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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Just after lockdown, our boss sent an important message in our general chat, tagging everyone with @channel. While reading the message one of my cats jumped on my keyboard and managed to spam '+enter maybe fifty times to all 400+ currently reading the channel in a few seconds. Don't think Slack has any kind of rate limiting..? It was also impossible for me to delete the messages, as they jumped up and down when people started reacting, making me misclick loads of times. It was funny.

https://i.imgur.com/Sznqb4t.jpg

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Ah! Reminds me of the good old 956th email about:

"Please don't reply to all@company.com it goes to everyone"

Each person in the mail list is convinced they need to send a reply to that mail informing everyone that the others should not reply to this email address, otherwise how would everyone know they're not supposed to reply to that email.

BCC is truly underutilized.

I believe that BCC can actually act as an active suppressor of reply-all storms even after they've started. i.e., reply-all to the storm in progress, but BCC the big list.

Each person who would send a reply-all does it in response to SOME message. If it happens to be your BCC, their message doesn't perpetuate the storm.

The BCCs would act as a kind of neutron absorber to dampen runaway reactions. Or like a trap-neuter-release program for cats.

Could be fixed by a good product manager or UX designer in Outlook team: instead of leaving CC field available for editing and BCC hidden, always ask about the intention and then show either of them.

BCC is broken in gmail. It lists the bcc’ed recipients for all to see. All other email systems I’ve used understand the “B” stands for “blind” and don’t let other recipients see the BCC list.

No it doesn't. I and others have used it many times, and it does not actually do that.

When you receive mail that you've been BCC'd on, it does attempt to figure out what address was used to get it to you, and displays that as a BCC (useful if it came to you via a mailing list that was BCC'd), so perhaps you're confusing that for showing the addresses of everyone to everyone, which isn't the case.

There is also a Reply-To header.

Why does that happen? I've seen it a few times and once it brought down exchange. Psychology study needed.

Psychology study needed.

My favourite is when people reply-all with “please remove me from this list”

Bonus points when those people hold technical positions in the organization.

Race conditions start it. The first 100 people get the message when it is sent, realize it is a mistake and decide they need to warn everyone, so they hit send almost exactly at the same time so none knew about the other. The next 1000 don't look for previous replies, but otherwise do the same thing. Then the next 1000 are annoyed by all the duplicate messages and it doesn't occur to them that they are making it worse.

The more technically literate users know exactly how reply-all and reply-all storms work... which makes it funny, so they do it.

My hypothesis is, the level of peoples education and intelligence are not correlated (ofcourse with exception of the technical and STEM fields).

People making mistakes when trying to do something outside their area of expertise is definitely not something that STEM professionals are immune to.

I think people are trained to respond to everything, even if its a quick note to say thank you. This is especially the case if its a personal sounding email from someone important. After that its just a matter of forgetting to pay attention to the address bar before hitting reply, possibly with a shortcut but more likely just going on autopilot and clicking things.

I'm not sure I agree. But why would that exception be "of course" anyway?

“of course with exception of the technical and STEM fields”

of course

Thank you, TIL :)

I wasn't correcting you, I was agreeing enthusiastically. And now I am ashamed for explaining myself.

Judging by the amount of Cat emoji reactions, I would go as far as saying your cat is a regular on that Slack channel :)

Changing the send action to Ctrl-Enter (or maybe it was Shift-Enter?) helps with this. It also helps prevent accidental yubikey posts and is good for when you need to write up multiline posts.

Just saying in case anyone wasn't already aware.

Thanks for the tip.

I wonder how many unfinished messages I’ll send before my muscle memory remembers I’ve switched?

Heh, yeah, I had a funny story about this:

I enabled a delay for gmail that from the moment I click send I have 10s to cancel the email and it let's me edit it.

Has been very useful so far.

Skål!

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