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?

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.

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.

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.

> do think we need to bring some shame back to corporate America

In a culture of worshipping ARR you’ll need to put a price tag on everything you find shameful or it won’t happen.

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.

Well, e.g. I am at a nonprofit using Slack and would rather not get rugpulled in the future. So I'm particularly interested in any evidence that Slack can give that this was an isolated, unintentional circumstance and won't happen again.

Absolutely, and I see nothing wrong with that at all. My issue is the tar-and-feather thing.

> My issue is the tar-and-feather thing.

From what I can tell the "tar-and-feather thing" is outrage directed at Slack and its CXOs, rather than the poor guy who happens to be reposting a message from the CPO.

Please don't let your moderator's concern for injury to individual people blind you to the fact that the outrage triggered by outrageous conduct is directed at the outrageous company and its officers, rather than at individual folks who aren't in a position with any real power.

Sorry but I can't agree with this framing. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293818.

I don't see how my comment above could be interpreted as any sort of personal attack or tar-and-feather behavior towards the person I replied to. This is a discussion about a bad business practice at a major company, and that is what these concerns are voiced against, not any one individual person who is acting as a spokesperson.

I interpreted it that way based on lots of past experience with the dynamic I wrote about upthread. I believe you that you didn't intend it to come across as hostile! The problem is that intent doesn't communicate itself, especially in short critical comments. The way I usually put it is "the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

I apologize for using your comment as a place to hang a whole generic thing about mobs and whatnot—I certainly didn't mean it about you personally (or even your post) - it's a shared group phenomenon for sure, and I could have made that clearer.

As an internet commenter, I expect vendors to be accountable to us precisely because we provide them free marketing in exchange for, well, attention of us, and our fellow commenters and readers.

In my days of heading R&D for a regional social networking site, we discovered that first ~100k of our users were both the most valuable ones, due to the extent of their interaction with the site, and due to the fact that their risk tolerance for our /new/ product meant they would also tolerate future products. As such, that "first wave" of community around a product - is - the wave the creates the market for the product.

In case of Slack - they were taking that goodwill for granted. And the community's outrage called that bluff. It highlighted to other readers (like myself, I don't use Slack anymore so never paid attention to the ownership change) that it's now part of Salesforce (and that's a negative signal for me, might be positive for others); that it got pretty dubious business practices (as others in similar situation to OP have spoken up); and that none of the CXOs' committed to meaningful (from my and community's perspective) responses - post mortems; blast radius; accountability; data export.. which means either they don't have the power to make such commitments (wouldn't be the case pre-acquisition), or don't want to make them. Another negative signal.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

Sure! you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll do my best. Specific questions are easier to answer than general ones :)

@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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

Yes. No argument here about that.

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.

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.

Yes, and that's the frustrating part of it all. I'm tired of turning the other cheek for companies that are ransacking us financially and exhausting us emotionally. It shouldn't take a public drama for a business to be proressional. Clearly leaving it as "we'll fix it, oppsie" isn't far enough.

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.

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

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.

I appreciate your comments and hugops! This is what the community should be about! <3

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…

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.

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 hn@ycombinator.com.