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Slack Says Letting Anyone Message Anyone with Few Limits Was ‘A Mistake’

22 points by arkadiyt 6y ago

jfengel 6y ago
I see this as part and parcel of something we've been discussing a lot on HN lately. It's 2021, and the problems of community building are well known by now. Spam should be really obvious: if you build a messaging medium, people will use it to send spam. It's also going to be used for harassment and other unsavory things. These aren't novel. We've seen them time after time. There's no one solution to the problem. There are lots of approaches, with pros and cons. But it's long past the time for people to start thinking about them before they roll this out, not after. If you provide communications between people, then the way people behave will affect your customers. These things are people problems, not just technical ones, and failing to take that into account is going to cost you.
- zapzupnz 6y ago
  It’s funny, I still see ideas for new community-centric apps/sites/platforms floating around on HN that fail to account for the people factor as though the short history of the internet hasn’t already provided more than enough horror stories. The other day, I saw someone’s pitch for an auction website where users’ home address was publicly available by default. They didn’t see anything wrong with that. Big yikes.
- agentofoblivion 6y ago
  +1 but with the addition that the people thinking about fraud/abuse/security are typically an isolated department that the standard product developer doesn’t ever think about. For mature products/services, this is usually integrated, but for new products, they seem to first think in isolation and then consider the more pessimistic cases as a last minute check box item (assuming they’re part of a large, sophisticated company that has such a thing). I’m not disagreeing with the premise that people should be more aware, just explaining how I’ve seen it happen. People excited about bringing a cool thing to market often don’t have an answer to the question, “but what if a bad actor decides to use it for nefarious purposes?”

22 points by arkadiyt 6y ago

I see this as part and parcel of something we've been discussing a lot on HN lately. It's 2021, and the problems of community building are well known by now. Spam should be really obvious: if you build a messaging medium, people will use it to send spam. It's also going to be used for harassment and other unsavory things. These aren't novel. We've seen them time after time. There's no one solution to the problem. There are lots of approaches, with pros and cons. But it's long past the time for people to start thinking about them before they roll this out, not after. If you provide communications between people, then the way people behave will affect your customers. These things are people problems, not just technical ones, and failing to take that into account is going to cost you.

zapzupnz 6y ago
It’s funny, I still see ideas for new community-centric apps/sites/platforms floating around on HN that fail to account for the people factor as though the short history of the internet hasn’t already provided more than enough horror stories. The other day, I saw someone’s pitch for an auction website where users’ home address was publicly available by default. They didn’t see anything wrong with that. Big yikes.
agentofoblivion 6y ago
+1 but with the addition that the people thinking about fraud/abuse/security are typically an isolated department that the standard product developer doesn’t ever think about. For mature products/services, this is usually integrated, but for new products, they seem to first think in isolation and then consider the more pessimistic cases as a last minute check box item (assuming they’re part of a large, sophisticated company that has such a thing). I’m not disagreeing with the premise that people should be more aware, just explaining how I’ve seen it happen. People excited about bringing a cool thing to market often don’t have an answer to the question, “but what if a bad actor decides to use it for nefarious purposes?”