I… had a surprisingly good time reading Coinbase’s Terms of Service update email?
We’ve recently updated our User Agreement. To continue using our services and take advantage of our upcoming feature launches, you’ll need to sign in to Coinbase and accept our latest terms.
You can read the entire agreement here. At a glance, here’s what this update means for you:
Easier to Understand: We’ve reorganized and modified our user agreement to make it more understandable and in line with our culture of clear communications.
Clarity on Dispute Resolution: We’ve revised our arbitration agreement to streamline the process for resolving problems you may experience.
Transparent Product Terms: We’ve consolidated the terms relating to many of our new products in a single appendix to make them easier to find.
Restrictions on Use of Services: We’ve created a standalone policy to make it easy to understand how you may use our services.
Response to Regulatory and Legal Changes: We’ve updated our tax language and some of our definitions to reflect the fact that crypto and crypto law are always on the move!
Please read the updated User Agreement and check out our help center article if you have any questions.
What I like about this was that normally Terms of Service are just incredibly opaque to me, and when someone says they updated them I just shrug helplessly.
And here… well… to be clear I totally haven’t checked if this is actually a good distillation of their changes, or how adversarial their terms of service are.But when I imagine a good, benevolent company trying to have a reasonable terms-of-service, and communicating clearly about it, it seems like actually a hard problem. (I’m currently looking at this through a lens that has general alignment parallels – communicating truthfully in an ontology your user can understand is a difficult problem)
And this email seemed like it was trying (to at least pretend to) do a good job with that.It’s still not sufficient. (this email would be much better if instead of saying “We changed something about X”, it said more explicitly “we changed X to Y, here’s a short summary of Y”)But it was an interesting signpost along the way to clear communication in a world of complicated interlocking systems
I think the reason you had a good time with this is because you don’t actually care what your agreement with Coinbase is, because you don’t have large amounts of money deposited with them. For people who do have large amounts of money at stake (myself not among them), this summary doesn’t really tell you anything, and you probably need to put the old and new ToS side by side and read the whole thing line by line.
It still gets me thinking about what the idealized version of this actually is.
I guess game/software patch notes are the thing that seems closest-in-concept space that’s actually useful. It’d be interesting to see a TOS that had github/googledoc-changelog capability. (It occurs to me LW could maybe have a TOS that lived in a post which would have that automatically)
One of their developers reached out to me recently to talk about working for them. I got strong good vibes about the quality of their engineering culture. For example, they are 100% remote and seem to be doing it well enough that employees are happy. They also organize a week of all-company PTO every quarter, which also speaks to the stability of their systems.
I associate good engineering culture with good writing, and this email is pretty good as far as terms and conditions go.
I… had a surprisingly good time reading Coinbase’s Terms of Service update email?
What I like about this was that normally Terms of Service are just incredibly opaque to me, and when someone says they updated them I just shrug helplessly.
And here… well… to be clear I totally haven’t checked if this is actually a good distillation of their changes, or how adversarial their terms of service are.But when I imagine a good, benevolent company trying to have a reasonable terms-of-service, and communicating clearly about it, it seems like actually a hard problem. (I’m currently looking at this through a lens that has general alignment parallels – communicating truthfully in an ontology your user can understand is a difficult problem)
And this email seemed like it was trying (to at least pretend to) do a good job with that.It’s still not sufficient. (this email would be much better if instead of saying “We changed something about X”, it said more explicitly “we changed X to Y, here’s a short summary of Y”)But it was an interesting signpost along the way to clear communication in a world of complicated interlocking systems
I think the reason you had a good time with this is because you don’t actually care what your agreement with Coinbase is, because you don’t have large amounts of money deposited with them. For people who do have large amounts of money at stake (myself not among them), this summary doesn’t really tell you anything, and you probably need to put the old and new ToS side by side and read the whole thing line by line.
Yeah, sounds right.
It still gets me thinking about what the idealized version of this actually is.
I guess game/software patch notes are the thing that seems closest-in-concept space that’s actually useful. It’d be interesting to see a TOS that had github/googledoc-changelog capability. (It occurs to me LW could maybe have a TOS that lived in a post which would have that automatically)
One of their developers reached out to me recently to talk about working for them. I got strong good vibes about the quality of their engineering culture. For example, they are 100% remote and seem to be doing it well enough that employees are happy. They also organize a week of all-company PTO every quarter, which also speaks to the stability of their systems.
I associate good engineering culture with good writing, and this email is pretty good as far as terms and conditions go.