When Savage says the “beep beep!” message “performs,” he means that the notification gets a lot of people to open up Tumblr—a boon for a company invested in DAUs and MAUs. And for most tech companies, that’s all that matters. Questions like, “is it ethical?” or “is it appropriate?” simply aren’t part of the equation, because ROI always wins out.
Well, they probably consider it, but put much lower weight on each foul-up than the author here. If a single person had an offensive experience out of billions of experiences, would she let it slide? Or is exactly one misstep serious enough to cancel a feature? Be realistic and compare to offline businesses before answering....
