5 ms·

(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, alo

by jamie 1y ago

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

jb1991 1y ago
When something happens on this scale, you cannot call it a "mistake." This is more than a mistake, it's a culture.
- andrewstuart2 1y ago
  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.
- dang 1y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - YC947584398754 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 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.
      - 1y ago
  - zzzeek 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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.
      - throwaway_fjmr 1y ago
        They are not "other people", they are company offering services.
        dang 1y ago
        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.
        ahnberg 1y ago
        I appreciate your comments and hugops! This is what the community should be about! <3
        1y ago
  - Mawr 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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&query=by%3Adang%20failure%20modes&sort=byDate&type=comment 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 hn@ycombinator.com.
    - baq 1y ago
      > 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.
  - sanjit 1y ago
    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…
- MisterTea 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  counterpoint: in software mistakes at scale is sorta what we do
dman 1y ago
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?

by jamie 1y ago

jb1991 1y ago

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

andrewstuart2 1y ago
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.
dang 1y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- YC947584398754 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 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.
    - 1y ago
- zzzeek 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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.
    - throwaway_fjmr 1y ago
      They are not "other people", they are company offering services.
      - dang 1y ago
        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.
        ahnberg 1y ago
        I appreciate your comments and hugops! This is what the community should be about! <3
        1y ago
- Mawr 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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&query=by%3Adang%20failure%20modes&sort=byDate&type=comment 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 hn@ycombinator.com.
  - baq 1y ago
    > 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.
- sanjit 1y ago
  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…
MisterTea 1y ago
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 1y ago
counterpoint: in software mistakes at scale is sorta what we do

dman 1y ago

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?