Exactly. The product is security and privacy. The thing being sold is that. If anyone could justify being slower to pentest, it is Proton.
I do wonder who would be demanding that Proton move faster. Would any user of their service ask them to sacrifice these attributes?
> “Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document obtained by 404 Media reads. Proton’s year-over-year growth is also “far away from what the market today considers to be good,” and, “By all metrics that matter, we’re an underperforming company.”
So, the "market" is demanding it?
If it was any other company we wouldn't even care, but if your marketing is 'big cloud is bad look at us we are so moral and so caring and respectful with you and your data' and they shit the bed like this in front of the users that are paying because they bought on this vision...
But in the case it is, it should be run as a careful privately owned business, that takes pride in their products, not a profit machine.
It seems the majority owning "foundation" does little to ensure that, if they're not the ones pushing for more profit and faster delivery of crap
"Proton was created to serve the world, and the non-profit Proton Foundation ensures that this can never change. As Proton’s primary shareholder, the foundation exercises its control to ensure that Proton does not deviate from our mission to build a better internet that serves the interests of all of society. Our legally binding purpose is to further the advancement of privacy, freedom, and democracy around the world."
Sorry for the corpo speak, but this time I'd say it's clear and warranted.
So basically: money, and their desire to have more of it, is demanding this.
They are cash flow positive.
I guess capitalism just needs constant, unsustainable growth. Until your product and ideals are a hull of what it once was.
Whenever I see "hosted in Switzerland" my mind immediately goes to the Crypto AG scandal.
Apple is deeply in this camp; all it takes is one MBA's desire for bonuses to break the damn.
Corporations in unregulated waters are only as solid as the last captain.
Aside, with age becomes a deeper understanding of how realistic the Dilbert cartoons are.
Having shareholders means that the company WILL NOT continue to serve their customers. Any company that has external shareholders is untrustworthy. Everybody should consider them as disposable. It doesn't mean that you cannot have a deal with them, now but the parties should be aware that anything that you share will be misused. So if Proton has any external shareholders, it is already untrustworthy to me.
Therefore, they cannot really gain any trust by being activist shareholders and change leadership. They already supported a certain "persona" to make them money.
"Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692 90 comments
"Proton goes all in on using AI" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296602 117 comments
"Proton to 'Re-Interview' Staff About AI to See Who Gets to Keep Their Job" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50251062 48 comments
"Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307183 254 comments
This is the core of it for me. There are many, maaany companies that don't want to be what they are. For example: Meta doesn't want to be a social media company - so it lets facebook rot, makes 10% of its total revenue from scammers advertising to its customers, which seem to mostly be vulnerable old people and focuses on VR and AI.
I guess Proton is having that same problem. I don't really want to be part of that though.
Are you just going to ignore the rest of advertising that isn't "scammers advertising to its customers", and makes up the overwhelming majority of their revenue?
It definitionally manipulates people into buying stuff they didn't want before, leaving them poorer and our world devoid of more resources.
What are you talking about??
But offline advertising generally isn't exempt. Screw billboards cluttering up cities. Screw flyers cluttering up my mailbox. Screw print ads cluttering up magazines.
It's all an assault on the senses in service of extraction. It's a non-consensual invasion of the mind.
This applies to the mom-and-pop selling something around the corner, not Coca-Cola. For Coca-Cola, their advertising money likely has negative returns at the scale they spend it.
That's an abstraction, though. The real-world logic behind that statement is that by bringing net benefit to The Whole (through your chosen acts), you will be duly recognised as a contributor of value, and accordingly you will be busy.
The way that modern formal terminology (like Notification Brings Business) has become a set of self-standing tenets in its own right has let humanity forget that our entire motivation for this whole practice of being busy ("busi-ness") is to make everybody happier. Preferably by doing things that don't suck.
Not to 'Maximise Our Business'.
If it's good, their friends may even tell them about it.
Why does it need a whole manipulative extraction industry around it?
Totally agree. I pay for Proton because I choose to trust their business practices more than Google. If Proton continues to move in this direction and hemorrhage trust, they will lose not just my business, but a significant portion of their client base [0]
See also ongoing annoyance amongst privacy community over decisions to prioritize feature bloat over bug fixes [1,2], add to that bad political takes by leadership[3], and some data retention choices which resulted in Proton indirectly supplying user information to US intelligence [4]. Not a good look.
[0] https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/945460-general-ideas...
[1] https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/how-should-we-handle-pro...
[2] https://youtu.be/831ndXv65CM
[3] https://mastodon.neat.computer/@jonah/113833858219604994
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20260305204857/https://www.404me...
When I recommend for someone to try proton, I recommend they do so with a custom domain for their email address.
That way, if something goes awry at proton, they can set up service elsewhere while keeping their same email address.
If something happens? I'm ready to pack bags and migrate again.
I think the AI backlash against Proton so far is unwarranted. It is purely speculative and based on make-belief. I am a dev myself, I use AI more and more, and I have no more long-term experience than the next dev. But so far the claim that using AI in your corp and workflow will result in buggier, shitty code is not true on a broad scale. It is certainly not true for proton, at least I don't see service quality detiorating for my service. I think it is a tool, and what you get out of using it still depends on the skill of the craftsman.
As a customer, I do demand stable service and the promised saftey and security. But I also demand low prices and a product that can compete with the market. Now, the market is Google and Microsoft - two companies we don't even need to question if they lay off people due to AI usage. Proton is kind of under pressure to compete on a product level in a pretty much david-against-goliath situation. We see AI-assisted exploits such as the Linux use-after-free from Anthropic and can't blame Proton for restructuring their dev process to incorporate AI to find exactly these kind of security issues. I wouldn't even feel comfortable as a client if proton whipped on a "human code only" label on their services.
Their lots of half-baked products added since already reminded me of the Mozilla slide to irrelevance.
This seals the deal. I am OK if they use AI to enhace their productivity. I do care if they want to use AI to "move fast and break things" not giving a damn for stability and careful testing, think craftmanship and careful development is for losers, or speak to their employees like that.
This CEO reminds me of Martin Shkreli. He should be laid off. Do they have a board that cares? An ideal company for services like Proton's shouldn't be for profit to begin with.
But for all the people on Reddit clutching their pearls over some imagined moral panic, there were just as many a week ago shouting about wanting more features and product lines. The point is, i don’t believe it’s a simple story as some would make it out to be.
Maybe this person was always an asshole, maybe it's the current job market. When the market is cold it brings out the worst in certain people. When their employees are "captive", they can finally treat them how they always viewed them; bottom feeders blessed to be employed.
Wow my first exposure to Andy Yen shouldn’t have been this one. I’m seeing a loser here and it’s not the engineer…
(I don't know his writing style, so I have no idea if this is actually written by him or just posted by him.)
Yeah, I have no horse in the race as a non-user of Proton, but even if you completely removed AI from the situation entirely, if I worked for a CEO that ever used the term "loser thinking" non-sarcastically that would be enough to get me looking for another job.
And if I were a customer, get me looking for another provider.
They are not the types to accept enshittification and they are the types to read these news. As soon as they discover something else, they're off.
Good luck proton.
"Encrypted email" as if all of your mail isn't in plaintext anyways because no one is using PGP. And if you're emailing Proton to Proton... well there are more convenient encrypted messaging platforms.
I definitely think that me and my team need to push ourselves to rethink how we work. Sometimes I have to push top-down, but I'd rather this happen in a measured way that's a combination of bottoms-up and top-down.
Ask AI (roughly) the same question; get (roughly) the same answer. Regardless of what model you’re talking to.
(Why? Because every AI company consumes the same whole-Internet corpus and distillations of all their competitors’ models; of course all their models’ answers will converge, especially about anything subjective where they haven’t supplied a specific “right answers for domain X” training dataset to override the “base consensus.”)
Before there were other voices of reason but these all get drowned out...
AI can do it in a few hours.
But maybe that’s just my own AI psychosis talking…
Wash me but don’t get me wet.
It was revealed to be owned by the CIA and German intelligence, formed in 1952 and secretly purchased by intelligence agencies in 1970
The customers relied on Crypto AG for their industry trusted privacy claims and “because Switzerland”
Looks exactly like everything wrong with Proton and its customer base despite so many obvious flaws to how Proton behaves, how their customers talk, justifications for how their anti spam measures undermine all of their privacy and records claims, and now the CEO dismissing engineers security concerns
Also, doesn't this news paint a fairly large target on them. There is now a rumour that they released a feature that hasn't been properly pen tested, where an engineer was concerned enough to be called a loser.
"proton is a privacy company though..." Oh So when it matters to YOU, AI slop is a bridge too far.
AI code is not the new norm. Anywhere.
It is not the norm for any engineer, or any company, who cares about the quality of the product. I will not say there are zero people who care who are trying to use LLMs to write code, because that isn't true. But neither is it true that most engineers find the tool useful. It is still wildly controversial in the programming community, contrary to what you state here.
> For most companies, trading some caution for speed is a reasonable call.
That isn't a reasonable call for any business, but it is an especially bad call for a business which sells itself on offering greater security.
My issue with what happened at Proton is twofold: first, the CEO treats his workers like dirt. That isn't a company I wish to do business with no matter how good their product is. Second, the CEO is in the full grip of AI psychosis, telling his engineers to use the tool just because it's trendy, not because it actually produces good results. That suggests that the product Proton produces will, sooner rather than later, turn into AI slop, full of bugs. I wouldn't wish to do business with such a company even if the CEO were a nice guy. So Proton now has a product going downhill, and a CEO who is a jerk. I'm not sticking around for that. I could just pay Microsoft if I wanted that kind of experience.
The flip side is that only a third of devs trust the AI code, which is wise depending on what that means exactly, but that’s a different claim than the idea that if you care, you don’t use LLMs to code, and that it’s wildly controversial in our field to code with AI. It was, like two years ago. It’s not anymore. Sorry.
And I have no idea where to start on the idea that it’s never reasonable to trade caution for speed. I can only conclude you’ve only ever been one of those employees who doesn’t understand your actual job: to deliver value to the business so it can make money. Your job isn’t to be careful and build a beautiful elegant system so it can exist. You’re there to solve a problem in a timeframe where the ROI of paying you is positive. If you exercise endless caution and never ship anything, you will have thus failed at the actual job.
It is possible to sell trust and security as the major feature. If that's the case, then skipping security testing in favour of more features is not what most of your customers want. Especially if the CEO is so arrogant about it.
And maybe such a product is not the best money extracting operation. That can be ok, if the company/shareholders is ok with it... If not, things are misaligned somewhere.
then i thought about other controversial CEOs from great product companies (like Musk) and i wanted to raise the question of when it’s right to abandon those great products because of what their leaders have done
i have a starlink, it’s a really really good product.
thanks for asking why and helping me understand how my comment may have been read differently. i appreciate it and will consider this moment when posting here again.
AI is a tool - like a compiler or a pen-testing tool or maybe like an uber-tool that can do all those things and more. It's not hard. 24 hours - put your best pentester against GLM-5.3 abliterated (host locally, so there's no data leakage to LLM providers). You know who will win and it won't even be close.
Quite unlike a compiler. I don't know about yours, but nobody destroyed thousands of books, started gas powerplants or illegally cut hundreds of thousands of trees to make mine.
Talk about ostrich-like denial of reality.
With expert supervision, absolutely.
I use AI daily. It still makes plenty of mistakes and need plenty of oversight to be useful.