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Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

mlthoughts2018

If a tool is so easily subverted and misused so widely, eventually it’s the tool’s fault. Arguing that it’s just the users’ fault is like trying to boil the ocean. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, the component that can actually be addressed is the tool, so the tool is capable of bearing blame.

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We’ve found the same behavior in normal person to person speech, so we’ve implemented a gag policy that nobody talks to one another during business hours. Ultimately, it’s person to person communication that we’ve found is the broken tool for, granted, a minority of users so we’ve implemented this policy company wide.

Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication. The whole reason it’s noteworthy to talk about it in regards to Slack is that it does happen to a much greater extent in Slack and other chat programs than in almost any other corporate communication system, enough to make it clear that instant messaging, not people, is the core of the issue.

My experience is the exact opposite. All personnel problems have occurred in-person, often at company events. I find that employees are generally much more considerate and careful about what they say over slack as everything basically becomes permanent record.

> Your satire rings very flat because it doesn’t happen much in person to person communication.

Of course it does. It is just harder to audit and record. That's why they call it "high school like" behavior - you put a bunch of people in a room together every day and you get gossip.

I think this is wrong. The property of high school that led to this being named that way is that high school facilitates immature, consequence-free social contexts where asserting individuality is key to your social status among peers.

In-person workplaces do not foster this usually, with some exceptions in immature start-ups or bro-y Wall Street.

By contrast, it’s exactly the kind of atmosphere that instant messaging environments foster.

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