[jamie]

(Hi - I'm an engineer at Slack -- reposting from our chief product officer Rob Seaman):

"This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291980

[dman]

Since this was a public facing mistake, will there be a post mortem including details about the blast radius, how many customers were affected and what steps are being put in place to ensure this never happens to a customer again?

[jb1991]

When something happens on this scale, you cannot call it a "mistake." This is more than a mistake, it's a culture.

[dang]

Please don't pile on like this when someone is showing up to fix something. I'm sure you didn't mean to (at least I hope not) but it's one of the nastiest effects a community like this one can have.

People should be welcomed and commended for posting like the GP, not shamed and hammered.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[YC947584398754]

Slack obviously didn't care about the problem until it started causing them PR issues, now that they're doing the standard Social Media corporate damage control we have to hold any criticism of the issue and their response? How many other clients have they done this to that haven't gone gone public or created a PR problem for $27bn Slack?

[dang]

The question is at what point the community response stops being beneficial and starts being harmful to the community itself.

I'd say this thread being high on HN's frontpage for many hours* has been beneficial. In addition to calling attention to Hack Club's predicament (and who doesn't love Hack Club?!), it gave a chance for many HN members to post their own relevant experiences, which it turned out there were a lot of—surprisingly many.

But in the later stage of this process, when the thread has basically done its job, drawn attention and generated a response, I think it's harmful to escalate even further and get into a tar-and-feather treatment of poor sods who wander in to offer a "sorry" or "we'll fix it". The dynamic at that point goes from "let's rally together and help these awesome kids, plus hey, something similar happened to us" to something darker and meaner. The former is good for this community, the latter is bad for it.

My point is that we should assess this based on how it affects us. That's handy, because that's information we can access, whereas we can't actually peer into $BigCo to find out whether what happened was a regrettable mistake or a nefarious grab they got caught at.

As long as I'm going on about this I want to repeat what I said in the cousin comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293388): the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage: unprocessed because it is pre-existing in a person (<-- and we all have this) for whatever original reasons that haven't been metabolized yet; opportunistic because it waits for justifiable occasions to lash out, and then lashes out with vengeance. This is not a great way to handle one's rage—it's a recipe for repetition instead of growth. How do I know that? I know it by self-observation, and I believe that anyone who wants to can know it by self-observation.

It's particularly important to know this in a group context. When a group joins together to vent rage—because an occasion justifies it, even though the driver in each person may be very different—that's when a group turns into a mob. This happens easily because it happens without awareness and no one intends it. This is when we become our ugliest, so we should pay attention to signs of it in ourselves and in our groups, and learn to respond differently. Not easy, of course, but a good use to put an internet forum to!

* something, btw, that the community corrected us about - we initially downweighted the thread, which was our mistake. Fortunately we like getting corrected by the community, so it was an easy fix.

[mlyle]

I think there's a reasonable question about whether this was really an accident or something deliberate that they walked away from after bad PR.

Fixing the immediate problem is only step one. It's reasonable to ask for accountability and that they tell us about what they're changing going forward.

[johnnyanmac]

I use hanlon's razor here. Or perhaps a Bus Factor. Someone envoying for this situation got laid off or left, there wasn't proper documentation to track the issue, someone else picked up a warning in their feed and they launched out an email as they'd normally do, without reading into the context of the situation.

Their envoy is out of the loop so when Hack Club tries to respond they are at best rejected as some spurned rouge customer, and at worst completely ignored as they fail to reach anyone who has the power to properly look into it. So they have to go nuclear and make things public just to get the attention of a billion dollar corporation.

The fix, if any of this speculation is accurate, is indeed cultural. One counter to the current culture of tech trying to lay off as much as they can and letting Customer Service rot on the wayside. These PR crises were long determined as an "acceptable risk" of such cuts.

I don't think our engineer quoting Rob upstream has anything directly to do with this (maybe Rob does, but that's too speculative even for this post), but I do think we need to bring some shame back to corporate America. This is indeed endemic at multiple companies, not just Slack. I hear this is one of many reasons companies prefer to deal with Chinese companies; these kinds of CS slip ups just doesn't happen in their culture as regularly as the US.

[dang]

I don't know about "accountability" - that word tends to get weaponized, and I'm not sure who is accountable to internet commenters or why we internet commenters feel they are accountable to us. But of course it's fine to ask what happened, what will be changed, etc. That's orthogonal to the rage thing though.

[exfalso]

Wow one of the most insightful takes I've read in a long time, hidden in the depths of a HN thread.

The mechanism you talk about is all too real, and it can be semi-consciously exploited. A bit off-topic, but the way genocides happen is via a similar mechanism. A group is depicted as base, a disease, faults are attributed to it. It becomes a moral imperative to clean the body.

This feeling is thus rationalized, and people start to reinforce each other's conviction. It becomes a twisted status game: the more you lean into the mentality, the higher you rank. Often times the goal isn't even to "address" the original trigger, it's to show your peers your approval and distance yourself from "those people". They the immoral, we the moral.

[arolihas]

The job isn't finished if a complaint has to go viral every time slack has an oversight and threatens to delete nonprofit chat data within 7 days. The comment you're calling unprocessed rage and tar-and-feathering just said it's more than a simple mistake. If anything your comments have been harsher to individuals.

[dang]

Yeah I see how I could have given that impression, now that you say it. We do try to be careful not to single out or pile on specific users, but there's always more to learn about that.

[qnleigh]

> the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage... It's particularly important to know this in a group context. When a group joins together to vent rage—because an occasion justifies it, even though the driver in each person may be very different—that's when a group turns into a mob.

This is relevant to so much, well outside of this forum. Thank you for writing it.

[radioblahaj]

Hi Dang! I help run Hack Club's moderation team, and found this comment great food for thought on moderation. I've seen this pattern in Hack Club in heated discussions, and when dealing with messy incidents.

I would love to read some more thoughts you have on this or discuss other questions about moderation and advice. Could I email you with some questions? Happy to also look at an archive of comments where you've discussed this before.

Thank you!

[dang]

Sure! you're welcome to email [e-mail] and I'll do my best. Specific questions are easier to answer than general ones :)

[gglitch]

@dang I trust you are writing or will eventually write a book about your time here and what you’ve taken from it. I hope I hear about it!

[vdupras]

HN moderation is routinely put in front of the most interesting dilemmas! Your response is, of course, sensible. Let's hope that if Slack does something similar to another non-profit, then it will rise again on the top of the front page, so that it doesn't end up being a story of "I got my free pass because I was lucky enough that the press talked about me", when others get a similar treatment, without the deserved PR nightmare that comes with it.

I mean, objectively, unless it was an honest mistake, which we can generously assume because this is HN, this was a really cheap shot, worthy of Broadcom and friends.

[zzzeek]

> Please don't pile on like this when someone is showing up to fix something.

how do you know they're "showing up to fix something" and not simply servicing the "10% returns" end of a widespread scheme to shake down customers? This has every bit the look of "shake all the low-paying customers down as much as possible, if one of them manages to raise too much awareness, act like it was an isolated incident".

It matters a lot of this is an isolated incident or if this is par for the course; in the latter case, responding to those customers that were lucky enough to go viral is just part of the scheme proceeding as planned.

[dang]

I don't know, of course. What I do know is the effect of repeatedly assuming the worst about other people and pounding them with unprocessed rage, which is what internet indignation is all about. The effect is that it poisons community. Since we want a good community, we should avoid doing that here.

[akudha]

I suppose people get automatically annoyed because who the owner of Slack is. It is reasonable to assume bad practices if the company is too large to care, have multiple prior bad incidents etc - that is why people automatically assume guilt with companies like Oracle, Comcast, Salesforce etc etc. If the company in question was a small 50 person outfit or unknown, people might assume it was an honest mistake or at least give benefit of the doubt.

Not saying it is right or wrong - just pointing out that people's patience is in short supply when it comes to mega corps, simply because of their very bad track records...

[dang]

Yes. No argument here about that.

[baubino]

I agree that we shouldn’t pile on and assume the worst. However, multiple comments have asked what Slack will do to ensure this doesn’t happen again, which is important pressure to put on the corporation so that they can show (and not just tell us) that they truly are committed to fixing this problem.

[tadfisher]

This was their answer to that question:

> We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.

I don't think we're going to get a different answer if we ask again, and frankly I wouldn't expect one.

[zzzeek]

I dont know that we should assume the worst but you are assuming the best, that's what irks me more here. my position is that we should be skeptical and demand (politely, civilly, that is all fine) more information about what is the nature of this mistake, why did it happen, and what do we know about the same mistake happening elsewhere? the parent post was just "this is a mistake, we're fixing it, giggles", I would argue that's insufficient.

[throwaway_fjmr]

They are not "other people", they are company offering services.

[dang]

Every HN user is a person regardless of where they work, and everyone here is posting first as a human being, same as you and I are. That's how we all need to relate to each other. Work affiliations don't obviate that, and there's no substantive point or question that can't be posted this way.

[sanjit]

But staff showing up and simply quoting a person higher in the org only shows they’re parroting.

Anything personal would have been appreciated, especially in this context. Maybe “I’m one of the thousands that work here but this means something to me…”?

Actually even a professional stance that showed concern: “One of our shared company values states…”

Sadly Jamie’s response didn’t build any trust of Slack from me…

[Mawr]

It's not your place to attempt to moderate perfectly reasonable posts just because the overall "feel" of the conversation seems off to you. The parent post is fine, stay in your lane.

As an aside, there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by on the daily, usually the older the user somehow the more leeway there seems to be, so I'd suggest you focus your moderating attention on that.

[dang]

The mods' job is to prevent the community system from falling into its failure modes, and/or to jig it out of them when it does (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In that sense, posting like I did there is very much our place. (Not personally, of course, but in the role.) Whether I pulled it off well or not is a separate question.

> there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by

I'd need specific links to respond meaningfully. Generally, though, if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. There's far too much content here for us to see it all, let alone read it all. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [e-mail].

[baq]

> The parent post is fine, stay in your lane.

Sense of entitlement off the charts. Take a second to reorient yourself, you aren’t even in the wrong lane, you’re on the other side of the barrier going in the wrong direction.

[andrewstuart2]

Moreover, relying on social media visibility to decide which mistakes get corrected and which don't is a really terrible system, whether intentional or unintentional, and I really don't like supporting companies where that becomes the case. At least in part because I'm not really the type to make the fuss; I'd rather just avoid the risk in the first place.

[MisterTea]

Here's the thing: the post says it was written in haste so I imagine they wrote it before they spoke to anyone at Slack. There is no way to verify malice.

It would have been better to first reach out to Slack and get a confirmation and document that. This way we would have evidence and Slack could not pull the oops card.

[ratelimitsteve]

counterpoint: in software mistakes at scale is sorta what we do