from Hacker News

Slack Takes an Important Step to Block Abuse

by rdoherty on 7/17/23, 3:57 PM with 69 comments

• by Nextgrid on 7/17/23, 4:58 PM

  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!).

• by Yhippa on 7/17/23, 5:19 PM

  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?

• by tjpnz on 7/17/23, 5:28 PM

  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.

• by hartator on 7/17/23, 4:56 PM

  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.

• by rightbyte on 7/17/23, 4:55 PM

  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.

• by nerdjon on 7/17/23, 5:50 PM

  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.

• by jrm4 on 7/17/23, 5:08 PM

  Double weird?

  1) I thought Slack was mostly a teams thing where you know who you're interacting with?

  2) Why Mozilla?

• by dilippkumar on 7/17/23, 5:21 PM

  > 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.

• by hirundo on 7/17/23, 6:05 PM

  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.

• by Eisenstein on 7/17/23, 5:22 PM

  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.

• by didntcheck on 7/17/23, 5:48 PM

  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

• by stanac on 7/17/23, 5:10 PM

  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/ [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/ [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/

• by throwawa14223 on 7/17/23, 5:15 PM

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