6 ms·

Slack Takes an Important Step to Block Abuse

31 points by rdoherty 3y ago

rightbyte 3y ago
Is the Mozilla foundation wasting money on awareness ads for pushing propertiary SaaS to add features? (Picture in article) Edit: Yes they are. I zoomed in on the pic.
- darkwater 3y ago
  Well, since tons of open source projects and foundations unfortunately use Slack already, they are being pragmatic, it makes sense. They should also push for opensource solutions for communication, at least lobbying in places like CNCF etc? Maybe.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Slack is Salesforce, which is a spyware vendor. There is nothing pragmatic in pretending some superfluous changes makes Slack better.
    - darkwater 3y ago
      Limiting harassment would not limit the Salesforce spying [1], so it's not something they would have any core reason to avoid implementing, [1] assuming what you say is true
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Mozilla's mission is to make the internet better. Is it really so bad for them to praise-with-critique when a major service takes a (albeit small) step forward?
  - computerfriend 3y ago
    Making Slack better makes the free and open internet worse by comparison (since Slack is not part of the free and open internet). Mozilla investing time and money in this makes the free and open internet worse due to the opportunity cost.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    It is not a step forward. Trusting Salesforce, especially for civil rights activity, is fundamentally broken. It seems to me like a huge waste of resources to put time and effort into convincing Salesforce of anything. How about telling people to stay away from it and make sure some "sudo apt-get install chatzilla" is available and easy to setup for the Women rights group and what ever. Also, "deafening" one user for your messages in a group chat is a great tool for bullying I guess. I don't see why you would want that or cheer it as some anti-bully step forward.
hartator 3y ago
Why should Mozilla care about anything than trying to make their browser better? Slack is not their responsibility. The browser is already ton of work.
- cmdli 3y ago
  Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit whose job is to make the internet better. Part of that is the subsidiary Mozilla Corporation, which makes money and develops Firefox, but the overall nonprofit can do other things. Think EFF, not Google. While it is a bit weird to be pushing for a proprietary product (Slack) to add a certain feature, I suspect that this was done to 1) make the web better and 2) as a PR act to show off the work they are doing in advocacy.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit whose job is to make the internet better. Through technology? Or through (non-technical) activism? It seems like a better spend of their time would be to build better collaboration and social media solutions, rather than lobby for a feature like this on a platform that’s mostly used in organizations but not the wide internet.
    - cmdli 3y ago
      > Through technology? Or through (non-technical) activism? Both? Mozilla Foundation isn't just an engineering org, and the internet isn't just a technology but also a place with rules and norms. Influencing the direction of the internet is a necessary part to making it better. If the EFF was the one doing this I imagine there wouldn't be any complaints, and the Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit just like the EFF is.
  - this_user 3y ago
    So what are they going to do next, campaign for MS to make "Teams" actually usable? That might actually make the Internet better, but it's also way out of scope of what Mozilla's mission ought to be. This seems more like a desperate attempt to stay relevant (and continue to receive donations).
Nextgrid 3y ago
I guess this can be useful for large-scale public communities but as far as I know Slack never explicitly supports this use-case (and lacks many features suitable for this such as moderation features, etc). For Slack's primary use-case of intra-organization communications, this is completely useless and wouldn't work anyway (if you block and hide messages from a team member, how are you going to collaborate?). If there is abuse, it should be up to management/HR to step in and address this issue. Mozilla should really mind its own business - Firefox marketshare is dwindling and so are the reasons to pick it over its competitors (and they don't even focus on the few reasons that do remain!).
- devmor 3y ago
  >For Slack's primary use-case of intra-organization communications, this is completely useless and wouldn't work anyway (if you block and hide messages from a team member, how are you going to collaborate?). If there is abuse, it should be up to management/HR to step in and address this issue. What makes you think any given organization is a corporation? I'm currently in 13 Slack organizations, and only 2 of them are companies. Slack is widely use for collaboration in co-ops and closed communities. >Mozilla should really mind its own business - Firefox marketshare is dwindling Mozilla is a non-profit organization whose stated goals[1] align with this post perfectly. Not a company who's sole product is Firefox. 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > Mozilla is a non-profit organization whose stated goals[1] align with this post perfectly. Not a company who's sole product is Firefox. IDK. With safety angle, maybe. But Slack is the opposite of "Healthy Internet". It's a corporation that wormed its way into companies and communities alike, by doing "embrace, extend, extinguish" on IRC to gain initial organic marketing from naive techies. And they've paved the way for Discord making so many good communities no longer accessible. It's not the kind of association that makes Mozilla look good to me.
    - 3y ago
vsviridov 3y ago
[flagged]
jrm4 3y ago
Double weird? 1) I thought Slack was mostly a teams thing where you know who you're interacting with? 2) Why Mozilla?
- marcolussetti 3y ago
  There's a lot for large and small thematic communities around, for instance there's a sizeable Python Slack, my university has a few, and I'm in a few geographic ones for developers in different cities.
- williamsmj 3y ago
  Re: 1), my employer's slack has just under one million members. I do not know all of them. But in any case, why would knowing someone you interact with make you less likely to block them?
  - yreg 3y ago
    Because you are not supposed to block your coworkers on Slack? If there is an issue it should be handled by HR. I can't fathom the idea of coworkers blocking each other in digital tools and pretending like that's a solution to anything.
    - williamsmj 3y ago
      HR's job is to protect the company, not the employee, so I would not expect them to help except in cases of literal harassment (rather than, for example, people who reduce the S/N of a large channel). And even then, self-service tools that do not make you a target of further harassment are a foundation of public social networks. Why not private social networks too?
      - yreg 3y ago
        Why not? – Because coworkers need to talk to each other. What's next, jumping off the daily standup call for a while when a colleague you have a problem with is speaking? If someone is reducing the S/N of a large channel then it is a culture problem that needs to be solved by the management. I have seen a few Slack dramas like that in companies I worked with (e.g. a person trolling), and it wasn't difficult to solve. Letting team members to arbitrarily block each other seems insane to me from a company standpoint.
stanac 3y ago
Off topic, I just noticed that they have (at least) 3 blogs: Mozilla Foundation blog [1], MDN Blog [2] and Mozilla blog [3] [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/ [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/
throwawa14223 3y ago
Can't have any communication channels without 'safety'. The noose is tightening on the free and open internet.
- williamsmj 3y ago
  Why do you need to be able to force people to listen to you for the internet to be "free and open"?
- porcoda 3y ago
  Oh please: Letting a user block another user has nothing to do with a free and open internet. Save the anger for when there’s an actual threat to the internet, otherwise people will just start tuning free/open internet advocates out entirely.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    It is quite bad really. One feature seem to be to single out users so they can't hear you in a group chat. To me that is highly toxic. Speaking behind someone's back, to everyone. It will be used for bullying of anything.
- mulr00ney 3y ago
  Bizarre takeaway. AIM and MSN had the option to block people 20 years ago and I'm pretty sure IRC had it even before that. It's not a new concept.
- ldehaan 3y ago
  [dead]
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  I feel sorry for your ex.
Yhippa 3y ago
My impression is that most Slack instances are highly private and most users are explicitly invited. This is in contrast to Reddit and to some degree Discord where the barrier to joining subreddits or servers is generally low. If this is true what is Mozilla's business making niche feature requests to other companies products that they don't own? Is the plan to do this kind of advocacy for other products?
- mjr00 3y ago
  Yeah, to me this is a bit odd. Many industries require that internal communication be logged, so E2E encryption and blocking are a no-go, and even having that option in the software can add potential regulatory headaches. I think it's fair to call out that Slack isn't a platform for interacting with strangers, nor the right tool for discussing a topic that would get you in trouble if e.g. your government saw your messages. But it's okay to just say, don't use Slack for that kind of thing; there's already other E2E encrypted messaging apps, and there's better platforms for managing communities of strangers where you have bad actors (who you can't deal with by contacting an HR department).
  - andybak 3y ago
    Maybe people are using Slack in ways you don't expect? That's fine, surely. Isn't a better solution to have per instance administrative controls? Default to allowing blocking but allow companies to disable that feature. Make it clear to users in the UI when this has been done so they can complain if it's not appropriate to disable it.
- catgary 3y ago
  I find it weird anyone would have a problem with this, since the alternative is these advocacy groups actively pushing people to stop using these services.
  - jeltz 3y ago
    > since the alternative is these advocacy groups actively pushing people to stop using these services. Which would be a great thing. Communities should not use Slack.
dilippkumar 3y ago
> On July 5, Slack announced it would soon be introducing a “Hide messages from another member” feature, allowing people to “support their needs for a safe and productive work environment.” Can anyone please link me to the announcement? My google-fu is failing me today.
Eisenstein 3y ago
I think it is important to fully consider the implications of implementing any feature which will allow users to silence other people. For instance, Reddit has a different take on the block feature: instead of the blocker being able to hide posts from people they don't want to see, the block function disables the ability of the blockee to see or respond to any posts from the blocker, thus making them invisible and removing the ability to respond to entire threads without recourse. This led to a wonderful tendency to end arguments with one party getting the last word in, then blocking the other party so that they couldn't respond. At the time I was amazed anyone signed off on that feature, and am still even more amazed they never rolled it back.
- rcme 3y ago
  > This led to a wonderful tendency to end arguments with one party getting the last word in, then blocking the other party so that they couldn't respond. Arguing online is a fun hobby. Who gets the "last word" doesn't really matter.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    That doesn't mean it isn't ridiculously frustrating when you come up with a response that may have taken a lot of thought and effort and find out you can't post it.
tjpnz 3y ago
If utilised in a corporate environment it will undoubtedly sow chaos. I trust that those administering instances in such a setting will have the ability to disable it entirely? I honestly find the idea of this really perverse. In a work environment you don't (nor should you) get a choice in who you interact with. If some if those interactions are negative, well that's not a problem Slack should be attempting to solve.
Proven 3y ago
[dead]
didntcheck 3y ago
The over/misuse of the word "safety" and its variants is reaching insane levels. No, seeing messages you don't like is not a threat to your safety. The intentional conflation is increasingly used as an emotive bludgeon/thought-terminating cliché to pressure organisations into doing what the speaker wants, because to do otherwise (or to even question the proposal) would be "endangering" people I don't really have a problem with Slack implementing a block button (I assumed it already had one) but this manipulative rhetoric and induced fragility is worth calling out in any case
nerdjon 3y ago
I am super confused about this and I really hope this is an optional feature (hopefully turned off by default) for administrators. Otherwise "blocking" should not be something that is utilized within a work setting. If you have a problem with someone you go to HR not just block them and ignore the problem doesn't exist. You can't convince me otherwise, I don't care how big your company is. If you feel the need to block someone at work, talk to HR. If they won't do anything you should leave since that just speaks to fundamental issues. Same with "Hide messages from another member" which if that is doing what it sounds like it is doing, again I can't imagine actually sending a message in a public area and marking specific coworker(s) as not being able to see it. Sure I know I have seen slack used for other purposes but I can't imagine this is actually a majority enough of a use of Slack that pushing or celebrating this feature is really useful? I honestly figured most of those non work use cases have likely moved to Discord at this point. Unless Slack is working on trying to dethrone Discord... this makes zero sense to me and if it isn't able to be disabled by administrators I will stop advocating to use Slack again... as bad as Teams is.
hirundo 3y ago
I'm afraid that in a small organization, where Slack is so often deployed, blocking abuse is a poor substitute for a low tolerance for abuse. My boss fired someone immediately after they made a degrading comment to someone on Slack, and in that case I think it was warranted. If that person was simply blocked by anyone involved it would have seriously broken communication with a core service. Putting a non-abusive person in that role was the better choice. It depends on the organization of course, so a blocking feature makes sense as a local admin option. In our case a "flag this comment" feature would work better.
ldehaan 3y ago
[dead]

31 points by rdoherty 3y ago

Is the Mozilla foundation wasting money on awareness ads for pushing propertiary SaaS to add features? (Picture in article) Edit: Yes they are. I zoomed in on the pic.

darkwater 3y ago
Well, since tons of open source projects and foundations unfortunately use Slack already, they are being pragmatic, it makes sense. They should also push for opensource solutions for communication, at least lobbying in places like CNCF etc? Maybe.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Slack is Salesforce, which is a spyware vendor. There is nothing pragmatic in pretending some superfluous changes makes Slack better.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    Limiting harassment would not limit the Salesforce spying [1], so it's not something they would have any core reason to avoid implementing, [1] assuming what you say is true
paulryanrogers 3y ago
Mozilla's mission is to make the internet better. Is it really so bad for them to praise-with-critique when a major service takes a (albeit small) step forward?
- computerfriend 3y ago
  Making Slack better makes the free and open internet worse by comparison (since Slack is not part of the free and open internet). Mozilla investing time and money in this makes the free and open internet worse due to the opportunity cost.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  It is not a step forward. Trusting Salesforce, especially for civil rights activity, is fundamentally broken. It seems to me like a huge waste of resources to put time and effort into convincing Salesforce of anything. How about telling people to stay away from it and make sure some "sudo apt-get install chatzilla" is available and easy to setup for the Women rights group and what ever. Also, "deafening" one user for your messages in a group chat is a great tool for bullying I guess. I don't see why you would want that or cheer it as some anti-bully step forward.

hartator 3y ago

Why should Mozilla care about anything than trying to make their browser better? Slack is not their responsibility. The browser is already ton of work.

cmdli 3y ago
Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit whose job is to make the internet better. Part of that is the subsidiary Mozilla Corporation, which makes money and develops Firefox, but the overall nonprofit can do other things. Think EFF, not Google. While it is a bit weird to be pushing for a proprietary product (Slack) to add a certain feature, I suspect that this was done to 1) make the web better and 2) as a PR act to show off the work they are doing in advocacy.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit whose job is to make the internet better. Through technology? Or through (non-technical) activism? It seems like a better spend of their time would be to build better collaboration and social media solutions, rather than lobby for a feature like this on a platform that’s mostly used in organizations but not the wide internet.
  - cmdli 3y ago
    > Through technology? Or through (non-technical) activism? Both? Mozilla Foundation isn't just an engineering org, and the internet isn't just a technology but also a place with rules and norms. Influencing the direction of the internet is a necessary part to making it better. If the EFF was the one doing this I imagine there wouldn't be any complaints, and the Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit just like the EFF is.
- this_user 3y ago
  So what are they going to do next, campaign for MS to make "Teams" actually usable? That might actually make the Internet better, but it's also way out of scope of what Mozilla's mission ought to be. This seems more like a desperate attempt to stay relevant (and continue to receive donations).

Nextgrid 3y ago

I guess this can be useful for large-scale public communities but as far as I know Slack never explicitly supports this use-case (and lacks many features suitable for this such as moderation features, etc). For Slack's primary use-case of intra-organization communications, this is completely useless and wouldn't work anyway (if you block and hide messages from a team member, how are you going to collaborate?). If there is abuse, it should be up to management/HR to step in and address this issue. Mozilla should really mind its own business - Firefox marketshare is dwindling and so are the reasons to pick it over its competitors (and they don't even focus on the few reasons that do remain!).

devmor 3y ago
>For Slack's primary use-case of intra-organization communications, this is completely useless and wouldn't work anyway (if you block and hide messages from a team member, how are you going to collaborate?). If there is abuse, it should be up to management/HR to step in and address this issue. What makes you think any given organization is a corporation? I'm currently in 13 Slack organizations, and only 2 of them are companies. Slack is widely use for collaboration in co-ops and closed communities. >Mozilla should really mind its own business - Firefox marketshare is dwindling Mozilla is a non-profit organization whose stated goals[1] align with this post perfectly. Not a company who's sole product is Firefox. 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Mozilla is a non-profit organization whose stated goals[1] align with this post perfectly. Not a company who's sole product is Firefox. IDK. With safety angle, maybe. But Slack is the opposite of "Healthy Internet". It's a corporation that wormed its way into companies and communities alike, by doing "embrace, extend, extinguish" on IRC to gain initial organic marketing from naive techies. And they've paved the way for Discord making so many good communities no longer accessible. It's not the kind of association that makes Mozilla look good to me.
  - 3y ago

vsviridov 3y ago

[flagged]

jrm4 3y ago

Double weird? 1) I thought Slack was mostly a teams thing where you know who you're interacting with? 2) Why Mozilla?

marcolussetti 3y ago
There's a lot for large and small thematic communities around, for instance there's a sizeable Python Slack, my university has a few, and I'm in a few geographic ones for developers in different cities.
williamsmj 3y ago
Re: 1), my employer's slack has just under one million members. I do not know all of them. But in any case, why would knowing someone you interact with make you less likely to block them?
- yreg 3y ago
  Because you are not supposed to block your coworkers on Slack? If there is an issue it should be handled by HR. I can't fathom the idea of coworkers blocking each other in digital tools and pretending like that's a solution to anything.
  - williamsmj 3y ago
    HR's job is to protect the company, not the employee, so I would not expect them to help except in cases of literal harassment (rather than, for example, people who reduce the S/N of a large channel). And even then, self-service tools that do not make you a target of further harassment are a foundation of public social networks. Why not private social networks too?
    - yreg 3y ago
      Why not? – Because coworkers need to talk to each other. What's next, jumping off the daily standup call for a while when a colleague you have a problem with is speaking? If someone is reducing the S/N of a large channel then it is a culture problem that needs to be solved by the management. I have seen a few Slack dramas like that in companies I worked with (e.g. a person trolling), and it wasn't difficult to solve. Letting team members to arbitrarily block each other seems insane to me from a company standpoint.

stanac 3y ago

Off topic, I just noticed that they have (at least) 3 blogs: Mozilla Foundation blog [1], MDN Blog [2] and Mozilla blog [3] [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/ [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/

throwawa14223 3y ago

Can't have any communication channels without 'safety'. The noose is tightening on the free and open internet.

williamsmj 3y ago
Why do you need to be able to force people to listen to you for the internet to be "free and open"?
porcoda 3y ago
Oh please: Letting a user block another user has nothing to do with a free and open internet. Save the anger for when there’s an actual threat to the internet, otherwise people will just start tuning free/open internet advocates out entirely.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  It is quite bad really. One feature seem to be to single out users so they can't hear you in a group chat. To me that is highly toxic. Speaking behind someone's back, to everyone. It will be used for bullying of anything.
mulr00ney 3y ago
Bizarre takeaway. AIM and MSN had the option to block people 20 years ago and I'm pretty sure IRC had it even before that. It's not a new concept.
ldehaan 3y ago
[dead]
DonHopkins 3y ago
I feel sorry for your ex.

Yhippa 3y ago

My impression is that most Slack instances are highly private and most users are explicitly invited. This is in contrast to Reddit and to some degree Discord where the barrier to joining subreddits or servers is generally low. If this is true what is Mozilla's business making niche feature requests to other companies products that they don't own? Is the plan to do this kind of advocacy for other products?

mjr00 3y ago
Yeah, to me this is a bit odd. Many industries require that internal communication be logged, so E2E encryption and blocking are a no-go, and even having that option in the software can add potential regulatory headaches. I think it's fair to call out that Slack isn't a platform for interacting with strangers, nor the right tool for discussing a topic that would get you in trouble if e.g. your government saw your messages. But it's okay to just say, don't use Slack for that kind of thing; there's already other E2E encrypted messaging apps, and there's better platforms for managing communities of strangers where you have bad actors (who you can't deal with by contacting an HR department).
- andybak 3y ago
  Maybe people are using Slack in ways you don't expect? That's fine, surely. Isn't a better solution to have per instance administrative controls? Default to allowing blocking but allow companies to disable that feature. Make it clear to users in the UI when this has been done so they can complain if it's not appropriate to disable it.
catgary 3y ago
I find it weird anyone would have a problem with this, since the alternative is these advocacy groups actively pushing people to stop using these services.
- jeltz 3y ago
  > since the alternative is these advocacy groups actively pushing people to stop using these services. Which would be a great thing. Communities should not use Slack.

dilippkumar 3y ago

> On July 5, Slack announced it would soon be introducing a “Hide messages from another member” feature, allowing people to “support their needs for a safe and productive work environment.” Can anyone please link me to the announcement? My google-fu is failing me today.

Eisenstein 3y ago

I think it is important to fully consider the implications of implementing any feature which will allow users to silence other people. For instance, Reddit has a different take on the block feature: instead of the blocker being able to hide posts from people they don't want to see, the block function disables the ability of the blockee to see or respond to any posts from the blocker, thus making them invisible and removing the ability to respond to entire threads without recourse. This led to a wonderful tendency to end arguments with one party getting the last word in, then blocking the other party so that they couldn't respond. At the time I was amazed anyone signed off on that feature, and am still even more amazed they never rolled it back.

rcme 3y ago
> This led to a wonderful tendency to end arguments with one party getting the last word in, then blocking the other party so that they couldn't respond. Arguing online is a fun hobby. Who gets the "last word" doesn't really matter.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  That doesn't mean it isn't ridiculously frustrating when you come up with a response that may have taken a lot of thought and effort and find out you can't post it.

tjpnz 3y ago

If utilised in a corporate environment it will undoubtedly sow chaos. I trust that those administering instances in such a setting will have the ability to disable it entirely? I honestly find the idea of this really perverse. In a work environment you don't (nor should you) get a choice in who you interact with. If some if those interactions are negative, well that's not a problem Slack should be attempting to solve.

Proven 3y ago

[dead]

didntcheck 3y ago

The over/misuse of the word "safety" and its variants is reaching insane levels. No, seeing messages you don't like is not a threat to your safety. The intentional conflation is increasingly used as an emotive bludgeon/thought-terminating cliché to pressure organisations into doing what the speaker wants, because to do otherwise (or to even question the proposal) would be "endangering" people I don't really have a problem with Slack implementing a block button (I assumed it already had one) but this manipulative rhetoric and induced fragility is worth calling out in any case

nerdjon 3y ago

I am super confused about this and I really hope this is an optional feature (hopefully turned off by default) for administrators. Otherwise "blocking" should not be something that is utilized within a work setting. If you have a problem with someone you go to HR not just block them and ignore the problem doesn't exist. You can't convince me otherwise, I don't care how big your company is. If you feel the need to block someone at work, talk to HR. If they won't do anything you should leave since that just speaks to fundamental issues. Same with "Hide messages from another member" which if that is doing what it sounds like it is doing, again I can't imagine actually sending a message in a public area and marking specific coworker(s) as not being able to see it. Sure I know I have seen slack used for other purposes but I can't imagine this is actually a majority enough of a use of Slack that pushing or celebrating this feature is really useful? I honestly figured most of those non work use cases have likely moved to Discord at this point. Unless Slack is working on trying to dethrone Discord... this makes zero sense to me and if it isn't able to be disabled by administrators I will stop advocating to use Slack again... as bad as Teams is.

hirundo 3y ago

I'm afraid that in a small organization, where Slack is so often deployed, blocking abuse is a poor substitute for a low tolerance for abuse. My boss fired someone immediately after they made a degrading comment to someone on Slack, and in that case I think it was warranted. If that person was simply blocked by anyone involved it would have seriously broken communication with a core service. Putting a non-abusive person in that role was the better choice. It depends on the organization of course, so a blocking feature makes sense as a local admin option. In our case a "flag this comment" feature would work better.

ldehaan 3y ago

[dead]