7 ms·
I'm a big fan and critic of apologies. This one is pretty good. They admit the mistake was theirs and they take responsibility for it. They say sorry. They exp
by mabbo 8y ago
I'm a big fan and critic of apologies. This one is pretty good.
They admit the mistake was theirs and they take responsibility for it. They say sorry. They explain what they're going to do to fix the situation. They say they're going to learn from this and not have similar mistakes in the future. Pretty solid.
The only thing that is missing, in my view, is personalization. Tell me who you are, speaking for the organization. This humanizes the apology, and also gives a face to who it is saying they're going to improve. Ideally the CEO.
Still, I give it 8/10.
- LeoNatan25 8y agoI'd subtract a few points for taking so long. Lawyers have gawked on this for hours to find holes, rendering the sincerity mute. 5/10 It's Slack, so actually 2/10.
- azhenley 8y agoThis apology seems very generic and sterile to me. People are boycotting their product so they apologized. They should have communicated with their users to begin with before taking such harsh actions.
- geofft 8y agoAre people actually boycotting their product? They very clearly see their free users as their non-primary market (no automatic invites, no tools for individuals to block individuals because your HR department is supposed to deal with it, limited archives, etc.) and I'm not sure a "boycott" of a free service even counts anyway. And a paying customer is not going to be able to drop Slack on one day's notice any more than they could drop email on one day's notice. Were there actually paying / potentially paying customers who cited this as a reason to stop using Slack?
- azhenley 8y agoMy Twitter is full of academics with students and collaborators from all over the world that are complaining that Slack just eliminated their ability for them to communicate over the service. I'm not sure how many of them were free or paid though.
- geofft 8y agoBeing involuntarily prevented from using a service is rather the opposite of boycotting, I think. (In the sense that boycotts are a tool of applying economic pressure to convince someone to change their mind, and if you're being kicked off you aren't actually able to exert any pressure.)
- azhenley 8y agoIt isn't those that got kicked off that are boycotting. It is those that had students or collaborators get kicked off, that are now refusing to use Slack.
- inferiorhuman 8y agoYou can block users now? At megacorp we definitely couldn't, and as much as there were people I wanted to block and mandatory channels I didn't want to be in… all of the frigging the bots were the most unbearable.
- geofft 8y agoSorry, I was unclear. You can't block people on either the free or paid plans, because you're supposed to ask your HR department to ask people to behave, and if you don't have an HR department you're 100% not their target audience. I've complained about this to Slack multiple times before, see their responses about how as a tool built for work they can't implement a block feature: https://twitter.com/geofft/status/767857284827475968 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/767857284827475968 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/770000987016818688 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/770000987016818688 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/818517767607517184 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/818517767607517184 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/1017193464415576065 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/1017193464415576065
- inferiorhuman 8y agoYeah I've seen that response too. While at megacorp I just stayed off of slack as much as possible.
- maldeh 8y agoAll the same, it's good they took responsibility when they did. I don't use Slack at work at present, but being an emigrant worker myself (not iranian, but honestly it shouldn't really matter), the past week's events left enough of an impression on me that I would have likely strongly protested any attempts in my organization at getting a slack channel going. This response is at least well-written enough that it gives me pause, that I should research the company's track record more carefully before jumping to judgment. (they're still on thin ice as far as I'm concerned, but it's a step in the right direction)
- tlb 8y agoSaying "they should have acted differently to begin with" isn't a valid criticism of an apology, or it would apply to all apologies.
- azhenley 8y agoThat was my point. Unless the apology is of the type "it accidentally got deployed before we had the opportunity to test the change and communicate to users..." then they shouldn't have done it to begin with.
- hamandcheese 8y ago“If you were sorry you wouldn’t have done it to begin with” has also come up on several occasions in my personal life. Haven’t figured out how best to respond to that one.
- tbranyen 8y agoIf you did something wrong more than once and gave the same apology that statement would make total sense. The first time though is unfair and kind of selfish minded.
- 8y ago
- komali2 8y agoFrom what I'm reading here, it would be impossible by your logic to effectively apologize. The only solution is to never make a mistake in the first place, which isn't a feasible expectation when dealing with humans.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- clwk 8y agoI agree entirely with your sentiment. Still, I'm not sure corporate personhood means we should judge corporate action as we would human action. It's still not possible to expect corporations to never mistakes, but I wouldn't excuse it on the basis of their humanity.
- DonHopkins 8y agoI believe there are unapologizable offenses that reveal true intrinsic character character flaws that can't be regretted away, but this definitely isn't one of them.
- galangalalgol 8y agoI have character flaws. Do you propose that we exclude people with certain flaws from our online communities? Which ones? Lack of empathy is a popular target, but children under 7 almost all lack empathy and they can be generous and kind despite it being intellectually motivated instead of emotional. Adults without empathy can be similarly productive members of our communities.
- DonHopkins 8y agoDo you have any specific unapologizably offensive character flaws that you want to admit to, or do you want me to try to make a judgement of whether or not you should be ostracized from society based on your one vague comment?
- nimbius 8y ago>We did not block any user based on their nationality or ethnicity. Okay, so how did you block them? >As is standard in the enterprise software industry, Slack uses location information principally derived from IP addresses to implement these required blocks. So, you blocked users based on their nationality. >We do not collect, use, or possess any information about the nationality or ethnicity of our users. you clearly possess enough information about the nationality of your users to block them based on it, which was your intent. You backpedaled when people who were not the target nationality began to complain.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- martincmartin 8y agoI'm Canadian, but live in Boston. My IP address shows where I live, not my nationality.
- abrowne 8y agoI was in London last month but that doesn't make me British.
- p1esk 8y agoNo, they blocked users based on location. I'm currently located in California, and this has nothing to do with my nationality.
- aervaertaera 8y agoExpats comprise less than 1% of the global population, and I doubt the number of international tourists at any given time pushes that percentage much higher. Use a VPN I guess, or better yet ditch Slack.
- dang 8y agoLikely a much higher percentage of Slack users though.
- duxup 8y agoThey were very to the point.
- benatkin 8y agoIt seemed insincere to me with the emoji-like slack logo at the end of their post. I know it's a standard practice for them but if they wanted to appear sincere they should have discontinued that practice.
- robbrown451 8y agoThat just looked like a "signature" to me, it didn't come off as insincere at all.
- speedplane 8y agoThe apology wasn't good just because it accepted responsibility, it was good because they acted responsibly. The incident lasted two days, and it was quickly corrected. Many other companies would ignore it for months, and a similar apology in that case would be feel far less sincere. It's okay to mess up if you quickly correct the issue or at least quickly recognize it and try to correct it. The problems arise when incidents are buried or ignored. Late apologies are not apologies at all.
- throw-far-away 8y agoApologies mean nothing without a believable promise to not behave similarly in the future. Furthermore, "sorry" doesn't excuse all behaviors. Doing something shitty like closing someone's account without warning and without an appeal process is inexcusable.
- SpikeDad 8y agoI think also apologies require explaining what changes they made and why they decided to do it that way. A look behind the curtain on why they chose way A when they could have chosen way B is illustrative to users.
- bad_user 8y ago2 days for people being locked out of their account, through no fault of their own, is a long time. Slack is only apologizing due to the public uproar, as apparently many people were affected. Our cofounder was also locked of his account. He's Irish and living in Romania, with nothing to do with the embargoed countries. To make matters worse, he tried contacting support to prove his nationality and country of residence and 2 days later he's still locked out of Slack.
- n_e 8y ago> 2 days for people being locked out of their account, through no fault of their own, is a long time. In absolute terms yes. Compared to how for example google handles this it’s outstanding.
- dogecoinbase 8y agoAre you joking? It provides no specific action they're taking to prevent this type of thing in the future, and it's internally inconsistent (who are "the people whose accounts we intended to disable" who they "will not deactivate their account and they will be able to access Slack when they return to countries or regions for which no blocking is required"?). I've spent the day messaging and talking with friends who work within Slack in an engineering capacity who feel, frankly, betrayed by the organization. Slack advertises itself internally as an engineering-driven company and on the security side, has an incredibly elaborate system of internal controls that I have espoused emulations of during my consulting that, and I am being very specific without being too specific here, were bypassed to perform these account bans. Slack's security team was bypassed. Slack's internal controls were contravened. Slack has demonstrated that they can access every location you've ever logged in from and will cheerfully give that information up for the pleasure of the US Government without it even being required of them.
- DonHopkins 8y ago>I've spent the day messaging and talking with friends ... Some of us use Slack because we have work to do.
- dogecoinbase 8y ago>I've spent the day messaging and talking with friends ... Some of us use Slack because we have work to do. How noble in reason! Some of us were banned without justification from our jobs today via the unjustified unilateral action of a private company. In fact, my job is to help companies secure their internal communications. So, talking with people about this was my job. What was yours?
- DonHopkins 8y agoNot shilling cryptocurrencies. ;)
- opless 8y ago
- kortilla 8y ago>They admit the mistake was theirs and they take responsibility for it. They say sorry. They explain what they're going to do to fix the situation. They say they're going to learn from this and not have similar mistakes in the future. Pretty solid. This doesn’t really mean much by itself. These are elements of the BP apology for the gulf spill as well. The only thing that matters is actions taken. Anything else is fluff part of standard PR.
- wpietri 8y agoWhat apology are you thinking of? The thing I find when I search for that is CEO Tony Hayward's statement of 17 June 2010: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jun/17/bp-tony-hayward-oil-spill-statement https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jun/17/bp-tony-hay... That specifically doesn't admit the mistake or take responsibility. You can find further discussion of their apologies here, and they get a 3/10 rating for apologizing well: https://www.perfectapology.com/BP-oil-spill-apology.html https://www.perfectapology.com/BP-oil-spill-apology.html
- nod 8y agoI don't think anyone would say an apology is sufficient response. It's only a necessary component of a full response. But if a company screws up the apology right off the bat (as so many companies do), you can tell that things are not going to turn out well for them. So it's pretty interesting that so many companies (and individuals) write such bad apologies, so much so that it's pretty rare to see an apology even as good as this one.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amelius 8y agoWho says they didn't hire a PR firm to write this apology?
- dorgo 8y agoquality and sincerity are orthogonal.
- burtonator2011 8y agoThis is confusing: > We do not collect, use, or possess any information about the nationality or ethnicity of our users. No nationality? Don't they kind of have to collect nationality in order to comply with the law on implementing sanctions?