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Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

well, “we had to lay off the trust & safety team” could be construed to mean that we don’t think t&s is important - whereas in practice it’s one of the core pillars of the whole project. so instead we positioned it as a reset, which it effectively is.

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Would it be accurate to say that you value trust & safety less than any other part of the project? You praise the UX designers, who apparently were not laid off. Is UX more important? Is your job more important? Where on the priority list did it lie?

If it's a core pillar of the project, and the T&S team doesn't exist anymore, is Matrix dead in the water, crumbling before it had even gotten the foundation laid?

Yup, UX is more important than T&S, because without good UX, folks won't use an app in the first place, making the role of T&S moot. The role of project lead (if executed well) is more important too, in terms of keeping the project alive and trying to lead the overall project in a coherent direction rather than drifting organically.

That said, T&S is a core pillar of the project, because without sufficient moderation and anti-abuse features the network will obviously rapidly hit a glass ceiling (which you could argue that it already has). Which is why the T&S team does still exist going forwards; just not in the same shape. It utterly sucks to have been forced into this through budget constraints, though.

This is a satisfying and well-considered answer. I apologize for being a bit rude to you elsewhere in the thread; I do want you to succeed, but your avoidance of pointing out the missteps in leadership that caused this to happen or explaining why you laid off who you did for which reasons and how it won't ultimately hurt the project in the post & initial comment was a communications misstep.

It's still not as easy to develop for as IRC though.

Sadly, UX is WAY more important than security. I've had two open source groups switch over to Discord/Slack from Element because of the phone app not being up to par.

Why on earth you would want to interact with a tiny ass screen with a horrifically bad keyboard and be harassed by messages all the time is beyond me. But, hey, that seems to be what all the cool kids want, and I'm an ancient greybeard who just doesn't get it.

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