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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

What 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-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

I 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.

The 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.

2 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.

> 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.

That's true, but you set the bar very low.

Regarding user support, Google ranks on par with an anvil.

My anvil has 100% uptime since 1912. Just sayin.

The metaphor stays apt if you take uptime into account :-)

Anvils do break, sometimes, and the failure mode is catastrophic: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=broken+anvil&t=h_&iax=images&ia=im...

Most times Google has issues like that, it's for a free service, rather than something affecting paid customers, yeah?

When I was consulting I had a client whose google ads stopped working for six weeks. She was spending $500 a week in ads, but Google wouldn't do anything to fix or even acknowledge the issue.

I also had Google accuse me of "click fraud" on a website I ran in college- they stole about $300 from me, with no ability to appeal.

Google's support- even for paying customers- is abysmal.

No.

We had someone locked out of their email while using Google's paid company mail service (App engine, I think it was called). Several days with no mail and no useful support taught me that relying on Google can leave you with no recourse.

Apologies 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.

I 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.

This 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?

Aren't the sanctions on the country itself? It makes sense that you only block people that are in the country, not everyone that was born there.

They need to block people who are in (for example) Iran, not all Iranian citizens, or all people who have visited Iran in the past.

They were very to the point.

Who says they didn't hire a PR firm to write this apology?

quality and sincerity are orthogonal.

This 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.

Saying "they should have acted differently to begin with" isn't a valid criticism of an apology, or it would apply to all apologies.

“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.

If 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.

I've spilt things on people more than once, AFAIK that's not unusual. Does that make me at fault morally?

I'd say no.

Your thesis needs work IMO.

Make sure you don't fail morally by ever presenting an incomplete/unsound thesis again!

Spilling something is an accident. Other things can be mistakes but not accidents.

Spilling something is usually a mistake, and often can be mitigated; the point is that mere repitition of error is insufficient to prove moral degeneracy.

IDK at some point you should be investing in a sippy-cup

your willful misunderstanding is making this thread unbearable.

If repetition of a trait is not enough to demonstrate it as a core trait, what is?

(Serious question)

If you trust the person to not be acting on malice, then I'd not worry too much about the precise semantics of those words and guess that the person is mainly expressing their frustration, hurt, etc.

What about responding to that honest emotional expression directly? "Ouch. I hadn't realize how much I'd hurt you. Truly, I'm sorry."

That's... not how the direction of time works.

By that argument regret seems impossible. Some nuance is probably lost here, to be fair.

There are a range of harms that are reasonably excusable and then those that are inexcusable. It's when people are excessively or inconsistently unreasonable that you're better off not associating with them and their BS. It's unreasonable to reason with an unreasonable person.

I am not perfect and I am trying to be better.

Victims have the hardest hearts.

Your personal life sounds more exciting than mine.

In each case though you did it to begin with because

1) while you knew you would be sorry, you surmised you would be more sorry not doing it, or

2) did not believe anyone would mind your actions, or

3) did not realize you would so much regret it when others took offense to your actions.

#3 absolves you of nothing. #2 absolves you unless you thought they wouldn't mind simply because they wouldn't know. #1 could absolves you in theory, but might just reflect priorities that the recipient of your apology doesn't share.

All this is likely of little use to anyone, but I couldn't resist writing it down anyway.

All three of your possibilities imply that it was on purpose and understood to be wrong to begin with. What about if you made a mistake: you thought you were doing the right thing, but turns out it was the wrong thing. Or you thought what you are doing wouldn’t impact anybody negatively. Or you did the right thing but it didn’t work out the way you anticipated. Or it was an innocent and honest thing you did, but somebody else took offence anyway. You can be sorry for things without there being any malice at play.

We (humans) are not always good at predicting the future or other people’s reactions. We do stupid things and make stupid mistakes all the time and when these things affect others we often feel sorry that we did those things.

Don't those all fall squarely under #2 (supposing the act won't bother anyone)?

I guess you’re right.

This statement would only work if one's could be perfect, if their actions would be not a mistake but a calculated misdeed and their apology would not be sincere.

If you are really sincere with your apology, and you are doing the best you can to fix what you did, so just ignore this kind of statement. You are doing your part.

That 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.

Your point is that you don't know what an apology is.

So you are saying we are never allowed to make mistakes?

I'm not sure you'll get a response as the OP probably can't hear you right up there on that high horse of theirs.

From 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.

I 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.

I 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.

I 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.

Do 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?

Are 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?

All 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)

My 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.

Being 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.)

It 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.

You 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.

Sorry, 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/770000987016818688 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/818517767607517184 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/1017193464415576065

Yeah I've seen that response too. While at megacorp I just stayed off of slack as much as possible.

Are 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.

What in the world makes you think they will "cheerfully give that information up for the pleasure of the US Government without it even being required of them"?

They're required by law not to do business in certain countries. They were over-broad and over-aggressive in how they tried to follow that law, unnecessarily shutting down accounts, which was certainly a fuckup. But I don't see any indication that they gave information to the US government.

>I've spent the day messaging and talking with friends ...

Some of us use Slack because we have work to do.

>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?

Not shilling cryptocurrencies. ;)

Best comment I've read this year.

Ok, that was great.

>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.

No, they blocked users based on location. I'm currently located in California, and this has nothing to do with my nationality.

Expats 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.

Likely a much higher percentage of Slack users though.

Nonsense. Much of Silicon Valley consists of foreigners, yet they didn’t block those users — a significant part of their user base ; thus the theory of ethnic or nationality blocking makes zero logical sense.

> So, you blocked users based on their nationality.

Where you are currently located or resident is effectively unrelated to your nationality (unless you were born a citizen of your country and have never left it, not even for a vacation).

This comment by Slack was in response to several (fairly overblown) comments that they were racially targeting users ("Slack bans Iranian in Canada"), when in fact they were disabling accounts of people who have used Slack from an embargoed country at some point. To be clear, this is still bad, just not "blocking users based on their nationality". All of the outrage was over expats (or travellers) being blocked.

I'm Canadian, but live in Boston. My IP address shows where I live, not my nationality.

I was in London last month but that doesn't make me British.

IP != nationality or ethnicity.

You gotta wait for IPV7 where your DNA sequence is your IP address, so they can block you and all your descendants.

I'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.

It 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.

That just looked like a "signature" to me, it didn't come off as insincere at all.

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