Two days ago I posted here about a couple of things at Upworthy’s website that bothered me, and made it an open letter because I couldn’t find any way to contact them on their website.

Today I received a comment from Luigi Montanez, Upworthy’s founding engineer. You can read it over at the original post, but I reproduce it here because it’s deserving of it’s own page.

Hi there, I work for Upworthy. Thanks for taking the time to write out this candid feedback. It’s immensely helpful for us to read.

1a) On the popups: Have you tried clicking the “Don’t show again.” links on them? Once clicked, they’re supposed to suppress those popups in the future. If they’re not working for you, that’s a bug we need to look into. Or if you didn’t notice them, we’ll work on improving their prominence.

1b) On the Facebook friends module: We actually don’t know who your friends are on Facebook. What you’re seeing is called an iframe; it’s a way for us to embed a little bit of the Facebook.com website into our webpage. It’s like a small window into Facebook.com that’s embedded on our page. Facebook never tells us who you are, or who your friends are. Here’s more info:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

If we wanted that information, we’d need to ask you to opt-in using Facebook Connect, which we don’t do.

2) Yes, this is a major oversight on our part. Instructions for contacting us are on our About page, but they’re hard to find. Based on your feedback, I created a dedicated Contact page and linked to it in the footer throughout the site:

http://www.upworthy.com/contact

Again, thank you for this. If you have more feedback, please send it our way.

Lots of love,

Luigi
Founding Engineer, Upworthy

This made me sit down astonied.

1. First of all, someone saw my post. This meant that Upworthy has a social media team or person that is actively scraping the Net for feedback and buzz about their company.
2. Next, someone answered, meaning that someone cares. In any company in the 21st century, that’s a gold star right off the bat.
3. Last, Luigi provided constructive suggestions and actually implemented one of my suggestions. I was gobsmacked.

Really, there’s only one possible response:

Well done, Upworthy.

The Old Wolf has spoken.