Proton Removes Popular “Andy Yen Should Step Down” Post From Its Feedback Forum
One of the most-voted ideas on Proton’s own feedback forum, a call for CEO Andy Yen to step down, is gone.
Smaller posts with the same demand are still visible. On Monday, Proton closed each of them with the same one-line reply: “UserVoice is intended for feature requests about Proton’s products, so this idea is being closed.”
A user who had been watching the big post climb noticed it was missing and posted about it on Lemmy on Monday afternoon. “This morning when I went to check if it was at the top yet, it’s just gone without a trace,” they wrote.
What's Gone and What's Still There
Proton collects product ideas on a UserVoice board it calls “The Voice of the Proton Community”. Users post ideas and vote on them. This autumn, one of the most popular ideas on the General Ideas list wasn’t a feature.
The post, titled “Andy Yen, CEO, should step down completely”, had 2,020 votes when Decrypt checked it on 2 November, four days after the 404 Media report described below. Going by today’s counts, only five ideas in the category’s history have more.
Its address now sends visitors to the forum’s front page. We tried an address with a made-up idea number for comparison, and that one returns a “page not found” error. So the post did exist and has since been removed or hidden. The forum doesn’t say which, or when.
At least four smaller posts with the same demand are still up. The largest has 84 votes, and one, posted on Saturday, wants CTO Bart Butler gone as well. All four were set to “Declined” on Monday, each with the reply quoted above.
It’s Proton’s forum, and it can decide what belongs there. What the reply doesn’t explain is why the biggest post disappeared while the small ones stay up, closed but readable.
Why Users Want Yen Out
The posts began after a 404 Media investigation published on 29 October, based on interviews with eight current employees and one former employee. In late August, according to the report, an employee in Proton’s security Slack channel urged the company to take a few days to pentest new code before pushing it live.
Yen’s reply: “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure.” In a follow-up, he wrote that “only losers think like that” and told the team to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
Proton didn’t dispute the reporting, 404 Media says. A spokesperson told the outlet: “In our determination to move fast, we have sometimes been too blunt or too slow in explaining ourselves to our people.”
That’s a hard message to sell to people who pay for encrypted email and a VPN. Users posted cancellations on Reddit and Lemmy, though Decrypt points out these posts show anger, not a verified count of lost customers. Decrypt also reports that Yen called off planned “re-interviews” of staff about their AI use on 30 October. Two days later, CTO Bart Butler published an engineering manifesto arguing that developers should direct AI models rather than use them as an occasional helper.
Who Could Actually Replace Him
A forum vote can’t remove a CEO. At Proton, that power rests with the non-profit Proton Foundation, which the company describes as its “primary shareholder”. The foundation’s board of trustees lists five people, and Yen is one of them.
For Proton customers, the more practical question is about the software. None of the reports so far names a security flaw in Proton’s apps. The dispute is over how new code will be written and tested from now on. Our Proton VPN review covers the VPN as it stands today.
We asked Proton why the post was removed rather than declined like the others, and whether its votes and comments still exist. We’ll update this article if the company replies.
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