Even if he answered that question directly, I still think it wouldn't be enough as material to base a story on. How hard wouldn't it have been for "the journalist" to reach out for the co-founder for an interview?
The real story is that the founder refused to give a straight answer to a simple, explicit "yes or no" question when directly and repeatedly asked. Where there's smoke there's fire! His non-answer shows he knows there's a problem, and he's actively trying to deflect attention away from it.
> Have you stopped beating your significant other?
that's an unfair comparison, because this is a loaded question (implying you were beating your SO). The question being asked in the blogpost is asking for clarification, with no assumption behind it.
There is an assumption behind the blogpost's question, IMO: that only by being setup exactly as Fedex and UPS can the couriers be adequately protected.
Maybe that is the actually the case (I'm not an expert in the field), but the underlying assumption of that being a hard requirement is present. Now, if Airmule thinks that they don't need to do exactly that but have another means by which the couriers could be protected, they can't reasonably answer "yes" (because they aren't organized that way) nor "no" (because that's a misleading answer from their point of view).
"I have never beaten my significant other" is an explicit answer that fulfills the question and doesn't hide behind the facts, unlike the founder in question.
That's a trivial thing, you would simply categorically deny the implicit accusation. But his answer instead did not come even close, it was "I have stopped about the same as other people".
So if I wanted to write a HN comment based on a question I had for the founder that I posted on Twitter, would I be doing a potential hit piece? Should I have scheduled a interview? This is the internet: we're all in some ways journalists in your terms.
