thing as positively towards Proton as possible, and completely skips mentioning Proton’s attempted cleanup job. Even worse, it pretends to sound neutral while doing all that to try and gaslight people into thinking it’s actually a full journalistic dive into the issue.
I’m like 90% sure it’s just Proton’s PR team creating an easy astroturf- an account that was made JUST to post that article, nothing else, created right at the same time as the Proton PR team started working on the whole issue?
The only reason it’s only 90% instead of 100% is because there’s a lot of proton apologists who think Proton supporting this shit is ‘blown out of proportion’ because they have no idea what they’re talking about, but feel personally attacked because someone isn’t supporting ‘their team.’
I legitimately want to learn the proper timeline with no bias. Is there a good source out there? Because I am genuinely confused.
Unfortunately I haven’t seen one yet- I would like to, so I could provide it to people in situations like this, but none of them have e.g. the now-deleted doubling-down Yen did on the official account, or noting the ‘88’ in his usernames, or even most of the mastodon clusterfuck beyond ‘they left mastodon after backlash.’
I was there reading most of it, but unfortunately I didn’t think to save screenshots of any of it, which is why I know it all happened, but this was also several months ago and I couldn’t recite the exact timeline anymore.
The long and short of it that when Andy Yen posted that, it immediately blew up on mastodon and reddit- along with presumably twitter, but I have that DNS blocked, so I have no further insights to that one, and frankly there’s enough weirdos on there that I don’t even want to know how that went down.
Mastodon, to my knowledge, was fairly bog-standard and I think most of it is still there, because proton’s PR team couldn’t lean on anyone to get it all purged. I suspect that’s the real reason why they left mastodon. Most of their posts involved were edited to be a lot less concerning sounding, however.
Reddit, on the other hand, had (presumably) Yen posting on the Proton official account (example that WAS archived by a very smart person who clearly saw proton for who they were: https://archive.ph/quYyb - that post no longer exists) doubling down for a while before someone else clearly took the reigns and started trying to play damage control, at which point andy yen got on his own reddit account and kept doubling down on it, using a ton of really concerning buzzwords. I remember reading him complaining about ‘the woke’ being ‘triggered’ at one point and just being like ‘What the fuck am I even reading right now.’ All of that was also edited away or deleted, but you can still find user replies to him boggling at him using GOP language that are unedited in the reddit threads that weren’t nuked.
Also revealed during all this is that Andy Yen’s personal reddit account is ‘andy1011000’. For those of you that don’t know, 1011000 is binary for ‘88.’ As in, the very famous nazi dogwhistle. While you can argue it may have another meaning- and I’m sure people will- the simple fact of the matter is that announcing your support for an authoritarian fascist with an encoded nazi dogwhistle in your username is a bad look, especially if you categorically refuse to acknowledge or change it when it’s pointed out to you. I know several people born in 1988 who used to have 88 in their usernames who instantly and comprehensively ditched those usernames the very second they found out what it meant, but Yen still uses it to this day.
Thank you for writing all of this out! Very interesting.